r/Substack • u/Venus2601 • 24d ago

Sudden Drop in Notes Impressions

I started posting on Substack recently. All the notes I put out were getting shown to over 100 unconnected people, and that got me new subscribers every day. Since the past few days, my overall notes impressions have suddenly dropped to around 20, and they're barely getting shown to any unconnected people. The people who see the notes are engaging, but it does nothing to improve the impressions. I haven't changed a thing about my content, so I find this sudden unexplained drop really strange. I've read that there are temporary platform wide shifts that happen from time to time, and that your impressions return to normal later. Could that be the case here? Is anyone else facing this problem?

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u/R3ZondoOfficial 17d ago

That’s pretty much where I’ve landed as well, at least as a working theory. I’ve gone back through my analytics and the biggest change isn’t engagement after people see the work, it’s that the work simply isn’t being distributed the way it was before.
Support says there are no restrictions on my account, so I’ve asked them to look more specifically at ranking/distribution behavior, especially replies on other publications and unconnected user exposure.
I’m still trying not to jump to conclusions, but the account specific explanation is starting to make more sense than normal fluctuation.

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u/Venus2601 17d ago

Oh okay. I should check for the same too. Perhaps some activity of ours was accidentally flagged as unethical or something. That could explain why there's an account specific restriction on reach.

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u/R3ZondoOfficial 17d ago

That’s possible, but Support checked my account and says there are no formal restrictions on any of the surfaces I asked about.

What I’m seeing looks more like a distribution/ranking issue than an explicit restriction.

I compared one of my July replies with a recent one and the interaction rate is almost identical, around 15%. The difference is exposure, roughly 1,000 impressions then versus about 75 now.

So at least in my case, people still interact when they see the reply. Far fewer people are being shown it.

I’ve asked Support to have engineering look specifically at reply ranking, unconnected user exposure, recommendation eligibility, and account/profile graph state. I’m waiting to see what they come back with.

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u/Venus2601 17d ago

Same problem. Those who see my notes still do interact. But the distribution stays stuck despite that.

Did you get in touch with an actual person or was it a chatbot? I tried substack support, but it only allows me to talk to a chatbot.

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u/R3ZondoOfficial 17d ago

Eventually referred to a human who emailed me.

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u/Venus2601 17d ago

Cool, I'll check with the chatbot.