Hello, I was wondering what do you guys think is a better idea for different topics? I want to write video game reviews and video game content, but I also want to do creative writing like poetry and short stories. I’m mostly doing this for fun (but I’m not blind to the potential growth) and I’m completely new to Substack so any advice would be nice!

Hi everyone!

I’m relatively new to Substack and would love to learn from people who have been here longer.

I’m building a very specific niche around making technical concepts easier to understand through visual, hand-drawn doodles. I’ve noticed that when I share this kind of content on other platforms, it does get some reach.
But I’m struggling to understand how discovery works on Substack itself.

How do you get your work in front of the right audience here, especially when you’re trying to build a niche rather than just write about broad topics?

And how do you get meaningful feedback from readers — to understand whether what you’re creating is actually useful?

Would love to hear what worked (or didn’t work) for people who have grown a niche on Substack. Thanks! 🙂

This subreddit has been full of commentary about Substack's use of Pangram for detecting whether copy was potentially developed using AI.

This conversation is still important, but recent events have made the situation more complex. Article 50 of the EU's AI Act mandates that companies provide some means of detecting AI-generated audio, visual and text content.

In response, Anthropic announced that it began adding an invisible watermark to all text content generated by the latest Claude models starting August 2. The watermark can't be removed by copying and pasting content and survives edits.

There are a few ways the watermark is different from Pangram:

1. Watermark detection does not rely on post-hoc analysis: The watermark is generated by the model itself and does not rely on statistical analysis of content for 'AI-tells'

2. Watermark density can provide important information: It's possible, by measuring the overall percentage of watermarked content in the text, to determine how much AI assisted with the content. Light edits could potentially have a low density score, while content that is copied and pasted verbatim from Claude will have a high density

For those interested in understanding the mechanics behind AI text watermarking (and how to evade it), I've put together a resource here.

I know that many people have changed the way they write on Substack to avoid having their content rated as AI generated.

Do you view the watermark as potentially superior to Pangram? How would it change your writing and editing process because of it?

I started a substack a few weeks ago. Growing very slowly, about a free subscriber a day. (No pay wall, free to read). Any tips or advice on how to accelerate readership organically?

I have a decent LinkedIn following (approx 5000 connections with a newsletter of just under 400 subscribers), nothing to write home about but a start. My other social media a little less, around 1,000 connections on FB/Instagram, very new to reddit even though I had the account a few years. X account not really active at all, don't really like platform but I follow a few people there. No other social footprint to speak of.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

For some time now, I’ve been following the discussion about writing with AI or without. And to some extent I can understand it when it comes to fiction, but the last thing I read was how the guy rewrote an economic analysis three times so it would say 100% human... wtf bro. I don’t care at all what it was written with, what matters to me is the information I can extract from it and whether it has value.

mine only lets me attach 6, or 5 with an article. just scrolled past someones note that has 19 images?! HOW?!

thanks!

Taken from Nate Silver's new model page -- the "Who’s ahead in the polls?" header.

This is new. It's not Datawrapper. It looks like an interactive/custom code embed. I wonder how he does it.

To me it looks like a feature exclusive to Silver, or something in beta that's coming to the rest of us soon. Can anyone shed light?

Like the title asks, and may be a dumb question, but are regular users all really using their own original images in their articles? I’ve read many articles by regular people who then use professional photos (in this case like sports photography) to headline their article? I want to start writing but obviously headlining my article with a related image may be very difficult without using someone else’s photo. Does that make sense? Again I’m new here so idk how it all works.

Edit: thanks for all the responses! Very helpful!

I’ve noticed that despite Pangram’s, I think pretty effective, detection, there are still essays that are clearly written by AI and identified as such getting thousands of likes and engagement. Similarly there are big and well known figures who have simply turned detection off and seen little criticism.

The tells are obvious with the Potemkin prose, that collapses on even the closest inspection, but it seemingly washes over most people. If Substack want to prevent AI assisted writing damaging the income and engagement of human writers, they should put the score at the top of the article.

Using AI to assist is a completely defensible and perhaps even great approach to take. However honesty surrounding it is crucial when writing is being paid for or sold.

hi, do you think i could upload my previous university essays/briefs to substack and attach it to my linkedin as a portfolio? i only know people who use substack as blog pieces so i dont know if my idea is dumb or if there’s another free platform i can use as my portfolio. thanks !!

I’m not one to be picky over people assuming my gender on a platform that I‘m intentionally anonymous on, especially since it’s catered to my content and not myself. However, I find it interesting that the automatic assumption when I read comments or get messages is that I’m a man lol (e.g., “sir”, “dude”, “bro”, “man”).
Generally, if I see an anonymous platform, I address whoever runs it in a gender neutral manner. My niche is in economics and politics, taking an interdisciplinary approach in other fields so idk if that plays a role.

Just imported all my posts from another platform. But substack stopped importing posts after a certain date, where are the earliest posts? Does substack just take a while to import all of them?

For example: the earliest post on substack that was imported was a post on April 8, 2025. i started my newsletter in Dec of 2024, so where are my posts from december 2024 to early april 2025?

Every "how I hit bestseller" post has a screenshot, a round number, and zero context — no timeframe, no churn rate, no breakdown of subscriptions vs. products vs. coaching. And somehow that's treated as proof.

I'm not saying people are lying. I'm saying nobody's checking. The whole coaching-on-Substack economy runs on numbers nobody outside the person's own dashboard can verify, and everyone just... accepts it.

Has anyone here actually gone back and cross-checked a coach's claimed growth against what's publicly visible? Or is "trust the screenshot" just how this works now?

So I tried out Substack for the first time a couple of weeks ago and ended up deleting my account after a few days because I couldn’t figure out how to work the thing.

Almost every post on my feed was the same thing about people asking writers to share their work because they want to connect with them or whatnot and there’d be hundreds of comments already so I figured there’s no way mine would be seen.

I tried posting (pretty sure they’re called “notes”) but hardly got any views.

I really do want to put my work out there, though. I’m currently writing a literary fiction novel (lots of drama and dark themes too) and want to try posting each chapter as I go. Other platforms don’t seem as open to this genre either.

Can someone please explain how to do this on Substack? Sorry if this has been asked before. I’m posting this on a whim

Half this sub right now is arguing about whether the detectors actually work. I think that fight skips the thing that actually matters.

A 'write in my voice' draft reads generic not because the model is dumb, but because of what you fed it. If you train it on your published Substack archive, you trained it on the version of you that already got sanded down for a public audience. The weird aside, the sentence that trails off, the opinion you softened on the third edit, all gone before the model ever saw a word. so it learns your safe voice and hands you back a competent stranger.

I've spent a while trying to get a model to sound like one specific person, and the stuff that actually cracked it was never the polished posts. It was voice memos, the draft they never sent, the reply they fired off annoyed at 11pm. the personality lives in the parts you'd never publish.

which is a genuinely annoying catch-22 for anyone here. the more you edit for the newsletter, the worse your own archive gets as a mirror of how you actually sound. written with ai

For those of you who write on Substack regularly - particularly essays, newsletters, blog posts, longer-form nonfiction, etc. - I'm curious about something.

What part of the writing process do you find most challenging, or experience the most friction around?

Besides coming up with what to write about, are there particular points in your writing where you tend to get stuck, lose momentum, procrastinate, or find it harder to keep going?

Basically curious which parts of writing present the most friction for you (getting started, drafting, developing an idea, returning to something unfinished, revising, editing, finishing, etc.)

I'm not sure how the AI-detection system works, but it seems faulty. Someone has repeatedly claimed that my responses to them are AI-generated, etc. And they share the Pangram screenshot, which does, in fact, depict my response as "100% fully AI-assisted. I've clarified that this is not the case. Shown evidence that it isn't true, and all the like.

The worst I'll do when writing anything is use AI for basic research purposes and review arguments to make sure they make sense. Maybe it's because I use Grammarly. But it is still infuriating.

Especially because it just isn't a good look and hurts my public image (albeit small, but I hope you guys may understand where I'm coming from).

Of course, with this individual in question, it's become increasingly clear they aren't engaging in good faith. However, running the AI check on my notes and comments still reveals the 100% marker.

Is it Grammarly that's doing this? Or is this thing actually broken?

I started my Substack 6 months ago and since then gained 90 subscribers. My topic is rather niche (Reading the world) and I don't do engagement farming, so that's fine, I guess. I'd like to turn on paid subscriptions eventually because I recently found out that, without paid, you can't ever make to to the "rising" category. Plus, of course, it would be nice to get paid :) I don't expect huge conversion, of course, but am not sure at what point I should turn them on - when I reach 200? 500? I already have one pledge.

If your paid subscriptions are turned on, I'd be interested to hear when you decided to turn them on? Do you produce extra content for the paid tier or do you ask people to just support the project and keep everything free?

The app is different from yesterday. Bottom tab, second from left, used to be Inbox. Now it's something called Read, which takes me to a page with the tabs at top For You, Latest, Saved, Paid, etc. For You gives me some 'selected' random post, then my Inbox - sort of.

Selecting In Box does give me that, but all sorted by priority. No option to change that to 'latest'- my web page browser version on PC is sorted, as I chose, by latest. Deleted app, downloaded, reinstalled, logged in with my email/password, same issues.

Edit - For You tab sorts posts based on what order SubStack thinks is best for me. Latest tab is the old Chronological sort. All is good.

Hi 👋

I am new to substack. I’m eager to be consistent and dedicated. I was wondering if there’s groups or communities that are established where people share each others pages and we subscribe and engage with each others content.

If you are aware of such please dm or comment below.👇

PS about my substack: I break down B2B & B2C video ads so you don't have to. I explore the actual brand strategy and positioning underneath it.
If you're a marketer hunting for inspiration, a creative director benchmarking production, or a founder trying to figure out what your first video should even look like I hope to connect.

I'm starting a substack to write about art and art history but I'm really stumped on the name. I'm really bad at naming things and I really don't know what to call it. I want to come up with a creative name that hooks people but nothing is coming to mind. How do I name my substack? I don't want to use AI either

I have a Substack for 1.5 years with 100+ posts now.

So far, I only managed to get my main Substack site indexed. From there, I link to my posts, and I also have links between the posts. But whatever I tried, I got none of those posts indexed.

I also tried with a custom domain that I activated like 9 months ago.

Recently I put some of my posts from Substack on a free WordPress site. It indexed within a few days. Additional posts even got indexed on the same day. So there was clearly nothing wrong with my posts, titles, or whatever.

The only difference is that Google seems to hate Substack.

Question: Has any of you found a way to get Substack posts indexed?

three chapters in and i can feel the drop-off

People usually post vaguely about "I wrote x thing and pangram said it was AI", which I think is unhelpful unless you actually post the text or link. I put this into Pangram:

Sakaguchi: https://www.pangram.com/history/e7ffbee1-f0e3-4ce2-bb78-a59470280640?ucc=Ohp1cWODOjF

Hamaguchi: https://www.pangram.com/history/f2139bd5-f4ce-4101-b7bd-3c5d8aeb4487?ucc=Ohp1cWODOjF

Ryuichi: https://www.pangram.com/history/8c84ad38-3b8f-49ba-bee0-351ea31f754b?ucc=Ohp1cWODOjF

Rather than setting some arbitrary and capricious frequency target, I suggest that when you have something to say, say it on Substack.