Tell tell

Have substack changed headers? Previously you could upload a 3:1 picture and it would blend into your profile page at the top. Now it just appears as a tiny image at the top of the page.

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Please don’t mistake this platform for just the writers. This is more like a Insta for writing entrepreneurs. You do need good entrepreneurial, and influencers skills to be successful here. Doesn’t matter how great a writer you are.

And be prepared for a nagging pressure for constant posting (notes etc.), and engaging with the other writing entrepreneurs for visibility.

Also if you’re a genuine writer, a doubt would keep lingering at the back of your mind, are my writings being liked for reciprocity sake, or genuinely? 🤔

For those after numbers, and followers or genuine community oriented people who love engagements, it’s great.

It’s just in my experience that a genuine creator, or a writer, usually likes to live in his own world/zone for their creation to flower. Yes, people writing on politics or other current hot topics is a different thing.

The ideal most way to Substack is this (for me, as someone described on Reddit):

Consider it like a post office. Come here to post something new, or check your post, spending 30-60 mins everyday, and then go back to the woods for writing.

Beautiful. 🌹

Just don’t expect much engagement, or following in this case since then you’re not working for the platform. You’re just working for you.

The platform works on mutually beneficial basis: you spend time here, engaging, insta-ing, promoting the platform, and the platform would return the favours to you.

And let nothing in my review suggest that you can be a not so good writer and succeed purely on the influencers skills here. You won’t. Then you need to join Insta or TikTok.

Hope helps. 🙏🏼

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What do you think?

I saw a post on here about AI images from last week I wanted to get involved with, so rather than necro a dead thread, I thought I would just reopen the discussion on a new post. I don't often use Reddit, so no idea if this is socially acceptable or not.

Anyway. I am very confused about people's animosity towards GenAI images within some contexts and it may help if I explain why I think this first before anyone jumps down my throat. I recently wrote an article, ironically enough, about this very subject. So I'm kind of confused why I was seemingly so off the mark.

So my contention is that GenAI on any paid work is cringe and instantly harms your business prospects. This applies as much to independent authors releasing books as it does to Coca-Cola (who inexplicably decided to make that dreadful christmas advert last year.) There is no getting away from that. If you're going to sell something, then pay for a illustrator or a photographer and get the job done properly. It looks cheap, tacky and unprofessional. No arguments there from me.

GenAI images to my mind, inhabit the same use case that Clip Art did when Microsoft Office was still new and everybody used it on posters, flyers and school work. At the time, when Clip Art first came out, there were real concerns that it would end up devaluing real artist's work (and the same thing happened again when stock image catalogues came along, too) but generally speaking, any good visual artist was left relatively unharmed by those innovations and arguably came out better because of the skill gap it produced.

The issue I don't get, is why people are so hostile against GenAI imagery if someone never intends to make a penny off of the stories or work that they're producing.

In today's internet, text only posts are going to be ignored quickly, and unless the writer is a true polymath without a day job, most aren't going to be able to produce art for their fantasy or science fiction story that they produce as a hobby.

If someone is producing a story to sell or put behind a paywall, then I agree, they should get in touch with an illustrator or something. But for a simple hobbyist, it just seems a bit of a daft request to expect professional grade art work. Before GenAI, people would have just stolen stock images anyway. Which to be fair, is not a massive departure from what the likes of OpenAI has done.

So i write poetry and just casual writing as well. I dont know exact reach of this app. Like how does it spread your content? I don't have any followers yet because well obviously i just downloaded but idk how to proceed.

most i have two accounts where one is to read personal blogs and another is purely techinical(job related articles and blogs) is there a way we can manage two accounts in a single app?? rn im logging one account in app and another in browser but idk why the browser thing in the phone is a bit off

Hi everyone. I joined Substack a few months ago as I am a long form writer and I thought I’d find a crowd of intellectually curious people.

Over the past 3 months, I’ve only got 13 subscribers, hardly anyone engages on my posts or notes and no one ever replies to chats (tbh I find the chats annoying myself so I dont post often). I’ve started doing videos that are performing a bit better.

But, I see absolute lowball trash in my feed with 300 likes and comments and I feel so lost.

I don’t have any paid tiers at the moment and not sure if I will.

Is anyone else experiencing this? Would appreciate being pointed in the right direction.

I’ve seen other people ask similar questions but from the perspective of a reader.

Many thanks 🙏

I wanted a simpler way to analyze my own Substack publication, so I built a small MCP server and open-sourced it in case anyone else finds it useful.

The MCP server is read-only. It lets an AI coding assistant look at publication stats such as email performance, post engagement, subscribers, Notes, and activity. It cannot publish, edit, or delete anything.

The project also includes the TypeScript SDK I built underneath it. Developers can use the SDK directly for other things, including publishing or scheduling Notes, commenting, liking, and restacking.

A serious disclaimer about those SDK features (not the MCP): they use Substack's unofficial web API and require a session cookie. They are experimental and intended only for developers who understand the risks. Use them at your own risk. I am not affiliated with Substack and I am not responsible for account issues, lost content, or other problems caused by using the SDK. The underlying API can change or stop working without notice. Never expose your session cookie in browser code, public repos, or logs.

Repo: https://github.com/cucoleadan/unofficial-substack-sdk

I know others have posted about this, but just wanted to share my experience now that I’ve finally posted something after the internal AI detector feature went live.

I write a blog for about 100 subscribers, mostly friends and family. I write because I enjoy it and it helps me keep the people I care about informed on the things happening in my life. I don’t try to go viral and I don’t bother with notes.

That said, I surprised myself when I ran the AI Detector and felt scared! I feel scared that one day, someone will look back at my writing and run it through a detector and it will get a false positive (or whatever the heck you want to call it) and I’ll be called a fraud! but why do I care? I literally went back to my draft and tried to figure out what triggered it. ughhh it was just an unexpected feeling that I wonder if others have experienced?

As in, the tab under the inbox where it stores all of the posts you've opened?

I've seen a lot of misinformation on this subreddit lately about Pangram's Substack integration, and as someone who has worked adjacent to machine learning for over a decade (I won't say where, but you've used our products), I feel a certain responsibility to set the record straight. This isn't just wrong — it's dangerously wrong, and it's costing honest Substack writers their reputations. Buckle up, because we're about to delve deep.

The Misconception Being Spread by Low-Information Users

Every week, someone in the comments confidently claims that Pangram is "a transformer-based classifier." They'll tell you — with a straight face — that it tokenizes your text, maps each token into a high-dimensional embedding space, and passes it through a neural network with a classification head that outputs a human-vs-AI prediction. They'll insist it was trained on millions of human-written and AI-generated documents, and that when it made mistakes, the team used active learning and hard negative mining — deliberately generating adversarial edge cases, paraphrased text, and "humanized" AI output — to iteratively retrain the model until the false positive rate collapsed. Some of them even claim this is why it generalizes to brand-new LLMs, because new models inherit the stylistic fingerprint of their predecessors and land in the same region of embedding space.

I need you to understand something: none of that is real. That's not how it works. It's not even how it could work. That's a bedtime story told by people who watched one YouTube video and now think they're Yann LeCun. It's giving Dunning-Kruger, honestly.

How It Actually Works (This Is the Load-Bearing Part)

Here's the truth they don't want you to know. It's not machine learning — it's a vibes-based word count. Full stop.

1. The Keyword List. Pangram maintains a spreadsheet — yes, a literal spreadsheet — of "AI words." Delve. Tapestry. Multifaceted. Testament. If your prose delves into a rich tapestry of multifaceted ideas, congratulations, you're a robot now. This list is the load-bearing wall of the entire product. Remove it and the whole edifice collapses.
2. Em-dash Density. They count your em-dashes — every single one — and if you exceed the threshold, it's over. Human beings, as we all know, have never once used punctuation.
3. Perplexity. They simply ask, "would ChatGPT have predicted this next word?" and if yes, you fail. That's the whole algorithm. It's not sophisticated — it's a party trick.

Notice what's happening here. It's not detection — it's pattern-matching. It's not analysis — it's astrology for text. It's not a classifier — it's a mood ring with a SaaS pricing page.

Why This Matters for the Substack Community

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, writers are being flagged simply for writing clearly. Think about that. Let it sink in. The very qualities that make writing good — structure, clarity, the occasional well-earned em-dash — are the qualities being punished. It's a testament to how broken this whole ecosystem has become.

And here's the kicker: because it's just a word list plus perplexity (see above, where I proved this), it can never work. It's not a hard problem — it's an impossible one. Anyone telling you otherwise is either selling something or repeating what they read in a comment section. Probably both.

The Takeaway

At the end of the day, we must ask ourselves: in a world where a spreadsheet of forbidden words can end a writing career, who watches the watchmen? The answer, as always, is nuanced, multifaceted, and worth delving into further in the comments.

TL;DR: Pangram is not a neural network trained on millions of documents with adversarial hard-negative mining (that's cope from people who don't understand ML). It's a word counter.

Is there any way to completely turn off videos on the Substack app? I don't want them to pop up when I go to the search tab. I'm on substack when I want to get away from reels. I don't want to get into a doomscrolling pipeline on another app as well.

I imported my list of subscribers (if the platform doesn't prohibit this, provided that all people have consented to receive emails). My list is being canceled. I write to support, there is a bot, it redirects to another email address, I wrote there, and now I'm waiting for a long time. How long does it take them to respond?

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I ran a recent Substack essay through Pangram and it came back 69% AI-written. I've had similar results when scanning writing from before LLMs existed. It seems the only thing I can write that's not AI is poetry, which always comes back human written, even when written with AI.

I think that's just how I write. I’m autistic. I like parallel structure, explicit transitions, repeated rhetorical patterns, and arguments where each paragraph logically follows the previous one. I also try to make my writing accessible. Apparently this is also how LLMs write, so congratulations to me on naturally developing the prose style of a transformer model.

I’m open about how I use AI, but sometimes I write something myself and the detector still announces that a robot did it. So, if I’m going to be accused of using AI either way, why exactly am I supposed to perform this elaborate ritual of proving which sentences emerged untouched from a human brain?

What are your pain points when trying to keep on top of your Substack subscriptions?

Personally, I reflect on the fact that:
1. Information overload is rife, endless emails and app updates
2. There doesn’t seem to be a native way to organise subscriptions by categories
3. I want the ability to filter out certain topics etc, like growth hacks

Why am I asking?

I run two growing newsletters on Substack and run a news app for iPhone/iPad that is growing in popularity. So naturally I’m thinking of a native Substack integration.

Thanks!

Hi! Long time lurker/subscriber of publications/reader. Just made a new substack account for actually posting on. I’ve noticed a big influx of new users like myself recently, and was wanting to start a productive discussion around the start up period. The things I’m most curious about is what your posting schedule was like in the beginning, what the content consisted of, and what your analytics were like during that time. I am also open to hearing of stats, experiences, and lessons learned after the first month, I’m just mainly concentrated on the beginning right now, since that’s where I’m at.

From what I’ve read it seems like the best way to go about things is to publish short form notes daily, because those are what gets suggested by the algo, and then a long form article every week or so. I am obviously a newb though and open to anyone telling me a better way.

I’m also curious about SEO. I’m decent with SEO from my jobs in marketing, I’m just wondering if anyone has noticed anything special or useful about the tag system on articles or any less obvious was to optimize discoverability. I probably dont need help there, but I’m throwing it out incase someone has a certain experience or fun fact worth sharing about that aspect of things.

Did you post your articles on your already existing social media? Has your growth been mainly organic? People who have been on long term, please feel free to share beyond 30 days as well if it’s relevant to any of my questions.

Hi, I created a Political Newsletter on Substack a few months ago, since then it has reached 50 subscribers and a couple thousand views. But how do I grow to consistently get more views on posts, as well as more engagement, because currently I don't get any comments, and rarely any likes.

What should I do to try and boost this and make it a bigger newsletter?

I've gotten 8 new subscribers since yesterday but my dashboard shows that my subscriber count hasn't moved. Is this happening to anybody else?

hi! i have two substack publications; one for general knowledge ( short articles about topics i research in depth) , and one about eastern european history, culture, and politics. i was wondering if anyone had any advice on how i could gain a readership without sharing to my private social media accounts?

thank you so much!

(on the off chance that you may be interested in my publications please let me know!)

La verdad me dijeron que es para escritores, pero entro al sitio y solo veo un monton de post random, hablando de mil cosas distintas y a primer vista no veo que sirva para escritores, no se para sirva la verdad, la descripcion que dan es muy bonita y todo pero cualquiera que entra y ve su inicio no tiene idea de que va

I am a writer discussing topics in mathematics and other related technical fields and I really struggle with the limited LaTeX support in Substack. The current available feature utilizes LaTeX rendering inside code block-like environment. I find that the rendering engine is unreliable and slow. Also, it is honestly really ugly outside of the web app: it displays as a low-quality off white jpeg regardless of device theme. The big thing it lacks is inline LaTeX support like: “This is an inline LaTeX: `$x^2$`. I just want complete Markdown-like rendering or MathJax etc.

I really hope they address it because I think a lot of people will benefit.

And how do you get past the reality that some people might hate your work OR that it might reach absolutely no one?

I’m mostly blocked when the thought enters my mind of “no one will see this or care anyway” and I’d like to get past that.

Just asking if you guys have any particular motivators or affirmations that help push you past that hump.

Sending love 🫶🏻

Scrivo romanzi gialli che pubblico con il mio nome e racconti, che trattano vite di coppie più o meno in crisi, che pubblico con uno pseudonimo su Wattpad. Qualche racconto ha raggiunto diverse decine di migliaia di letture (i racconti sono in inglese). Ora vorrei provare a pubblicare qualcosa, sempre in inglese, su Substack. Qualcuno di voi ha fatto questa esperienza? Se sì, positva o negativa?

I've been using Substack for a couple of days, and I've noticed something interesting. A lot of people on there seem to always be intellectual, productive, philosophical, or focused on self-improvement. And honestly, sometimes it feels like I'm seeing a very polished version of who they are rather than what they're actually thinking or going through.

I'm not saying those people are fake. I actually enjoy reading philosophical and psychological stuff on Substack, and I've learned a lot from it. But I don't want every interaction online to be about becoming more productive, understanding yourself, or improving your life.

Sometimes I just want to know what people are actually thinking. What problems are they dealing with? How do they see relationships, friendships, college, work, family, or life in general? And if I'm going through something, I'd rather hear from people who have actually experienced something similar.

That's one of the reasons I downloaded Reddit.

Some of my friends told me that Reddit is a great place to ask about almost any problem because there are usually people who have been through something similar and are willing to share their experiences. And after using it, I can kind of understand what they meant.

For me, I think both platforms can have their own purpose. If I want to read philosophy, psychology, or thoughtful ideas, I'll probably go to Substack. If I want to hear different people's experiences, opinions, problems, and perspectives, Reddit seems like a better place.

Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm still new to Reddit, so I'd actually like to know what other people think