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Ali Kapadia's avatar

i think the degree of subtlety really depends on the eye of the beholder! I appreciate substack giving us more options, I really do. I just wish for things like this that our old ways of visual display and organization weren't just discarded and made inaccessible. Shouldn't it be all about giving users and creators more customization and not limiting it?

I'm still new to writing on here but I did spend a lot of time carefully thinking and choosing how I wanted things displayed. Ideally, I'd like to continue using that and play around with new options to see if I want to adopt the change, rather than being forced to. It does feel a bit antithetical to the otherwise supportive branding/messaging I've associated with substack. I appreciate your response and willingness to incorporate our feedback!

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Ali Kapadia's avatar

to be more concise, i had my old layout intentionally feel more "blog-y" whereas this feels like it's forcing be to be more "modern website-y." Looking through others substacks, it feels more like i'm on an e-commerce site than i like i'm on a site to read new, interesting thought-provoking articles.

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Anton Cebalo's avatar

> i had my old layout intentionally feel more "blog-y" whereas this feels like it's forcing be to be more "modern website-y."

Exactly this! It looks too Facebook-like, it bothers me for some reason.

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Ali Kapadia's avatar

llike/promote/share my comment, your own complaint, and others. if they see enough of us dont like it then maybe they'll address it!

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Emily Ding's avatar

I do like their new layouts, but I agree with your point here about sometimes wanting my newsletter to feel more blog-y and would like to retain that option. I've often felt this about other newsletter platforms and that was one reason I've stuck with Substack in the past...

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Ali Kapadia's avatar

yea substack definitely has a great infrastructure around but this is definitely a point in the direction of "maybe consider self-hosting or switching a new one" if it makes sense to. I just dont get why you would force the new layouts on everyone instead of letting people decide for themselves.

Maybe the e-commerce, website-y pivot is subtly intentional to get it to be an "Everything app," wouldn't be surprising with the addition of notes (which i somewhat like), but might be a larger push of user acquisition and generating revenue. wouldn't be surpsied if i start seeing shopify integrations and such

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