Substack is awful
They ruined a great thing
“[Author] is live on Substack”
When I come to this website the notification button is illuminated with a number over it, indicating I have notifications. When I click on it though, I have no idea what I will see — an actual notification in one of the categories I have authorized in the Notifications tab of my profile setting, or a notice from Substack that someone engaged in an activity I do not care about and expressly clicked to disable in Notifications, namely that an author I follow was “live on Substack”.
This follows Substack’s rollout of Notes. I received a notification every time any author I followed posted their first note. I could not have given less of a shit and repeatedly tried to figure out how to disable such notifications, but no matter what settings I select Substack keeps pumping them to me.
That is the sign of a rotten company putting internal growth goals above the interests of its customers. Such nonsense is annoying but can be forgiven when done by Facebook or the like, services I do not pay for.
But I pay to subscribe to many Substacks. I’ve decreased the number recently, but still today I pay for 32 Substacks at a cost of over $2,500 per year.
All I want is for Substack to deliver me the essays and posts of those authors, and others I subscribe to for free, and provide a forum (site or app) in which those essays and posts are collected. I pay handsomely (and gladly) for this and have endeavored, repeatedly and at length, to configure my Settings so I only receive a Notification if a limited set of corresponding events occur.
Substack does not care. They sneer at my money and preferences and keep sending me Notifications for utter nonsense I do not care about.
In my attempt to pay authors for their content on Substack, I find myself in constant war or opposition with the rest of the Substack service. Is the service I pay for through it not profitable enough? Who knows. And who cares.
I wish to dine at a nice restaurant with interesting friends, but the only restaurant they all can meet at insists on letting flies into the dining room. They do not entirely ruin the experience, but constantly throughout the meal flies buzz in our faces and get in our food, and generally serve no purpose but to annoy, distract, and enervate.
That’s what most of Substack is to me — flies they let in that disrupt and worsen the experience I want to have and pay for. The management of Substack seems to think their fortune comes from flies not the sums I pay their authors, and demands I join them on a fly-infested future rather than the future I want (and they promise I can have in my Notifications settings — a complete fucking lie they ignore. Because they’re assholes who think I’m here and pay them because I like flies buzzing around me, rather than for their authors.
Substack has ruined one of my favorite places on the web, one of the last websites I regularly would go to, old school blog style. It follows in illustrious company of every other app or site I used for a similar purpose previously — RIP Google Reader. I wish they’d stop, but I know they won’t — they’re going to ruin the place, worsening it until I’m no longer willing to put up with it. And I hate them for it.