As a lurker with a minimal social media profile, I can only enjoy your posts but not do much in the way of amplifying…. But really glad your blog is doing well as enjoy it a lot 🙂
As a data point the other way, I really dislike Substack, and I'm here despite it, not because of it.
On mobile, the footnote popups are often displayed partially off the screen, so you can't read the information in them. (Example: https://imgur.com/a/3wpWJWd)
On both mobile and desktop, there's a really annoying workflow issue where you're partway through typing a comment but want to check or quote something in the OP, and the post is collapsed with a "Read more" link that looks like it's a dynamic link that will just expand the post in place without affecting anything else on the page (like your partially-written comment), but actually it reloads the whole page and loses the comment. I've been bitten by that a few times, and now know to use workarounds like opening the OP in a new tab, but I shouldn't have to in 2024.
Similarly, the "Continue Thread" button looks like it should expand the comment thread in place, but it actually opens a whole new page, and then you lose your place in the main thread (the back button might take you back somewhere else, especially if new comments have arrived in the meantime).
And it doesn't seem to be powerful enough to handle blogs in the tiers above yours. On ACX, it often just hangs while scrolling through comments and you can't scroll up or down.
It also counts comments weirdly. For example, this https://imgur.com/a/sdEDL1f looks as if there's one reply to Cathy's comment and then one other unrelated top-level comment. But in fact there are two comments total: Cathy's and your reply to it. (At the time of writing. Obviously, once I post this, there will be a second top-level comment.)
As for the stats, weren't you on WordPress before? They have a very similar feature, showing you where in the world your readers are based (although admittedly not subscribers): https://imgur.com/a/eD1SyW4
Clearly Substack is working for you and I'm not expecting to influence you away from it, but I wanted to offer the data point, and I'm also curious whether you don't encounter the problems with it or whether you consider them to be outweighed by the upsides. (I realise they're more reader-side than blogger-side issues - but you're a commenter on your own blog, and you presumably read and comment on other Substacks.)
I really like the idea of Substack, and the community and ecosystem of bloggers recommending each other, but I find it too buggy to consider moving my own blog there.
Substack is weirdly bad at comments. I assume its ACX failure boils down to 'none of our other blogs have this many comments, and performance fixes are hard', but as you point out it is inclined to just fail on comments in all sorts of ways. I personally tend to write my comment in notepad and paste it in at the end. One day I'll realise I ought to do this in something with a spellchecker.
That's so interesting! What do you read it in? Do you use the app? I tend to read substacks in my browser (Firefox) on PC and on the app on my mobile, and in neither do I have these problems.
I find the app a really easy and powerful way for it to show me the different substacks I've subscribed to (mostly not paid!) and I can scroll up and down and with one click go to read them, or go back and then look at others.
Reading is very easy and smooth and better and more consistent than LiveJournal or some Wordpress sites (which seem quite variable).
I find commenting much easier than on Wordpress sites which always seemed to log me out and make me fill in details again (and sometimes then went wrong and deleted my comment). I really don't recognise the issues you and Neil report at all. I've never had Substack eat a comment, either on my own or someone else's blog.
Re mega-blogs like Scott's, it's not perfect, but I've never had the hanging thing. I agree the going in and out of long complex threads can take more clicking than would be ideal, but I find it pretty intuitive, and ACX's comments now are way better than SSC's were, when (when reading on mobile) the formatting in nested comments would push everything over to the right so you ended up with unreadable comments with a letter on each line.
Some of Wordpress's bugginess were writer-specific (I had an old site that I'd taken offline and then put back, so errors had crept in and it wasn't updating properly; by the end, I was getting serious errors every couple of weeks). But others felt innate. Stats is a good example: the way they'd outsourced half their functionality to Jetpack was incredibly annoying: there were somethings I could only see with Jetpack, and others I'd have to go to the Wordpress.com site for. I notice you are on a *wordpress.com domain name, not your own, so I wonder if this makes a difference? Jetpack also kept trying to aggressively upsell me stuff the whole time (sometimes not being obvious on whether it was a sale) which I really dislike.
On stats and tools more generally, the core functionality on Substack is streets ahead (the map is fun, but there is so much more): as I say, I don't use most of it, but one could run a very sophisticated operation (e.g. offering 20% discounts to your top engaged readers who aren't currently paid subscribers) if one was using it as a business.
The one thing that I do find doesn't work well and is buggy is editing posts on mobile. That is a bit annoying but I do all my serious writing at a PC, so it's not the end of the world (and Wordpress wasn't great either, so it's like going from a 'C' to a 'D' here).
As a final point, Substack has much better customer support. When I had issues in transferring over I contacted someone and they got back to me rapidly and resolved it; I know a couple of other people who've had similar experiences. There was no-one at all to contact on Wordpress.
Like you, I'm not attempting to influence you away from Wordpress, which I recognise is working for you! But I definitely prefer reading Substacks to any other blogging platform (the 'they're grouped together' is definitely a factor here) and find it a very smooth and easy platform as a reader.
As a lurker with a minimal social media profile, I can only enjoy your posts but not do much in the way of amplifying…. But really glad your blog is doing well as enjoy it a lot 🙂
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoy it and very much appreciate your 'likes' and comments. :-)
Congrats!
As a data point the other way, I really dislike Substack, and I'm here despite it, not because of it.
On mobile, the footnote popups are often displayed partially off the screen, so you can't read the information in them. (Example: https://imgur.com/a/3wpWJWd)
On both mobile and desktop, there's a really annoying workflow issue where you're partway through typing a comment but want to check or quote something in the OP, and the post is collapsed with a "Read more" link that looks like it's a dynamic link that will just expand the post in place without affecting anything else on the page (like your partially-written comment), but actually it reloads the whole page and loses the comment. I've been bitten by that a few times, and now know to use workarounds like opening the OP in a new tab, but I shouldn't have to in 2024.
Similarly, the "Continue Thread" button looks like it should expand the comment thread in place, but it actually opens a whole new page, and then you lose your place in the main thread (the back button might take you back somewhere else, especially if new comments have arrived in the meantime).
And it doesn't seem to be powerful enough to handle blogs in the tiers above yours. On ACX, it often just hangs while scrolling through comments and you can't scroll up or down.
It also counts comments weirdly. For example, this https://imgur.com/a/sdEDL1f looks as if there's one reply to Cathy's comment and then one other unrelated top-level comment. But in fact there are two comments total: Cathy's and your reply to it. (At the time of writing. Obviously, once I post this, there will be a second top-level comment.)
As for the stats, weren't you on WordPress before? They have a very similar feature, showing you where in the world your readers are based (although admittedly not subscribers): https://imgur.com/a/eD1SyW4
Clearly Substack is working for you and I'm not expecting to influence you away from it, but I wanted to offer the data point, and I'm also curious whether you don't encounter the problems with it or whether you consider them to be outweighed by the upsides. (I realise they're more reader-side than blogger-side issues - but you're a commenter on your own blog, and you presumably read and comment on other Substacks.)
I really like the idea of Substack, and the community and ecosystem of bloggers recommending each other, but I find it too buggy to consider moving my own blog there.
Substack is weirdly bad at comments. I assume its ACX failure boils down to 'none of our other blogs have this many comments, and performance fixes are hard', but as you point out it is inclined to just fail on comments in all sorts of ways. I personally tend to write my comment in notepad and paste it in at the end. One day I'll realise I ought to do this in something with a spellchecker.
That's so interesting! What do you read it in? Do you use the app? I tend to read substacks in my browser (Firefox) on PC and on the app on my mobile, and in neither do I have these problems.
I find the app a really easy and powerful way for it to show me the different substacks I've subscribed to (mostly not paid!) and I can scroll up and down and with one click go to read them, or go back and then look at others.
Reading is very easy and smooth and better and more consistent than LiveJournal or some Wordpress sites (which seem quite variable).
I find commenting much easier than on Wordpress sites which always seemed to log me out and make me fill in details again (and sometimes then went wrong and deleted my comment). I really don't recognise the issues you and Neil report at all. I've never had Substack eat a comment, either on my own or someone else's blog.
Re mega-blogs like Scott's, it's not perfect, but I've never had the hanging thing. I agree the going in and out of long complex threads can take more clicking than would be ideal, but I find it pretty intuitive, and ACX's comments now are way better than SSC's were, when (when reading on mobile) the formatting in nested comments would push everything over to the right so you ended up with unreadable comments with a letter on each line.
Some of Wordpress's bugginess were writer-specific (I had an old site that I'd taken offline and then put back, so errors had crept in and it wasn't updating properly; by the end, I was getting serious errors every couple of weeks). But others felt innate. Stats is a good example: the way they'd outsourced half their functionality to Jetpack was incredibly annoying: there were somethings I could only see with Jetpack, and others I'd have to go to the Wordpress.com site for. I notice you are on a *wordpress.com domain name, not your own, so I wonder if this makes a difference? Jetpack also kept trying to aggressively upsell me stuff the whole time (sometimes not being obvious on whether it was a sale) which I really dislike.
On stats and tools more generally, the core functionality on Substack is streets ahead (the map is fun, but there is so much more): as I say, I don't use most of it, but one could run a very sophisticated operation (e.g. offering 20% discounts to your top engaged readers who aren't currently paid subscribers) if one was using it as a business.
The one thing that I do find doesn't work well and is buggy is editing posts on mobile. That is a bit annoying but I do all my serious writing at a PC, so it's not the end of the world (and Wordpress wasn't great either, so it's like going from a 'C' to a 'D' here).
As a final point, Substack has much better customer support. When I had issues in transferring over I contacted someone and they got back to me rapidly and resolved it; I know a couple of other people who've had similar experiences. There was no-one at all to contact on Wordpress.
Like you, I'm not attempting to influence you away from Wordpress, which I recognise is working for you! But I definitely prefer reading Substacks to any other blogging platform (the 'they're grouped together' is definitely a factor here) and find it a very smooth and easy platform as a reader.
Footnote 7 exceeds -> to exceed
Congratulations on your inevitable rise to intersellar readership!
Or for -> before.