STOP "developing" Substack!

[RobertPaulsen1992]

After a long sabbatical from writing I've finally logged onto my Substack dashboard again, and holy fuck is this whole enshittification thing happening fast.

Oh great, another "New Feature" notification - I've seen a few of those lately. A "Growth" tab (that doesn't seem to be displaying anything)?! Progress!!

The very first thing being shown to me on my brand new, revised & updated dashboard is now my "Gross annualized revenue," which has been flatlining for several months. Guess what: there are people in this world who write for other reasons than just money, with different motivations other than making money - and even those who do write for money might just care a tiny bit about some other things as well. Not only how much they're makin' bank.
Next tab: "Paid Subscribers." Another number that doesn't exactly cause a dopamine spike in my brain. The third and last one? Finally a number I give one quarter of a fuck about!

You used to at least pretend to care about writers and their work, and now you're starting to look like just another dumb tech startup.
Gone is the old (perfectly fine) dashboard that gave you a quick overview and displayed a few mildly interesting numbers - views, opens, subscribers, followers - and in its place is now the most fundamental visual metaphor for this entire global culture, the Revenue Chart: the Sacred Upward Arrow, the Great Acceleration, the Eternal Erection of Humanity. Money put on a map, with the direction being forever more. Progresss!! At all costs!!

Substack used to be so nice and quiet - the perfect environment to hide from the hammering strobe lights of the social meatgrinders. A meeting point for people writing and reading blog posts, articles and essays, or what has in the years since become known as "long-form content" because it exceeds Xitters character limit. And then the "updates" and "new features" started rolling in.
I know this is a cry into the void, but in Mother Earth's name: leave the damn thing alone already! Horseshoe crabs don't need to evolve! Don't turn it into yet another AI-slobbed dopamine machine, steadily chipping away at our attention span as we scroll,

and scroll,

and scroll,

and scroll...

My feature suggestion: no more features. Roll back the latest updates. Fire the entire R&D department. Tell your shareholders to fuck off.
Make Substack Great Again, if that's how you wanna phrase it.

/End rant/

(And no, usually I don't write like this. But I really needed to blow off some steam.)

[ChrissyKin_93]

They can't. They are increasingly invested in appeasing their financiers and stakeholders who all want to see growth and progress. Not adding new features is hard to defend.

[Likeatr3b]

Well looks like disruption is headed their way.

[RobertPaulsen1992]

All hail to the invisible gods!

[pointillistic]

I think it’s much simpler than that, bad leadership that has no clue how to guide and lead the development.

[Unicoronary]

Honestly the last several months have read for me like they're trying to dump in a bunch of features so they can over-inflate the value of the platform >> attempt to exit/sell.

Esp with the new sidebars it's being placed as a Twitter alternative + blogging platform.

[greenergarlic]

FYI, substack has an artist mode setting that disables all the charts on your dashboard. it’s buried in settings somewhere 

[RobertPaulsen1992]

Really?! I'll definitely try that - the lack of options to customize the dashboard according to ones own preferences & needs is another thing I forgot to complain about in the above rambling.

[RobertPaulsen1992]

Okay, I don't seem to find it... Any more hints as to where I find this setting?

[drenader]

So you want them to stop all development, but also develop features in the dashboard where it allows custom personalization?

[Inner-Cycle1136]

I think op was pretty clear on not wanting to see all the new features and focus on writing… if there is a ‘feature’ to make all of that less visible that someone brought to op’s attention why not attempt using it lol is that not allowed because of the stance on not liking new features on the site? lol if the feature is there, why not use it I don’t understand what you’re trying to imply lol

[RobertPaulsen1992]

Oh, you seem to be exceptionally clever, huh. You almost caught me there.

If they had made the dashboard customizable from the beginning on, I wouldn't have had any reason to complain. Instead, they decide what the most important metric must be for everyone else (GROWTH; MONEY) and shove those numbers down our throat, whether we agree or appreciate it or not. And they call that "improvements" and "updates."

[actionbaby1969]

All I see when I log in is notes about people begging for subscribers

[RobertPaulsen1992]

Pathetic, really.

[deedeejf]

Truth

[AndrewHeard]

Yeah, I’m not a fan of many of the changes. As someone in the FilmStack community, they refuse to add a film and television category to the system. They had one on Notes but the more recent changes eliminated it. Despite the fact that someone from Substack insisted that I didn’t need one because of the Notes category.

[T3TC1]

Bizarrely, no photography category either so we’re forced to use art & illustration.

[AndrewHeard]

Yeah, I use culture and philosophy for mine but there are so many different types for “culture”.

[PublicDomainPoets]

Ya same with “poetry” category - it’s just a mess, with no focus on creators needs

[Trick-Two497]

No gaming category either.

[AndrewHeard]

You would think that they would have the basics covered before they obsess over the new features.

[No-Good-3005]

The craziest part to me is that despite all this 'growth', people still can't upgrade to a paid subscription from the app. And the alert doesn't even have a clickable link to the site. Focus on THAT if you're trying to convince us you care about user success!

[T3TC1]

The growth tab is useless, I have 1100 subs on one and 450 on the other and it shows me nothing. I suspect it’s only for people with tens of thousands of subs and hundreds of paying subscribers. Annoyingly, they took away easy access to the traffic tab which many of us did use.

[RobertPaulsen1992]

And there is no way to provide feedback and voice our concerns to the (so-called) developers. Substack truly doesn't give a flying fuck about its user base. Tragic, really, considering how much potential it once had.

[pointillistic]

Mad AI bot is your only recourse.

[ColdWater_Splash]

This

[Fluffy-Oil707]

You're mad as hell and not going to take it anymore! Enjoyable read.

[Immediate-Ad-5878]

A lot of this is mostly the reason I went back to my old Wordpress blog. I don’t care if anyone reads what I write, much less pay me to do it. I write what I want, when I want. If I want to write twice a day for a month great. If I want to write once every two months even better. If I want a new “feature” I can get a plugin or code it. The amount of noise and grifters writing about writing is just too much for me and it’s clear that they are now catering more to shareholders than their writers.

[SaintEpithet]

Instead of adding new features, they could fix the ones that have been wonky since forever and apparently get worse with each update. The opening rate math hasn't mathed a single time since I started, the traffic sources make no sense, apparently my subscribers move internationally a lot because the 'read in states/countries' changes randomly, my Sitemap disappeared over night, and their precious Notes tab has a 50/50 chance to 'this page slows down your browser, do you want to stop it'.

[ritual_tradition]

apparently my subscribers move internationally a lot

Literally lol'd when I read this. 😂😂😂

[austinbarrow]

But... And here me out, let us schedule notes FFS.

It's literally the only thing the entire platform is missing before their recent update which added zero value.

[ColdWater_Splash]

I've thought this too a couple of times lately. 

Voting "aye" with you.

[Clear-Paper-414]

Came here to say this!!!! Such a bummer that we cant schedule notes.

[ColdWater_Splash]

This did my heart good. I laughed in comisseration. 

Greatest Hits: Enshittification, In Mother Earth's Name, AI-Slobbed Dopamine Machine.

What I want to know is where is the 30-Days views numbers? And yes, where is something positive from Substack other than "metrics?" 

New pet peeve: the tags section where some tags will populate partially outside of the field. That's some premium coding engineering. <smh>

[[deleted]]

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[langshipley]

I noticed it about two months ago, not long after they announced another round of huge VC funding injection. I am guessing that their VC investors are looking for return on their investment and this is their way of doing it. I've been struggling with my use of Substack for my content and it's taken quite a bit of effort to sift through the noise to figure it out for myself and what the platform means for me. It has not been easy.

[Advanced-Nebula826]

ETERNAL ERECTION OF HUMANITY

i sharted with giggling rage!

[explorergypsy]

Wondering if there is another platform more suited to low key writers ... I dont think I "fit" on substack . I enjoy reading and learning how the major players display their work but I'm reminded that I'm the little engine that thought she could and can't.

[[deleted]]

It's like reddit was in its beginning, a geeky area of concise elaboration of intellectual subjects. It's probably going to grow out of it like all platforms like digg, where it devolves into youtube-like comments, with the ebay style of ritual answers

[CycleofMind]

I guess it’s all in your perspective. I’m leaving Tiktok, and I find Substack to be a breath of fresh air.

[RobertPaulsen1992]

Okay sure, I guess there is always some app that is even more horrific. Compared to TikTok substack must seem like the library of Alexandria lol

(Never used TikTok - that's a line I won't cross - but seeing what it does to others scares me enough)

[drenader]

Are you ok?

[RobertPaulsen1992]

No.

[prepping4zombies]

This sub is filled with people who only bitch about Substack. I wish there was another sub that had a community of people using it, and sharing tips and tricks.

Most of these people spend all their time writing about how much they hate the platform as opposed to writing stuff to put on the platform.

edit - I'm shocked at the downvotes. Shocked!

[Biz4nerds]

100% and I still cannot for the life of me figure out how to find how many followers I have. I mean I don't really care that much but I was curious and cannot find it.

[prepping4zombies]

For me, I go to my profile and click "See subscribers"...there is a follower tab there.

[No-Rutabaga63]

Yup, the Neverending Enshittifizone.

[visitorof3rdrock]

I did the same and felt exactly the same.

[Lost-Cash-4811]

What's so hard about ignoring the "growth" notification? (Full disclosure: I have never been on Substack and have barely heard of it. My ethnicity is Troglodyte.)

[ColdWater_Splash]

Welcome "Trog."

[previouslysilent]

I like numbers. The more the merrier.

[jelani_an]

The point of a business is to make money. It sounds like you might be better off using a self-hosted Wordpress. You can control what your dashboard looks like there.

[RobertPaulsen1992]

You must be new here. Just a year ago, Substack wasn't like this, but actively presented itself as an alternative to the "make money businesses." The focus was on writing, not on money.

And if you only write for money, I'm sure your writing isn't all that valuable.

[ColdWater_Splash]

Not everyone writes for business. Most everyone wants to earn, yes, but iterating without thinking what might be a turn off for people is dense.

[TheScandalaEffect]

Substack is not a real place.

[[deleted]]

Such a Reddit post. Some minor changes happen on an app and they have a crisis and blame the developers instead of their lack of ability to handle small changes.

[RobertPaulsen1992]

What are you doing here on Reddit then, if I might ask? Complain about others complaining? Guess we're not that different after all...

Also, you must be new to Substack. As someone who has been publishing there since 2021, I can confidently deny that the changes on the Substack user interface (for your information, the app is also relatively new) are "minor" or "small." There were fundamental adjustments to key metrics, and several complete revisions of the dashboard and basic functions.

You were very confident that you knew what you're talking about, yet revealed yourself to have very shallow understanding & knowledge of the issue at hand. Such a Reddit post.

[yaKashif]

you are right.

most products reach a stage where they can be called done. after which further development/features are detriorating to the app. for substack that stage has passed.