We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA

Please include an option to increase the font size. I love Substack. I typically read articles through the web in Safari's reader view which allows you to increase the font size. The app looks great. Love the dark theme. Just a larger font would be more comfortable to read.

You're only saying that censorship isn't a problem for content that you personally judge to be unimportant. Many don't see it that way - they see policies like this as evidence of Substack appeasing Christian moralist values that have "cancelled" the expression of sexuality and sexual identity outside of a set of norms acceptable to them. Worse, these "blanket" policies often only end up enforced against LGBTQ people in practice. I don't know if that's the case with Substack, but they are absolutely censoring content for political reasons when they ban the arbitrarily defined category of "pornography".

Likewise, one could trivially dismiss your position by saying that there are plenty of ways to get anti-vaccine messages (or whatever other "forbidden" political knowledge) - they are published all over the web! In the op ed section of every major newspaper, for example. Far more widely with regard to readership than sexual content is published.

2: We do have a strong philosophical stance on this. We think taking a strong stance in favor of freedom of the press is both the right thing to do, and critical to the success of our broader mission. We've written about this a few times, e.g. https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderati... and https://on.substack.com/p/society-has-a-trust-problem-more

That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.

4. YES!

Hello, I (Hamish) will answer question #1 and leave the rest to my colleagues.

I think what has driven our growth is a nice synthesis between the product, the business dev work (i.e. convincing writers to give it a shot), and the business model.

The model may be the underestimated part. It's compelling for many writers, partly because of its simplicity and transparency: you own the relationship with your audience, you publish stuff that gets sent to them, and then if you're doing good work some portion of that audience will choose to pay you to keep going. That's a good deal for writers, since:

a) It lets them do the work they believe is most important b) No one can mess with their audience c) There's a clear path to making money, which is the major thing absent from most other options for writing on the internet (or, increasingly, anywhere else).

These things make Substack a relatively easy "sell".

Of course, some writers are better poised to succeed with this model than others, so we have put in a sustained effort to identify those writers and let them know about their opportunity on Substack. In a small number of cases, that has meant we've offered a financial package to derisk the move for them (you can think of it as like startup funding to get them going; many don't have much financial buffer and may be reluctant to leave jobs even if they are unhappy in those jobs). But the vast majority of writers doing well on Substack have come to the platform of their own accord, without any kind of deal.

What does Substack look like to you in 2027?