Suggestions for possible improvements for Substack:
1. Consolidation of Newsletters Option:
One of the biggest issues I find Subscribers have is they find publications are effectively flooding their email inbox, so they have to choose to keep deleting emails (to see their other, important work or personal emails) or unsubscribing from Subs…
Suggestions for possible improvements for Substack:
1. Consolidation of Newsletters Option:
One of the biggest issues I find Subscribers have is they find publications are effectively flooding their email inbox, so they have to choose to keep deleting emails (to see their other, important work or personal emails) or unsubscribing from Substackers who are 'too' frequent. It also discourages free subscription expansion, and I imagine bandwidth wise it might be an issue for Substack servers if it goes exponential in adoption.
I think this could be solved if Subscribers got a single email a day (at a time of their own choosing) that lists all of the new Substack articles from their various subscriptions that have been published publicly. That way they get a single email that is a list, it no longer clogs up their inbox, and Substack can reduce bandwidth overheads.
2. De-lineate Likes and Comments Notifications:
Currently Substack have an email notification option that toggles *both* likes and comments. It needs to be separated. Personally, notifications about likes as an author seeking to engage with the public aren't particularly useful, and they become a time drain because they have the exact same heading as comment responses on emails.
This makes it very time consuming to respond to comments in a timely manner, especially if you get a lot of likes and comments, because you have to manually check emails to see which are likes and which are actual comments.
3. Have An "Online Only" Option
One of the biggest issues in journalistic reporting is you may, from time to time, be required to issue corrections or retractions for inevitable human mistakes. The problem with this is, you cannot 'retract' or 'correct' a mistaken or erroneous email, which inevitably means you must fire off another email - thus adding one more email to the spam flood counter - in order to notify users of the error, that might have already been corrected on the online version.
I'm aware emails can't really load dynamic content, so what is needed is an option that essentially shows the title and sub-title of the article, and then prompts the user to read online, that way ensuring they are reading the latest (typo-free) edition.
4. Use Sub-Section Delta Changes Instead Of Entire Article Updates
Currently if you want to correct a section - say you're like me and sometimes make an illiterate spelling mistake - you have to load up the *entire* article to correct one word. Wikipedia solves this issue by allowing individuals to edit *sub-sections* of an article.
There's a number of advantages to this. One, it reduces bandwidth overheads for both server and client, which lowers networking costs. Two, it allows writers to more quickly make corrections and changes, without eating into EG mobile data if you're say, a journalist on the move in remote locations.
5. Tracking Data For Unsubscribes For Specific Articles
Ignoring unsubscriptions is a type of toxic positivity, and knowing what articles the public don't like or aren't interested in can help refine a writers' style. Maybe the article wasn't as good quality as it could have been. Currently, unsubscription notices are sent via email, however the option to unsubscribe is often at the bottom of a newsletter. It can therefore be inferred the specific newsletter, in part or in whole, spurred the unsubscription, and that data would be useful to know.
For example, MrBeast - second largest YouTuber in the world at time of writing - on YouTube uses viewership retention rate drop-offs to work out which part of his videos do not work for the audience, so he can remove those unwanted aspects. So capturing which articles were unwanted can give writers crucial feedback, as there may be a trend or an issue to fix.
6. Prompt For Optional Feedback On Why People Are Unsubscribing (And Give It To The Author)
Another issue is currently Substack has no optional feedback form from unsubscribers to let authors know why they chose to unsubscribe. Were the newsletters too regular? Low quality? Topic too offensive for them? Not regular enough? Did not feature the topics they subscribed for? Perhaps the writer was a fraudster? Or maybe they'd like to leave a comment remarking why?
7. Provide Substack Authors With Access To a CSV File Of Their Metadata
I had to build a tool to manually webscrape metadata from Substack, but it is slow, inefficient and cannot provide real time updates. That metadata allowed me to analyse what readers enjoyed from articles, spot trends, and work out what sort of messages promoted growth.
It would be more practical - seeing as other people don't have access to my tool and I don't intend to maintain it for public use - to be able to download article metadata in a .CSV format (this is a widely useable spreadsheet format that can be ported and used on many OSes and read by many software packages). This would aid writers in making decisions and spotting trends.
8. Provide Article-by-Article Timeseries Breakdowns
Another feature Substack could add is a timeseries marking when likes, comments, shares and other interaction events occurred. One thing I'm still blindly guessing is what time of the day my readers actually interact with my Substack at because I don't know when the majority of likes happen.
This wouldn't require any additional data as knowing when a like was pressed is as simple as recording the timestamp of when that happened; likewise shares, subscribes. Comments already have timestamps. Essentially, an 'engagement metric' that shows time-of-date.
9. Audience Origin Breakdowns
Another missing feature is knowing what country most of your subscribers are from (inferred from IP). I like to tailor my topics to accommodate where my audience is from. Americans won't be interested in British law, and British people won't be interested in American law. Currently, I randomly mix the areas of coverage, but it would be nice to know where most are from so I can infer topics of interest and bring them higher quality reporting for their interests. It doesn't need Subscriber specific breakdowns, just an aggregate data that gives a percentage of how many X are from America, how many Y are from Europe etc.
Very good ideas that if implemented would be very beneficial. I hope your reply gets read as data is everything. I particularly like the consolidation idea.
Suggestions for possible improvements for Substack:
1. Consolidation of Newsletters Option:
One of the biggest issues I find Subscribers have is they find publications are effectively flooding their email inbox, so they have to choose to keep deleting emails (to see their other, important work or personal emails) or unsubscribing from Substackers who are 'too' frequent. It also discourages free subscription expansion, and I imagine bandwidth wise it might be an issue for Substack servers if it goes exponential in adoption.
I think this could be solved if Subscribers got a single email a day (at a time of their own choosing) that lists all of the new Substack articles from their various subscriptions that have been published publicly. That way they get a single email that is a list, it no longer clogs up their inbox, and Substack can reduce bandwidth overheads.
2. De-lineate Likes and Comments Notifications:
Currently Substack have an email notification option that toggles *both* likes and comments. It needs to be separated. Personally, notifications about likes as an author seeking to engage with the public aren't particularly useful, and they become a time drain because they have the exact same heading as comment responses on emails.
This makes it very time consuming to respond to comments in a timely manner, especially if you get a lot of likes and comments, because you have to manually check emails to see which are likes and which are actual comments.
3. Have An "Online Only" Option
One of the biggest issues in journalistic reporting is you may, from time to time, be required to issue corrections or retractions for inevitable human mistakes. The problem with this is, you cannot 'retract' or 'correct' a mistaken or erroneous email, which inevitably means you must fire off another email - thus adding one more email to the spam flood counter - in order to notify users of the error, that might have already been corrected on the online version.
I'm aware emails can't really load dynamic content, so what is needed is an option that essentially shows the title and sub-title of the article, and then prompts the user to read online, that way ensuring they are reading the latest (typo-free) edition.
4. Use Sub-Section Delta Changes Instead Of Entire Article Updates
Currently if you want to correct a section - say you're like me and sometimes make an illiterate spelling mistake - you have to load up the *entire* article to correct one word. Wikipedia solves this issue by allowing individuals to edit *sub-sections* of an article.
There's a number of advantages to this. One, it reduces bandwidth overheads for both server and client, which lowers networking costs. Two, it allows writers to more quickly make corrections and changes, without eating into EG mobile data if you're say, a journalist on the move in remote locations.
5. Tracking Data For Unsubscribes For Specific Articles
Ignoring unsubscriptions is a type of toxic positivity, and knowing what articles the public don't like or aren't interested in can help refine a writers' style. Maybe the article wasn't as good quality as it could have been. Currently, unsubscription notices are sent via email, however the option to unsubscribe is often at the bottom of a newsletter. It can therefore be inferred the specific newsletter, in part or in whole, spurred the unsubscription, and that data would be useful to know.
For example, MrBeast - second largest YouTuber in the world at time of writing - on YouTube uses viewership retention rate drop-offs to work out which part of his videos do not work for the audience, so he can remove those unwanted aspects. So capturing which articles were unwanted can give writers crucial feedback, as there may be a trend or an issue to fix.
6. Prompt For Optional Feedback On Why People Are Unsubscribing (And Give It To The Author)
Another issue is currently Substack has no optional feedback form from unsubscribers to let authors know why they chose to unsubscribe. Were the newsletters too regular? Low quality? Topic too offensive for them? Not regular enough? Did not feature the topics they subscribed for? Perhaps the writer was a fraudster? Or maybe they'd like to leave a comment remarking why?
7. Provide Substack Authors With Access To a CSV File Of Their Metadata
I had to build a tool to manually webscrape metadata from Substack, but it is slow, inefficient and cannot provide real time updates. That metadata allowed me to analyse what readers enjoyed from articles, spot trends, and work out what sort of messages promoted growth.
It would be more practical - seeing as other people don't have access to my tool and I don't intend to maintain it for public use - to be able to download article metadata in a .CSV format (this is a widely useable spreadsheet format that can be ported and used on many OSes and read by many software packages). This would aid writers in making decisions and spotting trends.
8. Provide Article-by-Article Timeseries Breakdowns
Another feature Substack could add is a timeseries marking when likes, comments, shares and other interaction events occurred. One thing I'm still blindly guessing is what time of the day my readers actually interact with my Substack at because I don't know when the majority of likes happen.
This wouldn't require any additional data as knowing when a like was pressed is as simple as recording the timestamp of when that happened; likewise shares, subscribes. Comments already have timestamps. Essentially, an 'engagement metric' that shows time-of-date.
9. Audience Origin Breakdowns
Another missing feature is knowing what country most of your subscribers are from (inferred from IP). I like to tailor my topics to accommodate where my audience is from. Americans won't be interested in British law, and British people won't be interested in American law. Currently, I randomly mix the areas of coverage, but it would be nice to know where most are from so I can infer topics of interest and bring them higher quality reporting for their interests. It doesn't need Subscriber specific breakdowns, just an aggregate data that gives a percentage of how many X are from America, how many Y are from Europe etc.
Some ideas.
Like these
Very good ideas that if implemented would be very beneficial. I hope your reply gets read as data is everything. I particularly like the consolidation idea.