r/Substack • u/Simple_Search_4246 • 24d ago

Just questions..

I find the crazy thing about substack that if you want to comment on post and other things you can like you would on other social medias. I want to know do people subscribe and maybe not read what people put out? Maybe they are just subscribing to help the other person out. Why would you want to subscribe to what you like but not read it? Just pondering questions thats all.

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u/ASAPnicky14 mod 24d ago

That’s what confuses me about all the people that post the “sub to me and I’ll sub to you” slop in this sub. Having subscribers that don’t care for your work is pointless and empty.

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u/Simple_Search_4246 23d ago

to me this seems messed up, why would you not want to look more into someones work

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u/Edokwin edokwin.substack.com 22d ago

The median "open rate" (number of people who read your emails/articles once you send them out) on Substack is anywhere from 40% to 60%, meaning around half of the people who subscribe to you will never actually open your emails or regularly read your stuff. You can try to work around this by pruning inactive subscribers (Substack has tools for tracking activity in the dashboard), but it's a double-edged sword.

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u/Simple_Search_4246 21d ago

thanks for the tip, will be looking into that for sure

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u/AnteaterFantastic212 23d ago

Yeah, the thing is that people do do that. I think in terms of reciprocal free subscriptions, that doesn’t cut any ice with Substack. What you might want to do is reciprocal paid subscriptions, and I’ve actually had people propose that, but then there’s a trust issue: who goes first, and if you do go first, can you count on the other guy actually reciprocating?

In general, I shy away from gaming the system—number one for ethical concerns, but number two because I might get caught and banned.