208 Comments
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Sarah Sunfire's avatar

Whichever of you on the team came up with Revenge of RSS—

I'm a reasonable drive away from Vegas if you wanna get married real quick.

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Rob Kay's avatar

Oh Sarah! I thought you would never ask (blushes) !!

Next week OK for you ?

I mean, no pressure or anything ...

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Sarah Sunfire's avatar

I'm freelance right now, so next week should work!!

It's no pressure, of course. Given how long we've been steadfastly committed, our friends will all agree that it's about time.

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Rob Kay's avatar

We should have done this last year... it's been far too long. But obviously, only if we are both fully masked, and quadruple vaccinated: I can't bear to kiss a woman unless she has taken three negative PCR tests every day, and insists on wearing full PPE including a face nappy and a tin foil helmet. And we have to think of the kids: what if they were born with in-vitro Covid, the poor dears?

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Sarah Sunfire's avatar

Hmmm, I can't tell if you're making light of covid protection or if you're just being a citizen of 2022, but in the case of the former, we must annul this marriage.

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Rob Kay's avatar

OK: its off. I guess a quickie divorce is called for.

I'll have to cancel the Elvis Chapel of Love.

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Tianyu Fang's avatar

Finally!

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Bailey @ Substack's avatar

First comment!

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Tianyu Fang's avatar

I've been waiting for this since Google sunsetted Reader, after all

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Letrado's avatar

Thank you

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Pablo Andreu's avatar

Looking good! It seems the Substack team is making some improvement every week. I appreciate y'all trying to make the platform better on a consistent basis.

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Scoot's avatar

The reader looks great and I have really enjoyed it! Thank you for this!

A feature request that is more quality of life than anything, I would really like to be able to customize the "recommended" sidebar by tweaking whose publications add to that list. A majority of the recommendations are from "On Substack" or "Substack Community" and while obviously I wish to remain subscribed to those publications, I am less likely to be interested in what they recommend. There are some other publications I might want to customize so the recommended pubs are more likely to be things or topics I am interested in. I don't know how feasible this request is, and can't complain about how it is operating otherwise.

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Holly Rabalais's avatar

Good catch, Scoot. I haven't been using the recommendations much because...well, I'm just not interested. And now I understand that may be because of the "On Substack" or "Substack Community" subscriptions.

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Holly Rabalais's avatar

I stand corrected. I just took a quick walk through my recs, and most of them come from other 'stacks I follow. Only one was a "substack" recommendation.

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Scoot's avatar

4 of my top 10 recommendations are from substack, and when I click the "view all" button under the sidebar, there's another sidebar with recommended publications and 7 of 7 of the top ones are from substack.

There's nothing wrong with them being from substack in and of itself, but the principle still stands that being able to customize this would really help these features be tailored to me and my interests. Again--I don't know how feasible that is, but it would be really nice!

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Nick @ Substack's avatar

It’s feasible! I think it would be great to be able to x-out specific recommendations or say “See fewer recommendations from Substack Reads.” Right now the system is quite simple but we’re very focused on making this better.

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AC⚡️DC's avatar

OPML for RSS import would be a start I reckon. I have too many feeds to import.

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Scoot's avatar

Thank you very much! I really appreciate both how innovative Substack is with their system and how willing to listen to the community you are about features. Can't wait for the future of this platform!

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Holly Rabalais's avatar

I agree--the other day when looking at recs, I moved on because I didn't have a way to x-out ones I wasn't interested in. I'm subscribing to more and more substacks, and sometimes I'd like an x-out feature for my inbox for days I just don't have the time.

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Holly Rabalais's avatar

How many other 'stacks do you subscribe to?

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Scoot's avatar

It's not a huge number--34 I just counted--but even if I only subscribed to two newsletters, if one of them was a publication who is very liberal with recommendations, it might flood my recommendations sidebar with publications I'm not interested in. So being able to manage that would still be useful. You're right though, the density of substack-based recommendations will depend on how many subscriptions I have!

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Holly Rabalais's avatar

I was more curious why you had so many substack recs vs others. I'm probably right where you are on subscriptions. When I refreshed just now, I did see 4 or 5 recs in a row by one writer. I didn't like that. I can see the case for being able to customize your recs based on interests (categories, maybe?).

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Carlos Cortés's avatar

When are we going to have Substack for Android? I use Feedly as a news reader and I would like to change it to Substack but without an Android app it is not comfortable and Feedly does have an app.

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Bailey @ Substack's avatar

Imminently! If you're not on the waitlist, now's a good time to get on it...https://sublink.substack.com/android-waitlist

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Carlos Cortés's avatar

Thank you

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Sara White's avatar

I can't figure out how to turn dark mode off anymore – the option has disappeared for me and I've looked everywhere for it with no luck. Hopefully this option hasn't disappeared as I can't read light text on a dark background without ending up with a headache.

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Sarah's avatar

Same! Did you ever figure this out?

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Ky | The Puppy Raiser's avatar

I'm struggling with the same problem. Also I can no longer find the add RSS button :(

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Liberty's avatar

Dark mode! Keyboard shortcuts! Thank you 💚 🥃

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John Ward's avatar

I don't know exactly when this went live, but I've been using the new interface all weekend. I've added several RSS feeds and was delighted to see new posts from those sites populate in my feed right next to the Substacks to which I'm subscribed.

Kudos to the team that developed this. It's such an elegant implementation and does exactly what I want an RSS reader to do. We finally have a successor to Google Reader. THANK YOU.

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Bailey @ Substack's avatar

You're an early adopter! It went out silently last week. We wanted to make sure the bugs were all ironed out before sharing the news.

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John Ward's avatar

I really, really, really can't express how happy I am to have RSS back. I believe you'll have people start using the Substack reader just because of those features (and the slick reading environment) even if they aren't actively following any Substacks. This is a great way to bring people into the ecosystem.

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AC⚡️DC's avatar

While you're at it, please add OPML import, as I have too many RSS feeds to add separately. THX.

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Brad Dobson's avatar

Love this! For some of us RSS never left. I was just about to start adding my substack subscriptions to my feeds, now I might add my feeds over here instead :-)

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GAYLETTER's avatar

Can't wait to dive in.

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Andrew's avatar

I have looked and looked and looked, this option doesn't appear where it says it should. I only see "library" and "archive" and "+Add RSS Feed".

Honestly I was excited to see this article, because the time I spend on reading stuff I want to substack is practically zero (I just can't handle the white background everywhere.) Has someone removed this feature?

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Kate McDermott's avatar

Substack just keeps getting better and better for both writers and readers!

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Tami Carey's avatar

Agreed!

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Christopher Brunet's avatar

Hopefully this helps out with organic discovery for us little guys :)

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Ana  Cristina's avatar

!Los cambios son bienvenidos!

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Bill Bishop's avatar

can i import all my feeds from feedly in bulk?

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Minh's avatar

Awesome!! We love distraction free places to read, thank you team Substack

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