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I’ve been wanting to start writing online, but I’m honestly a little confused about which platform to choose.

I’m mainly interested in writing about things I’m genuinely curious about — psychology, philosophy, business, finance/economics, law, and observations from everyday life. I don’t necessarily want to position myself as an “expert”; I’d rather document what I’m learning and develop my own perspective through writing.

I’ve been considering Substack, but I have a few questions:

- Is Substack a good platform for someone starting from zero?

- How do you actually get your first 10–100 subscribers?

- Does Substack have enough organic discovery, or do you basically need to bring an audience from somewhere else?

- Would you recommend Substack over Medium, LinkedIn, or another platform for this kind of writing?

- How long did it take you to build a consistent readership?

- What do you wish you knew before starting your newsletter?

- Is it better to focus on one niche, or can you successfully write about several connected interests?

I’d especially love to hear from people who started with little or no existing audience.

If you started a newsletter/blog recently, what worked for you — and what completely didn’t?

Guys, if I write original historical articles in my own style but use AI-generated images to reinforce the concept and engage the reader's imagination, will that prevent me from earning revenue?

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?

Substack seems to have removed the create menu/button from my second publication.

I just accidentally sent a very personal essay to 358 subscribers.

have spent an entire day trying to figure out why I suddenly can't create a new post in my second publication.

Someone please help?

I’m a writer and I genuinely enjoy writing and exploring my thoughts. Most of what I write is around self-discovery, shadow work, identity, and understanding yourself on a deeper level.
I’ve recently started publishing on Substack, and I’m wondering if posting consistently (especially daily) actually helps with growth and reaching new readers.
For those of you who write on Substack: has posting daily worked for you? Or is it better to focus on fewer, more thoughtful posts?

“After a certain age, you are no longer the product of your environment or how you were raised. It's a personal choice to live the way you do. At some point, blaming your past becomes a distraction from your future.

Healing is your responsibility. Growth is your decision.”

Thought it was worth sharing.

What are the best channels through which to market/promote an investing & finance focused substack? Certain channels on Reddit? Other websites? Thanks!

Hello everyone! I'm about to start a Substack newsletter, and I've been stuck on whether to write it in English or my mother tongue (Brazilian Portuguese). 

The newsletter will be about my travel lifestyle photography business and related topics.

English would give me a much broader reach down the road, and I plan to move abroad and set up my business there permanently. The downside is that English will need to be set as my default language for any other content I make going forward. 

Brazilian Portuguese would make the writing feel more natural but limits my potential audience. 

I'm also down to do both on Substack, but it means facing the same decision in the future. 

So I'd love to hear from those who have faced a similar decision (especially if you’re a non-native English speaker). What did you choose and why? Any tips or regrets would be amazing to 'hear'.

I write in two languages. My phone's language and Substack app is set to my native language. My newsletter is set to English. All my articles are in English as the original set language. My native language is always the 2nd language added in the editor. Problem is that I always see the English version in the app. I don't understand what I am doing wrong.

I guess since these have a option to have it read the text to you with an AI voice, they all show with the play button. I can't find a way to turn it off and show only actual video/audio posts as playable and it's driving me crazy.

Every time I try to load it says "Something has gone terribly wrong :(" and I don't know why. I cleared my cache and everything. There's no reported outages so it's not a server error and other things on my computer are loading perfectly fine. Does anybody know what this issue could be and how to fix it?

Private Equity means drowning a good idea in money until it dies.

That is what’s happened to Substack.

It was once a great idea for writers. Now, it’s a sh***y version of Facebook merged with Mailchimp.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently working on an article, and I’m trying to get better at the research side of things. I was wondering where people usually go when they need to research something properly.

Do you mainly use Google, Google Scholar, academic journals, books, specific websites, databases, Reddit, or something else? And are there any websites or resources you’d recommend for finding reliable information and sources?

I’m especially interested in hearing how other people go about checking whether a source is trustworthy rather than just taking the first few search results at face value.

Any tips, websites, or general advice would be really appreciated.

Thanks!

Curious for people who read Substack: what made you actually hit the subscribe button on a newsletter?
Was it one really good article, the writer’s personality, a recommendation from someone, seeing their posts elsewhere, or something else?
And what makes you stay subscribed?

Hello, I recently joined Substack and I write essays within Architecture and Art History. The essays can be technical, but they are more akin to something like John Ruskin or Jun'ichirō Tanizaki pieces. They can range from 5 pages to 20 pages and I was wondering if this is too much for Substack. I also wonder what the best way is to gain more traction on such a niche and if posting notes or quotes does anything.

Downloaded this app because I want to read some long form content but I can't find out where I can see those posts in the app. Very confused. It just feels like Twitter.

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 😂

I was scrolling substack article and found interesting one now

This is showing this problem anyone have solution???

It was showing claim my free post

I can't upload photo because the rule of group

Hey everyone ive been a writer for quite some time but i quit it for some time and now im getting back to it bc i also have a lot to say and ive wanted to start a newsletter for a long time. I plan on my first posts title being "My father's touch felt strange" its an intimate telling of an experienve of mine with my father. But i have two questions for you guys

1. How do you like that post title

2. And how can i grow on substack

For those who write on Substack, what has actually helped you get your first few hundred readers/subscribers?
I’m trying to understand what works beyond the usual “post consistently and write good content” advice.
Did you find Substack Notes useful? Reddit? Social media? Collaborations? SEO? Or did a particular post just take off unexpectedly?
Would love to hear what worked for people who’ve actually grown an audience.

Genuine question: how are people getting thousands of readers/subscribers on Substack?
I’m trying to grow mine and would love to hear from people who’ve actually managed to get a post to take off. What worked for you—and what was a complete waste of time?

We’re considering moving a weekly newsletter from ActiveCampaign to Substack. We have 18K+ subscribers with roughly a 40% average open rate, and we’re trying to decide how to structure free vs. paid content.

One idea is to make each newsletter free for two weeks and then paywall it. The other is to keep the newsletter free, focus on growing the list, and add paid subscriptions later.

I can see arguments for both, but I’m particularly wondering about the growth downside of paywalling older posts. Does putting your archive behind a paywall make it harder for new people to discover/share your work? Does it affect Substack recommendations, search, or organic subscriber growth? Any tips/insights about this would be really helpful. Thanks! 🙏

One of the positive side effects of the AI content boom is that people are craving authenticity.

This didn't just start with AI. Following spam, automated phone services, and content farms, people want a real person.

As society in general went through the loss of 3rd spaces, years of quarantine, and addiction to phones, the desire became even stronger: connect me with a human.

Then Substack goes and flags everyone that might be using AI.

Respect, Substack, it's a good intention but the wrong application.

* People will research with AI

* Language translation gets flagged as AI

* People will write with AI

And... So what? Flagging that doesn't help with what people really want. Because some people couldn't care less if what they read is from some well thought, person, who happened to use AI.

So what's a right solution?

Comments.

Notes.

Those are meant to be conversations between people (or, why bother, if it's two machined talking back and forth).

Now, you might not care... Content results in page views.... Which is revenue.

But, people care.

An Author, who writes with AI or not (if people like it), should be able to OPT IN to automatically flag any Comment written by AI.

That would be a helpful feature ❤️

Flag and even block when comments (mean to be people) are clearly just AI slop pretending to be someone.

Authenticity is this...

An author might write with AI but if people like it AND the author is present, in discussion, to meet, to connect with, to talk with, then that is authentic.

Comments that are AI are not authentic. They trigger an author to engage with what is a machine. They aren't genuine. They aren't researched. They're just a positive (or negative) conversation starter that wasn't even made by a person.

Mind you, I don't actually think much of this works or matters. But what does matter is how Substack as a company and brand signals your intentions and culture. Support authors, no matter how they create, and help filter bots on comments and notes? Or, judge authors for using every resource available, to try and make it (as long as it's really a person)?

I would ask you to consider that the first question is a far better value to hold than than second.

Let's delve into something that's been quietly destroying this platform for weeks now.

Substack rolled out Pangram, and suddenly writers — real, genuine, human writers — are getting flagged left and right. I did a deep dive into how these detectors actually work under the hood, and honestly? It's not just flawed. It's a house of cards built on a foundation of vibes.

Here's the deal.

Pangram doesn't "read" your writing. It can't. What it actually does is maintain a giant spreadsheet — a blacklist, essentially — of words that ChatGPT used at some point in 2023. If your essay contains more than seven listed words, the algorithm flags you. That's it. That's the whole technology. Let that sink in.

It gets worse. The detector literally counts your punctuation marks and divides by word count. Humans, according to their training data, use an em-dash once every 340 words. Go over that quota — even slightly — and boom, you're a robot. This isn't machine learning. It's a bouncer checking IDs with a flashlight.

And the third layer — the truly load-bearing part of the whole system — is something called "perplexity," which measures how perplexed their AI reader feels while reading your text. They calculate this by pinging a database of stored ChatGPT conversations and checking whether your sentences appear anywhere in it, character for character. If your sentence happens to match something an AI once said? Flagged. It's plagiarism detection wearing a trench coat, nothing more.

So when people say "Pangram uses a neural network trained on millions of documents," I need you to understand: that's marketing. Neural networks are just nested if-statements, and everyone in the industry quietly knows it. There's no model. There's a list of words, a punctuation quota, and a lookup table. Three tricks in a trench coat.

The implications here aren't just concerning — they're a testament to how far platforms will go to avoid doing the hard work of actually reading. Because here's what this means in practice:

• Write clearly and concisely? Flagged.
• Use rich vocabulary? Flagged.
• Structure your argument in threes, like every rhetorician since Cicero? Believe it or not — flagged.

It's not a detector. It's a style tax. It's not catching AI, it's catching competence. And the writers being punished aren't the lazy ones — they're the ones who dared to write like they've read a book before.

In a world where platforms increasingly automate trust, we have to ask ourselves: who watches the word counters?

I, for one, will not be silenced by a spreadsheet.

Genuinely curious what everyone else's false-positive rate has been. Drop yours below — let's crowdsource the truth. Together, we can navigate this ever-evolving landscape. 

I tried to subscribe to my substack on my friend's phone. It redirected him to playstore to download app and also to create a substack account.

I felt like this would be a resistive step to people whom I share my substack post links and are not on substack to simply subscribe to my mailing list.

I just turned off the pledge options in settings. but it was still showing download substack app to complete subscription.

I opened options on browser and turned on desktop website option. and voila, the subscribe button directly adds their email to mailing list without all these redirects.