Et tu, Substack?
Substack people, I really like what you’ve created here, and thank you.
But my guard is up now and I don’t trust you. I’m marking time until you decide to make Substack into something writers like me don’t want. That will be the time I pull up stakes and shut my Substack down and go somewhere else.
You tipped your hand with the forced participation in your “Notes” feature. I can’t shut “Notes” off. I can’t disable notifications about “Notes.”
I can’t stop my responses on “Notes” from pinging my readers’ notification box.
You’re forcing participation in a version of Twitter. I left Twitter to get away from forced participation in gambling-style drip-drip notification dopamine hits.
Many writers came here to leave that behind.
Now you’re forcing participation in it and it’s outrageous.
My positive regard for Substack has been drastically altered. You just turned my view of your product around 180 degrees. Good job.
Looks like a mask-off moment to me.
My first impression take of all of this is that its more behavioral steering. ( Telegram didn’t work . Wechat didn’t really cut the mustard. There are more examples. Lots of failed attempts to congregate demographics in siloed spaces ) Regardless, we are each self selecting for those who would steer us at this point. Essentially making their jobs even easier for them. I’m headed towards serious disinterest in all outlets at this point. Perhaps THAT is the point. To kill all communication.
I see a gear icon in the notification section, and when you click on that there is an option to toggle off the option "Notify me when a writer I subscribe to posts a note." Of course it should have been off in default and we should have had to toggle it on to use it if we wished.
I read somewhere we would see a notification for each "first note" by an author, but I assume not the rest of their notes in the future. I'm not sure how that works in combination with the toggle switch or if I was misunderstanding something.