The Ensh*ttification of Substack

And there's no way to give feedback

What is “Priority”? and why did it become a default?

I’m generally happy with substack. It’s a decent platform to write on, I read lots of interesting content on it, but I’m detecting signs that substack is beginning to try the algorithmic displays of content that made Facebook, Xitter and co. so bad and made censorship so easy.

What is the difference between Home? and Following? and why is there one?

Worse there is no obvious way to provide feedback to substack that I dislike what I perceive as the first steps down the road to full adtech algorithmic enshittification.

Note: I use the browser version more than the app, but I use that too. So far as I can tell the two are pretty similar though my app doesn’t do the “priority” thing for the inbox (but then I just noticed it this morning on the browser so maybe the app hasn’t updated yet)

What has driven me to write this post is that this morning I noticed that I didn’t seem to be seeing as many recent substack articles in my “inbox”. Then, for reasons, I went to the Home page and saw different, and more recent, articles highlighted. So I did some poking around and found that the inbox now has an option for “Priority” or “Recent” and that the choice had been made for me to display “Priority”.

I had perviously noted the “Home” was not the same as “Following” and while I kind of get the difference, Home seems prone to giving me older stuff that, while sometimes interesting, is generally not what I’m looking for. I think it is fair to say I don’t actually want “Home”, I want “Following” as my default and that substack seems to sometimes change it back when I’m not paying attention. It is possible, since I read on 2 different computers and the app, that this is something I’m doing but it isn’t obvious that I’m doing it if that happens.

Related to the “Home” issue is this note from Christopher Messina, which I have also observed from time to time (not neccessarily Jim Acosta in my case, but I don’t want him either)

All this leads me to believe that substack is dabbling in the same stuff that made facebook, Xitter and the like actively unpleasant - algorithmic curation. Where a computer program decides what you want to see instead of you and/or where a computer decides that you don’t need to see something and hides it from you without your knowledge so you have no idea that it is there.

This is not a good place for substack to be heading. We’ve already been down this path with Facebook, Xitter, medium and so on. Part of the reason why discourse moved to substack was that it wasn’t algorithmically controlled. We have people like Michael Shellenberger, Lee Fang and Matt Taibbi on who wrote on substack about how bad it was when the social media companies started censorship. Substack really needs to think very carefully about heading down that path.

I don’t neccessarily mind curation as an option. I do want the curation to be clearly called out and not be the default though.

Chronological order as default

I don’t know how to put it more clearly. I want to see comments, posts, notes and everything in chronological order by default. I like the option to see “most popular” but 99% of the time even the most popular comments benefit from context with what was written before. I want to be able to set this in one place (or maybe two or three places) and NOT HAVE THIS FUCKED WITH in the future when some smart programmer or UX person introduces some cool new feature.

I don’t think I am alone in this and I’m guessing that this kind of thing is going to annoy many people when they realize that it’s happening

Announcements and Feedback

In addition there are two big issues that this brings up.

The first is that there has been no obvious announcement of the change. Websites and apps often have a little walk through of new features when they update. Sometimes it can be annoying but there’s usually an option to skip the tutorial and at least, even if you hit skip, you know changes happened so having things slightly different is not a surprise.

Substack didn’t do that. They didn’t even put a banner at the top of the page saying “new display option”. I found out by wondering why I wasn’t seeing what I expected. That’s the least good way for a user to find out that things have changed.

Secondly there’s no obvious place where I can send the contents of this post and expect a substack employee to read it. This is not the only bit of feedback I’d like to give, but I have no way to submit feedback that I can see. And to be honest I don’t expect a substack employee to read every individual feedback. Summarising weekly/daily feedback is an ideal application of AI, but the output of that AI process - “in the last day substack received 541 comments regarding the ‘priority view’ option, most were negative. There were also 2034 complaints about …” would be valuable to substack and worth someone reading.

PS if anyone from substack does read this another bit of feedback I’d like to give is regarding the ability to make one off (micro) payments to authors within substack. Essentially take the standard “if you liked this please consider dropping a few $ in my ko-fi” that many substack writers end their posts with and make it a substack managed option. Perhaps extending that to “I’m willing to pay $1 to unlock this one post”. Oh and, in case this isn’t clear, that doesn’t mean banning people from using ko-fi, but allowing them the option to roll that into their substack payment would be good.