Announcing new ways to read and find writers on Substack
Today, we’re introducing new ways to discover writers on our homepage, and the beta version of Substack Reader, a place to keep up with all your newsletters.
The homepage revamp includes the introduction of lists that display the top newsletters in various categories, as well as a ‘Featured’ section to highlight writers who might not otherwise appear on those lists.
Read all your newsletters in one place
If you read a lot of newsletters, you might find it challenging to keep track of all your subscriptions. We want Substack to be a distraction-free place for writers to connect directly with their readers, so we’ve created a new space, Substack Reader, that’s just for you and your newsletters.
If you’re logged in to Substack, Reader will become your new homepage. Use the “Discover” tab in your sidebar to find new writers to subscribe to. Reader also comes with RSS support, so you can really have all your subscriptions in one place.
With Reader, our goal is to put you in charge of what you read. While other platforms seek to own your attention with feeds that are optimized for engagement, on Substack, you control what you see.
Reader is in public beta, so we’d love to know what you think. You can share your feedback with us anytime using the “Send feedback” button in your Inbox.
You can add Reader to your iPhone home screen by opening it in Safari and choosing “Add to Home Screen” from the share options. To add Reader to Android, open it from Chrome, tap the three dots at the top-right, and choose “Add to Home Screen.”
New ways to discover writers on Substack
Substack is just over three years old now, but our network has seen rapid growth in the last year in particular.
Not long ago, it made sense for us to prominently display a leaderboard of the top publications across the entire platform, since people were interested in finding examples of the most successful writers and learning more about how the model works. However, as many thousands more writers arrived in recent months and millions more readers came with them, it soon made less sense to show such a small slice of the work being done on Substack.
By introducing a host of new categories, which you can find through our homepage or Reader’s Discover tab, we hope to expand the number of writers who get exposure on Substack, and help readers more easily find writers who cover their particular interests.
In the coming months, we’ll be working to improve the reader experience on Substack, making it easier for you to find and share the writers you love. As with all aspects of the platform, we expect these new tools to evolve rapidly and look forward to hearing what you think.
Interested in working with us on these opportunities? Check out substack.com/jobs.
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