When am I going to be able to add strikethrough text, superscripts and subscripts to my Substack posts?
We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
91–100 of 451 posts
Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
#92Are you going to pay Tim Dillon his 20 milly?
Our strategy with Dillon is to keep sending him coffee mugs until he relents.
Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
#93>This is Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the founders of Substack, with Sachin Monga, the head of product. Are there any female top brass at Substack?
Yes. VP of Partnerships, VP of Communications, Head of Talent are all women at the top table.
Thanks for the quick response! Hopefully that trend continues and we can see some of that diversity move beyond the VP-level and on into the C-suite. :)
Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
#94A popular sentiment on HN is "don't make an app when you can just have a web page". Reading articles is an an almost perfect fit for the web. What are your reasons for having an app?
> A popular sentiment on HN is "don't make an app when you can just have a web page". I have yet to hear a user data analytics team say that.
To clarify, for the good of the user or for their own purposes?
Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
#95Hi! I love substack, and have been writing a weekly blog on it for over a year now! Do you have any plans to give more granular data on traffic/emails? Stuff like being able to see specific posts views over time, etc... What's currently available is ok, but I'd really like to be able to get as much data as possible and then export it into a BI tool. Also, for a "quick win", have you considered adding the ability for…
> Also, for a "quick win", have you considered adding the ability for authors to generate unique URLs for sharing posts? Ideally with separated analytics.
That's a cool idea! Is your intended use case being able to easily spin up different URLs so that you could share them in different places and see which ones drive the most traffic / subscriptions?
Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
#96Please 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.
Thanks! Curious if you use dynamic type on your phone? Right now those settings should be respected by the app. In-app settings are on the roadmap too (themes, font selection, type size) but in the mean time maybe that's a helpful stopgap.
Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Censorship happens when a writer is de-platformed, and has nowhere to turn to re-platform themselves. People on HN then give snarky, insincere advice about creating your own web hosting company or whatever. On the other hand, there are lots of platforms catering to nudity and sexual content, so I don't think this is going to be a problem there. In a society where the government isn't allowed to censor, the greatest f…
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…
> ... but they are absolutely censoring content for political reasons when they ban the arbitrarily defined category of "pornography".
Have they said in plaintext that this is politically motivated or motivated by their "values"?
A lot of platforms that censor sexual content don't do so out of their own wants or desires. I mean, what user generated content platform wants less users? Instead, they're pressured by VC's who have "morals" of their own or financial institutions who have heavy handed policies that could severely impact a fledgling company.
There's also a big difference between "sex workers" and "pornography". Would Substack censor an escort for talking about detailed aspects of escorting? That's very different from censoring someone for posting pornographic images or videos which could potentially fall into the following very harmful, hard to moderate, and litigious categories like age and consent.
Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
#98Will there ever be bundles? Or some kind of bulk discount? Pay-per-article? I'm a paid subscriber to a number of Substack writers, and I'd like to subscribe to more, but it can rapidly run into the hundreds of dollars per month - so I really have to pick and choose. I can imagine bundles aren't really your model, and maybe aren't in your authors interest either. But I'd love to get like an Economics bundle and a New…
Thank you for subscribing!
The bundle question is interesting.
The model right now is really an unbundling. The direct relationship between writers and readers is what makes Substack work: as a writer, your incentive is to earn and keep the trust of the audience who deeply values your work. That's not just a good way to get paid for work you're already doing. It's a model that allows and rewards a fundamentally different and better kind of work that the work you would have to do if you were e.g. trying to please something like the Spotify algorithm.
That said, bundle economics are real. And so while we wouldn't and couldn't do some top down bundle, if there were a way to do bundling that maintained the direct connection, and put writers and readers in charge (e.g. writer self federation, or readers buying several subscriptions at once) that could be very interesting in the future.
Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
#99My personal experience with consuming content on Substack is that it’s been mostly fringe opinion content with a biased agenda. For someone like me that feels wary every time I see a Substack URL, are there some quality independent journalists covering current events that don’t participate in conspiracy theories and partisan echo chambers that I can discover?
There's a giant universe of voices on Substack and I'm sure you'll find many who fit that description. A couple of ways to do so:
Peruse the leaderboards at substack.com and in the new app (in the Discover tab).
Check out the profiles of the writers and readers you most respect (just click on their faces). You'll find lists of Substacks they're subscribed to, which may lead you to some interesting places and new writers to respect.
Re: We’re the founders of Substack, we just launched an iOS app. AUA
#100Please 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.
John from the app team here. We're currently respecting iOS font size settings, so if you increase that it will be reflected in the app. We have app specific font sizing on our roadmap though and it is coming soon!