I’m starting to actively dislike Substack.
I wanted to sign up to your newsletter, and support you and all of that good stuff.
And part of the cost is I am now roped into Substack’s centralised account system with a bunch of notifications for things that are not your newsletter?
That’s terrible.
And now that I'm taking a closer look at the design in general, it's easier to see all kinds of gross decisions.
Hiding unsubscribe buttons? Really?
So much of the way this website is designed has one goal at the heart of it: Entrapment.
Not "this is so good that you'll happily pay for it" but instead "just follow these tricks into easily subscribing and never leaving".
Fucking. Gross.
The only thing Substack has done, for me, is this:
I am now less likely to sign up for one of their newsletters at all, let alone consider "upgrading".
@SimonWoods Had a quick look at the new feature. It has that ‘smugness’ that made Twitter intolerable.
@maique The newsletters are great! Giving an accessible and discoverable spot for them has always been the most valuable aspect of Substack.
I've just lost my tolerance for the generic "platform" design of their site, including all of the sleazy strategy that I rattled off. Using services such as Micro.blog, Glass, and omg.lol have now proven to me that the gross side of Substack is much more of a deliberate choice than that which they are willing to admit.
@SimonWoods Got it. I did find the site generally meh, and a bit confusing. I’m enjoying the newsletters on Feedbin, but had to turn notifications off for the app, and I’ll probably delete it anyway, can’t find an excuse to keep it around.
@maique Yeah, if they manage to leave the core delivery system alone then they will have done a good thing. Beyond that, they'd have to make some pretty big changes to look any different than the other social platforms.
