180 Comments

If I paid for all the requests for money and subscriptions, I'd be broke.

Expand full comment

I can't wait 'til that new click to cancel law kicks in & they have to stop hiding the cancellation process in labyrinths & make getting out just as easy as signing up is

Expand full comment

Great

Expand full comment

Waiting for that same moment

Expand full comment

& also if & when you should donate to one your name & contact info goes on a list that gets sold & then, everyone comes running with their hand out as well, I discovered that years ago even before there was an internet & only snail mail was around

Expand full comment

Yes, this happened to me this year and I was bombarded. Also, my card details were somehow leaked from substack and eventually my bank account was scammed.

I usually use PayPal to pay for subs but can't through substack.

Expand full comment

did you get your money back?

Expand full comment

Yes,was a relatively small amount however the bank was on to it and reversed the amount. They actually notified me that something was amiss in the 'transaction'. Still, it made me aware of the ease at which things can go south and after cancelling my card and getting a new one I no longer use that new card online now. 👍

Expand full comment

Nice

Expand full comment

for some reason they don't consider that when they bombard you with those requests & petitions or, maybe it's just that they're hoping if you only choose one one or two it will be them? because it is quite ridiculous being assaulted on a daily basis with all kinds of folks & entities continually asking for money that nobody actually has

Expand full comment

I am considering dropping Substack because I have gotten no response from tech support for 6 weeks. very disappointing.

Expand full comment

When I looked, I couldn't even find contact details for tech support! Must be well hidden.

Expand full comment

https://substack.com/support

used to go to a contact form, at least. They've replaced it with the AI chat bot thing which is pretty useless. You can find the same articles it directs you to through google.

Expand full comment

Thanks, have gone thru the robot chat help steps, still at a loss of how to reach a human...my credit card not going through on a site I was once a paid subscriber to with it, neither that card used originally successfully nor two other cards from two different banks or two different browsers will go through, even though I get to the "I am human" capcha box, click that, then all give same error msg "Insufficient funds" which is not true

Expand full comment

robot monitored through dashboard.

Expand full comment

Tech support is no more. It has expired, gone to that database in the sky or something. I used to take the time to contact them if I had a question. Now I've learned not to waste my time.

Sometimes (like today), I put a comment in one of these articles in the hope that Substack will see and fix some issues. It seems like a heck of a long shot, though.

Expand full comment

yeah, me too, hoping. But looks like I'm not alone in my frustration with Substack. Maybe they've gotten too big to try to keep their contributors happy.

Expand full comment

Likewise .no response of any sort for 8 weeks .. so have effectively dropped it because i cant login to add posts

Expand full comment

ouch. this is not good! Maybe the Substack corporate people have become too big to care about keeping their contributors happy.

Expand full comment

I'd like to see the possibility to set up a one-time payment for, let's say, a series or a collection of related posts (such as thematic poems or a novella) or a longer piece so that readers don't have to subscribe to everything on an on-going basis.

Expand full comment

I love this idea.

Expand full comment

That would be great.

Expand full comment

I think it would be great if Substack took a month or 6 weeks and worked on existing bugs, and on improving support. Right now, support is pretty much missing in action, and the list of ongoing bugs is getting longer.

- Email notification when someone replies to a comment - Broken for months and months

- Image caption doesn't follow movement of image in editor - broken (again)

- Comments disappear when replying or updating (need to refresh page)

- Various share things don't work

Anyway, I hope you'll take a little time off from making new features in order to fix bugs. Also, consider getting a good testing team on board.

Expand full comment

Exactly! For now, I want existing bugs fixed.

Expand full comment

I paid the subscription fee for a few Substack writers but when I try to access Substack from my phone (my app account predates my subscriptions) it keeps telling me that I am not a paid subscriber and I cannot comment. If I log in from my laptop, then I can comment. I tried to log out and log back in but it doesn’t seem to fix the problem. It’s frustrating

Expand full comment

Please bear in mind some people don't use apps at all - please always make sure things work in our only interface, the web. For example, notifications have been broken since I joined. I unticked notify of likes, but I still get notified about hundreds of them, making it hard to pick out the important things like replies.

Expand full comment

It does seem the focus of substack is switching solely to the app. I think it's only a matter of time before the web interface doesn't just stop getting access to new features but also starts LOSING existing ones.

Expand full comment

I have unsubscribed from writers shoving the app in my face.

If I wanted another phone app I would have installed it, but they keep pushing the app like a yApping puppy, sick of it

Expand full comment

Same here.

Expand full comment

Livestreaming (both broadcasting and watching live) is an app-ONLY feature. I suspect there will be lots more to come...

Expand full comment

Well I prefer to take my time and read. I see little value in 'live' stuff unless a literal emergency.

Expand full comment

I have the opposite problem! I don't get e-mail notifications of replies any more, even though I did for the first few years!

(If you're still getting both likes and replies, then you should be able to do what I did. There's a difference in the sender for the two types of e-mails, so you can set up a filter that sends the likes directly to trash and keeps the reply notifications in your inbox. I had thought that a change in sender might have made this filter kill all my e-mails, but I deleted the filter and still am not getting any.)

Expand full comment

I think the email notifications work for me, but it is the website ones that tell me about everything, and ignore my settings.

Expand full comment

Stop pushing notes written by the Hi-I’m-New-to-Substack-Subscribe-to-me-and-I’ll-Subscribe-to-you masses.

Expand full comment

I just launched a second Substack. The new one focusses only on LOCAL news from my hometown. It's called The Troy Citizen. I started it last week and already have 144 subscribers, including (drum roll) 30 paid subscribers. I haven't really started to send out my real human-interest stories so I'm cautiously optimistic about future numbers. (I also have almost 2,000 page views).

I'm surprised more journalism entrepreneurs haven't started local newspapers. My start-up expenses were $0.0. So thank you Substack!

https://thetroycitizen.substack.com/p/the-history-of-haunted-hill

Expand full comment

I would think that any person who tries to extricate money is NOT worth looking at.

Expand full comment

Please let us use custom fonts and CSS

Expand full comment

Oh look, they shut the bathroom door.... They are going to flush themselves or shoot themselves in the head. Time to find another platform; this one isn't long for our world.

Expand full comment

I’d like to have subscriptions in general without automatic renewals. That’s where they screw you. I’m thinking of using pre-paid Visa cards for subscriptions so I’m not charged for things I’m no longer interested in. Eventually the card will run out of money.

Expand full comment

better still, get a wise account and card - I have one which is usually frozen, I unfreeze it only to make a payment, then freeze it again right away

Expand full comment

Still waiting on better oEmbed support for more than just Apple, Spotify, and YouTube embeds for podcast players.

Expand full comment

So let me get this straight...you are enabling a paywall on chats, but don't have full tech support for any substack at all? Spoiler alert! The payment processor you use is hopeless and non-viable in so many countries. You can't unsubscribe with joining the hyper-labryinth Olympics.

You don't even look through things we report like racist, Nazi or extremely worrying articles, notes, and chats, now you've made it harder to detect them and do the right thing because you're not a paying viewer/reader.

Expand full comment

No, have enough expenses.

Expand full comment

A couple months ago, I stopped getting notifications of comment replies in my e-mail. My settings still say that I should be getting them, but they stopped appearing, so now I have to use the awkward "bell" icon in the corner of the page.

I also briefly tried installing the Substack app a few weeks ago, but it just made browsing comment threads too hard. If it was possible to minimize and maximize each level of comment threads individually in the app, the way it is in the browser, then I might use the app, but with the way I interact with comment threads, the app seems unusable.

I haven't seen any information about how to ask for tech support, so I'm using the comments on this thread, which was sent to my e-mail.

Expand full comment

not interested in paying so, buh-bye

Expand full comment