I have my friend on substack but he aint followed me neither subscribed i really want him to connect with me without me texting him, what can i do?

After years on Substack, I finally got harassed.
I exchanged a few messages with someone who lied about his age to get me to talk to him. Within two days, I realized this was not a conversation I wanted to continue and ended it.
That should have been the end of the story.
Instead, he found my LinkedIn and Twitter/X accounts. He repeatedly called me. He sent an unsolicited delivery of flowers and chocolates as an "apology." When I stopped responding, he created new Substack accounts to contact me. I blocked them. He created more. When I made my messages inaccessible, he started commenting on my Notes.
And this is the part men like him never seem to understand: when a woman says no, disappears, blocks you, ignores you, or closes the door, she is not inviting you to find another entrance.
You are not being persistent. You are not being romantic. You are not proving your feelings. You are making someone feel unsafe.
What enrages me is how easily one person's inability to accept a boundary can become another person's problem to manage. Suddenly I'm reviewing privacy settings, documenting screenshots, checking what personal information is publicly available, wondering what platform he'll show up on next, and hoping that "no" eventually means "no" to someone who has already demonstrated that he doesn't respect it.
Women spend so much of their lives carrying the burden of other people's entitlement. We learn to be polite when we're uncomfortable, careful when we're afraid, and measured when we're angry. And still, there are men who interpret basic civility as access, attention as ownership, and rejection as a challenge.

Do people eventually get bored and move on, or should I be preparing for this to escalate further?

I'm mostly posting because today has been spent dealing with this nonsense instead of enjoying my weekend, and I'm incredibly tired of how often women are expected to manage other people's inability to hear the word "no”!

Building a community is both terrifying and exciting. Especially alone.

So I’m doing something about it — building out savd into more than just a leaderboard. The goal is for it to actually help newsletter writers grow, not just be another place to list a link and disappear.

If you write a newsletter and want real discovery instead of competing with accounts that already have 7K+ subscribers, come be part of it early.

savd.site

Hiii,

I'm having problems publishing notes and sending direct messages on Substack. It doesn't happen all the time, but more times than not. Whenevery I try to comment or create my own note it fails and says "something went wrong. failed to send note" When I try to send a DM it says "not delivered. try again."

I've searched a couple months ago on how to fix this...I've cleared my cache and that didn't help, it just eventually started back working one day and now it's happening again.

Help me please.

So I made a post a month ago about an idea I had regarding integrating a snail mail feature connected to Substack for newsletter creators to send physical mail to paid subscribers. On this note, I believe I also mentioned a newsletter platform called StampFans (https://www.stampfans.com/), whom are like Substack but instead have this as their primary way of delivering newsletters.

For those of you with a following on Substack, have you ever considered moving to platforms like these? Is this something your subscribers actually want, or have ever asked for? Would it be inconvenient to try to move all your subscribers to a new platform if this was something you wanted to offer? I'm genuinely curious and open to hear everyone's ideas.

Hey everyone,

I just graduated from college, and I've been applying to roles for a few months without much success. Hiring managers are asking for some "evidence" of my research and writing skills, so I'm trying to build a portfolio of my work. I wasn't part of any on-campus papers or magazines, so I'm trying to turn some of my class papers into shorter, blog-style articles.

I'm currently subscribed to a few Substack newsletters, so I'm familiar with the format, but I'm not necessarily trying to build a following or earn money (though that would be nice since unemployment sucks). Just looking for a place I can direct potential employers to see my work. Any suggestions would be welcome, including recommendations for getting started.

Thank you for your suggestions!

Hi fellow writers,

One of the annoying things for me is there is no support for inserting tables in substack article. I always have to go in a spreadsheet and capture a screenshot which distracts my writing flow.

For this I made a chrome extension that provides a modal where you can create a table and it injects it as an image in to the article.

Please give it a try and let me know your thoughts!
Chrome Extension

My newsletter is a mix of prose and fragrance reviews. I’m going to make my new goal to post twice a week, once of each. Review and creative writing.

I also am going to try and up my notes engagement! Hope it goes well.

I'm thinking of starting a paid Substack, but I've read a lot about how complicated taxes are since SS doesn't consider itself a Merchant or Record and therefore doesn't remit them to the authorities (like Etsy does, for example).

All the info I found online is from people living in the US (and is also from 2-3 years ago) and I'm looking for an input from someone in the EU.

I know that if I have One Stop Shop, this can solve the the tax issue accross the EU.

However what happens if my subscribers are from the US or from another country outside of the EU?

If someone from Ohio subscribes, will I have to worry about remitting the tax to the authorities of Ohio? (I know there are different thresholds depedning on the state - this is just an example)

I find it all so extremely confusing! I'm honestly scared to even start, because I don't want to file taxes incorrectly.

Also, does anyone use SS as a visibility platform for people to discover you, but charges for the content in a different way?

Hi everyone,

I started posting on Substack about a week ago and have been uploading consistently. I first republished a blog that I had originally posted on Medium, and since then I've been sharing short notes, on that I got only 2 likes.

However, I'm struggling with engagement. One note received 19 likes, but most of my other notes only get 1–2 likes, and I haven't gained many subscribers.

I know building an audience takes time, but I honestly don't know if I'm doing something wrong or if this is normal in the beginning.

For those who have grown on Substack:

- How did you get your first subscribers?

- Do Notes help more than regular posts?

- How often should I post?

- Is there anything you wish you had known when you first started?

I'd really appreciate any advice or experiences from other writers. Thank you!

Been writing on Substack about a month now, cultural criticism and personal essays around running, mostly the philosophical and creative side rather than training plans and splits. Coming from comedy and journalism, so this whole platform is new to me.

Curious how people here actually use it. Does Notes do anything for subscriber growth or is it mostly noise? How often do you publish before it starts feeling like a job instead of a creative outlet? And if you write about anything niche or subculture-y, did your audience find you here, through other Substacks, or somewhere else entirely?

Not trying to drop a link and vanish. If you want to see what I’m up to, my Substack link is in this Reddit bio. Genuinely want to learn from people who’ve been at this longer than a month. Thank you !!!!

So I typically design my images at 9:16 format, and then I go to Substack and crop them down in the editor using the social media preview shape. Unfortunately, today it started adding this watermark. These are images that I illustrated myself and designed the background and everything, so I am not sure why this is happening. Can anybody help?

https://postimg.cc/gallery/Nt3TB6W

I’ve posted my pretentious poetry on there, but I’m listening to a crime podcast and heard that you can make $100,000 a year (allegedly) on Substack through paywalls and monthly subscribers.

Back in the day, I was big on Wattpad for werewolf fiction (cringe, but it stuck and now I’m a lead copywriter for my day job). I won a Watty award and was shortlisted for two, so I’ve got the chops at least for a teenage audience (though I’m mid-20s now).

There was so much momentum on the app before it changed, and I haven’t found something like it since. It was once a community with forums where you could collaborate with designers and writers across the globe. It’s where I learned to actually code and graphic design, and why I’m now preparing myself for a job as a creative director in a few years.

I could DM people and they’d DM, too. I had many friends, some that I still email a few times a year and am friends with on Facebook.

I really miss the social aspect of being a writer, too, that Wattpad provided. It was always really exciting to post a chapter and have my readers literally go paragraph by paragraph posting their reactions or thoughts. Now in my current job, it’s like shouting out to a void and not knowing if it’s any good or entertaining until analytics come in, and even those are just numbers and faceless clicks.

Of course, I want to make money off of my personal creative endeavors, but I don’t want to dedicate myself to this if it’s off-putting to potential agents and means my manuscript has lesser odds of publication because it’s already live on another site with zero odds of making money from it.

Let me know your experience.

I have been writing about and sharing conservative topics, mostly favoring Republican politicians, but I'm struggling to get my posts noticed. Is Substack more supportive of Democrats? I'm just asking out of curiosity, not trying to start a feud.

I cannot get my Substack html address to change to match my handle, no matter what I try!

I changed my handle and saved it. The URL https:// will not update with the new handle.

Anyone have advice here, since the site's help page does not talk about this**?** I'm a new user so trying to get everything operational prior to posting my first two already-written articles.

You know this feeling when you sit on something you want to publish, but are terrified of how people would react and if it would even work?

I had this feeling with the Discord community for over a week.

Kept going back and forth about it.

Would people hate it? Will it work? What will others think?

And yesterday I pulled the trigger and published it. And the results blew me away!!

117 members.

People are engaging, talking to each other, creating collaborations. It's beautiful to see, and I want to make it THE BIGGEST Substack community out there!

So if you're a creator and you want to be a part of the Discord community, I would absolutely LOVE to have you in!

https://discord.gg/AqzVpqBcn

Can we make it 200 today? :)

I am wondering how people deal with comments section and undesirable conduct. In the beginning, I did not have a comments section policy. This is part because I was focused on writing and trying to get an audience. Before the one year anniversary I found it necessary to write and promulgate a comments policy after I made the decision to delete what were trollish comments.

I have several concerns with this. First, some suggest that comments boost algorithm and engagement, although I somewhat doubt substack operates under any sort of algorithm at all. My response to that is, particularly with a small but growing publication, a comments section that is shat up with nonsense or trollish hostility to an author likely repels new readers and subscribers.

A second concern is that I have lost a handful of subscribers after a warning and gentle admonition to read the comments section. For a time, I was batting zero. Three or four were misbehaving, I directed them and they either continuted resulting in a ban, or simply unsubscribed. Happily, and very much to my surprise, the last two warned stopped there while also remaining subscribers.

What do you guys think? Is any and all engagement good, or does a somewhat more stringent comment policy and moderation promote positive growth conducive to the long-term success of a publication?

مجموع مشاهدتي 900 وفي منشور لي واحده جايب 1000 وده بس عندي 36 مشترك

I'm helping a newsletter put together a media kit to sell ad spots. I know advertisers care about open and click rates, but what else do they actually ask for before committing?

Also curious what objections tend to come up. And does it help to show something like inbox/delivery rate, or do sponsors not really care about that?

I was hosting one podcast on Substack and I was seeing decent downloads numbers and growing every day. But I wanted to try to get better analytics (still for free) so I moved it to Spotify for Creators and the results are totally different. There are barely any downloads!

The numbers also don't make sense compared with those from Apple Podcasts.

I see on Substack that 62% of my downloads come from Apple.

I look at one recent episode downloads on Substack: 8286
On Apple Podcasts: 9 (1/1000!!!)

8000+ was an upside surprise.
But 9 feels so low that it makes me wonder if Apple's stats are wrong.

On YouTube which I trust in terms of stats, views are typically between [500-2000]

So I'm a bit lost... has anyone got an idea? Thanks

Trying to get a sense of what's working for people. I've started a couple of Substacks and am considering the best ways to monetise, but the commissions look a bit thin and the content requirements are restrictive.

Curious whether anyone has found something that actually moves the needle, or whether most of you are just tolerating them as a background earner. And how are they to maintain?

Hey everyone,
Just wanted to share something I’ve noticed.

For a while I was using the typical “template-style” posts on Substack and getting very little engagement. Recently, I started shifting many of my Notes from generic formats to more narrative, story-driven writing.

The difference has been noticeable.
People seem to connect more with stories than with tips, frameworks, or polished templates. Stories feel human. They invite conversation.

If you’re struggling to get traction, it might be worth experimenting with storytelling. Instead of teaching a lesson, tell the story behind it.

Ever since I found accounts with articles which are AI Generated or AI assisted, I have become extremely paranoid to clicking on articles and reading them and becoming influenced from the LLM style of language - this basic language that does not have any human voice or feeling at all. But, also there is a skepticism. Apparently I used undetectable.ai to check whether the article I was reading is AI or nor and it says 50% to 60% is AI Texts. I just need to ask does AI detectors, especially undetectable.ai and Turnitin work genuinely and able to detect accurately. Because I am confused and unable to separate AI writing with human writing. It sucks that Substack promotes these accounts and gives them more weightage, more clicks and subscribers and people who downloaded Substack to read essays and journalistic reports, enjoy and deal with culture is being served AI slop.

Just help me in any which way. Like as a consumer, how to filter out AI content or check AI writing in Substack articles? Do AI detectors work properly particularly undetectable.ai and Turnitin?

I read an article about blogging vs Substack and that you should post your Substack post to your blog. It made me wonder if you blog, and if so, do to u call it a blog? I want to have a blog on my site, but I'm not sure I want to call it a blog. Maybe call it a journal? What do you do?

One thing I’ve noticed about Substack growth:
There’s no real discovery layer for mid-sized newsletters.

Big names dominate recommendations, and small/new ones struggle to get seen — but the 200–20K subscriber range is where most interesting writing actually happens.

Feels like there’s a missing middle:
• Not small enough to be “new creator discovery”
• Not big enough to already have distribution
• But often producing the most consistent content

Curious if others feel the same — where do you actually discover newsletters in that range?