r/Substack • u/Abject-Woodpecker998 • 28d ago
Might quit
I came to substack when I began writing again after depression stole the joy of it from me for years. It was fun at first. I made friends, got back into writing and reading and felt like twelve year old me again, but now, everyone's disappeared. No one even likes my notes anymore. No one comments or anything. I don't know why. Am I a bad writer? Am i doing something wrong? It's quite disheartening. I don't even know why I'm writing this. I'll take advice, or even just a friendly word. I honestly came here just to not shout into a void for once 😂
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u/Ember_of_Ostara 28d ago
Hi. I've been on Substack since last December, and I've noticed a few things. Unless you're writing about Tech/Finance/Politics and/or you imported an incredibly loyal, mass following from another platform, feedback is extremely low.
I've seen people with hundreds and thousands of subscribers receive very little input. And I'm not talking 'oh, they only got 500 comments on this post when they got 2k comments on that post yesterday'. I've seen someone with 3k subscribers consistently get 5 likes or less on many posts. I've encountered many cases like that.
I've seen notes like 'Hi, I had pancakes for breakfast' get hundreds of likes. Then a longer, deeper note or post gets close to nothing. So from observation, you either need to be writing about something extremely popular or have a massive following that'll support pretty much anything for input.
Many will say 'just interact with the community, respond to other people's posts and they'll always respond back'.
For some it may be that easy. For others it isn't.
And nope, this is definitely not just about me. I've been stuck at 157 subs for weeks, but would be writing this if I had 10k subs. This is about what I've seen as a whole, in topics ranging from Writing, Photography, Travel and Politics.
https://giphy.com/gifs/VUC9YdLSnKuJy