Today, we’re introducing new ways to discover writers on our homepage, and the beta version of Substack Reader, a place to keep up with all your newsletters.
The homepage revamp includes the introduction of lists that display the top newsletters in various categories, as well as a ‘Featured’ section to highlight writers who might not otherwise appear on those lists.
Read all your newsletters in one place
If you read a lot of newsletters, you might find it challenging to keep track of all your subscriptions. We want Substack to be a distraction-free place for writers to connect directly with their readers, so we’ve created a new space, Substack Reader, that’s just for you and your newsletters.
If you’re logged in to Substack, Reader will become your new homepage. Use the “Discover” tab in your sidebar to find new writers to subscribe to. Reader also comes with RSS support, so you can really have all your subscriptions in one place.
With Reader, our goal is to put you in charge of what you read. While other platforms seek to own your attention with feeds that are optimized for engagement, on Substack, you control what you see.
Reader is in public beta, so we’d love to know what you think. You can share your feedback with us anytime using the “Send feedback” button in your Inbox.
You can add Reader to your iPhone home screen by opening it in Safari and choosing “Add to Home Screen” from the share options. To add Reader to Android, open it from Chrome, tap the three dots at the top-right, and choose “Add to Home Screen.”
New ways to discover writers on Substack
Substack is just over three years old now, but our network has seen rapid growth in the last year in particular.
Not long ago, it made sense for us to prominently display a leaderboard of the top publications across the entire platform, since people were interested in finding examples of the most successful writers and learning more about how the model works. However, as many thousands more writers arrived in recent months and millions more readers came with them, it soon made less sense to show such a small slice of the work being done on Substack.
By introducing a host of new categories, which you can find through our homepage or Reader’s Discover tab, we hope to expand the number of writers who get exposure on Substack, and help readers more easily find writers who cover their particular interests.
In the coming months, we’ll be working to improve the reader experience on Substack, making it easier for you to find and share the writers you love. As with all aspects of the platform, we expect these new tools to evolve rapidly and look forward to hearing what you think.
Interested in working with us on these opportunities? Check out substack.com/jobs.
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Is it possible to subscribe to newsletters to read in the Reader without them showing up in my email inbox?
Oh, that’s a dangerous feature though for newsletter writers. I would not be happy to see that really, tbh; that would lock writers in Substack as a platform, as opposed to needing Substack to prove their worth over time.
I think that fear of getting locked into Substack would discourage writers from using the platform. Right now a huge draw of Substack is that writers could move if they wanted to do so, but because Substack is so valuable with its other features, no way I am moving right now and I’m happy to use it.
thanks for saying what i was thinking.
Agreed. It gets overwhelming to see all the newsletter emails in my inbox, and I've resorted to relegating them to folders using Gmail's label feature .. but if Substack offers the "reader", it would make sense that we could turn off email updates and clean out our inboxes a bit better.
I look forward to trying the reader. Sometimes the emails get lost in the sea of other messages coming in.
I do have some questions about the "discover" feature. I think this is an improvement from the previous iteration of hyper-focusing on "top" posts and writers. Many of them don't really need the help to be "discovered" any longer. When I looked at the lists for all writers in each category I saw a lot of newsletters I've never seen before - that's great!
But how do newsletters get categorized? What if they don't neatly fit in the categories you've chosen? The Discover page doesn't have a search box, and when logged in I had to click on the "Write on Substack" button to find it. What is the search box searching? I typed humor and got zero results. Science - zero results (https://substack.com/discover/science). Culture, books, nature - no results for anything. As a librarian I have high expectations for findability when I'm presented with a search box.
The categories chosen leave some big gaps, too. I suggest adding Science, Humor, Travel, and Music for starters. There are probably others that would help folks find great content.
My newsletter covers a variety of topics, and I've been posting weekly for over two years. While I don't have a huge readership, it would be nice to see it pop up in searches. I'm allowed three tags in my settings, and those seem not to have any meaning at all. It's unclear how any of this works - some transparency on that so writers can either add meaningful tags or do something else to increase the chances of fitting a category would be helpful. As somebody else mentioned, a keyword search would be welcome - especially for finding posts on specific topics.
I know this is coming across grouchy, and I really like change when there are good improvements. There's so much potential here.
Thanks for the superb feedback, Anne. There’s a couple of things to dig into here:
First, about the broken search: we unfortunately had to do an emergency disabling of the search box during the reader launch yesterday, because the additional search traffic load was threatening to bring down all of Substack. It should be working again now, and we have some improvements to make over the next few days that should speed it up and make it better and more reliable than before.
Science, Humor, Travel and Music would make for excellent categories. We'll take a look at adding them. In general, we want to greatly increase the number of categories available to browse.
The tags you pick for your publication do help determine where you end up in Discover. So if you would prefer to be visible in a particular category, try putting it first in your tag list in your settings. (We'll make this easier to manage in the future, and changes here may take some time to take effect.)
Finally, this is really the first useful beta version of Reader and Discover that we wanted to get out the door. There’s much, much more to build and improve, so please keep the suggestions coming.
Hi, new to Substack. when I try to subscribe to a newsletter and choose the 'none' option, it doesn't let me proceed and it says I'm already on the free plan. but then this newsletter doesn't show up on my account list of subscriptions. how does this work?
Using categories is a great idea, but some additional categories would help, or maybe "Art & Entertainment" could include humor, fashion, movies, music etc. It would be great to allow writers who write about different topics to choose the category they want per post.
> If you read a lot of newsletters, you might find it challenging to keep track of all your subscriptions ... so we’ve created a new space, Substack Reader, that’s just for you and your newsletters.
Problem: managing subscriptions.
Delivered solution: reading content
You're not even solving the problem as you stated it. Have you learnt nothing from the slow-motion train wreck that is/was Medium?
There is, on further reflection, an even bigger issue here: Substack was a platform/product for newsletter writers. The customer was writers. The customer for Substack Reader is NOT writers, it is readers/subscribers.
Who is Substack for? Who does it intend to serve? The model thus far has been that Substack serves the writer, and the writer serves their subscribers. The writer came to Substack to serve their audience, NOT to find it.
With a move like this Substack is giving itself the ability to insert itself quite visibly and deliberately between the writer and their subscriber. It looks like a move to take control of the writer's audience, by mediating the audience's experience of, and access to the writer. It makes the audience AND the writer dependent on Substack in a way that email does not.
Both the writer AND the audience often choose email as their preferred medium for reasons that have a lot to do with disintermediation. A move like this, married to the inevitable feature-requests seen elsewhere in the comments to disable email delivery in favour of the reading app has the potential to disempower both reader and writer.
A far cheaper place to start experimenting with enabling multiple modes of delivery on behalf of your writers would have been to publish private RSS feeds and help people discover existing RSS readers. You win by nurturing the ecosystem, not controlling it end-to-end.
I understand your concerns, but I respectfully disagree.
Producing an app that caters exclusively to the writer without considering the reader privileges a certain kind of writer. Yes, writers with an established readership came to Substack to serve their audience, but what about new writers? What this feature set offers those of us who don't already have an audience is a way to connect with new readers.
Prior to the reader feature and the new explore feature, the only way to get people to read my newsletter was by hawking it on instagram or worse, twitter. I'd much rather connect with people who are already here, people who are actively seeking to read and write long form.
💥 goes the 🧨.
How are "top" newsletters selected for each category? What is the basis of the ranking?
The basis of the ranking in each "top" category is roughly by revenue, and in each "all" category is roughly by readership — with both being subject to some basic conditions to filter for quality and to keep out spammers etc.
What category do "music" newsletters fit into? I'm surprised it's not it's own category.
Nice features. But what if someone's work doesn't fit neatly into categories, or *these* categories. Any plans to expand them?
I agree with the concern folks have with a reader app that allows folks to disable the email newsletter.
I also have an idea that might help:
Make "reader-only" a perk of paid subscriptions. If you pay, you can go reader-only. If not, you get an email subscription.
Give writers the power to choose at what level their subscribers can go reader-only, but make it impossible for subscribers to do so for free.
I also would like to see a "roll-the-dice" feature that gives subscribers the chance to click a button and receive a random list of ten headlines from multiple newsletters within a given category. This is more helpful to new writers than a reader app that favours the already profitable.
On that note, I'm concerned with the idea that "Top" newsletters get defined roughly by revenue, or even by number of readers. To be more specific, I don't like the idea that discoverability favours the successful incumbent. If Substack is about giving writers a chance to build a connection with their readers and control their relationship, part of that ought to be a way to compete on a level playing field with other writers.
A reader design that keeps writers in mind would not use the size of the platform (whether by revenue or readership) as a way to determine the importance or relevance of a newsletter.
Engagement is a better measure. Growth rate is a better measure. Consistency of delivery is also a fantastic measure.
If the goal is to help writers grow an audience and to give readers something fresh and interesting, then reward growth and the effort to grow. As it stands, this kind of discoverability has the potential to reward writers for migrating platforms more than building platforms.
A "roll the dice" feature that makes it easier for people to discover content they like is a good idea, IMO.
Thanks for the top-shelf feedback, Omar. Your concern for balancing the interests of readers and writers is spot on.
We’re just getting started with Discovery features on Substack. While this initial round of categories is a more diverse and useful approach than our previous leaderboard, there’s still much more to be done. Growth rate, and consistent engagement and writing cadence are all great metrics that can help highlight publications still in their infancy which are going to grow to be massive successes someday.
I don't like email subscriptions, but i might easily choose to read via a reader app. I think it's best to allow readers to read a substack by whatever method they choose. That puts the user in control.
Hi team Substack, this is a great idea. It would be nice if the "Discover" section of the Reader included "Find writers I follow on Twitter". It seems like a natural place to expose it, rather than its current location in your Substack account settings (which itself is harder to reach via manual clicks). What do you think?
Thanks, but I'll stick with https://upstract.com for _real_ news.
the opposite of real news.
+1 for Upstract — Love it!
Also check https://unfeeder.com/ for actual news.
Following up on my first comment about how great this is, something that would be great to see over time is more filtering options. Right now I think everything is sorted by “Top” - what if I say “I want culture newsletter with less than 500 subs, or top free in business, or those with greater than 1k but less than 10k in literary” that could be cool.
Also interesting would be keyword searching, which I didn’t see - if I want to search for all newsletters and filter the same way above related to “korea” or “book reviews”, that could be awesome as well.
Just thoughts - thank you again!
Thank you for providing this opportunity. I was a columnist for The Des Moines Register in the 1980s and left for other endeavors. It’s been rewarding to get back to column writing in this format. With one week under my belt, I’m pleasantly surprised by readership growth.
Here’s a recap of my first anniversary … https://okobojiwriters.substack.com/p/recap-and-sht-richard-says
Is there a way to subscribe to a newsletter in Reader while disabling emails? I'd like to follow people without cluttering my inbox.
Hi Adam! Lovely to run into you here.
There is not yet a way to disable emails while staying subscribed to the publication — but it’s a use case that we also keenly feel the need for and will be working on next. The trick here is going to be staying respectful towards each author’s needs: the email list is their primary lifeline and point of contact to their subscribers, while also respecting the inbox of the reader. The goal here is going to be finding a balance where more readers can stay happily subscribed to more publications, should that be their choice.
While it’s not comprehensive, it goes a long way toward democratizing Substack.
One question. I have multiple email addresses since I subscribe for work and for personal. Is the backend architecture for Substack designed so you can have multiple email logins like PayPal, LinkedIn and Facebook?
Hi Jenny — nice to see you here!
Currently, your separate logins each have their own individual Readers. But that’s a great feature — we’ll take a look at what it would feel like to be logged in to multiple accounts at once. (And fair warning, there’s a lot of stuff to build that will probably slot in higher on the priority list above this.)
With Reader app, finally I hope Gmail won't be able to suppress my True Crime newsletters
DANG. Love love love this!
Hi! This is a great new feature. I have a question about categories. When I first launched my newsletter I didn't quite know how to choose a category, and so chose Travel. But I'm mostly a food writer and changed my setting to Food & Drink. I am pretty sure I should now be showing up in the top 25, in Food & Drink, but am not there. I have a feeling that my change in category didn't stick. Thoughts?
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It would be great if Substack had a page where the most recently published post from any writer would be listed on top as a link in the way that posts appear in the "Archive" section: picture, tittle, subtitle, author and category. This way visitors to " https://lightnovelshub.com/ " could see a live feed of the latest publications, and in that way discover a new newsletter.
will be glad to have this feature soon, let me know on this
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Bless you for introducing an RSS reader with feature of external RSS feeds. My question is whether you'd consider adding a feature of adding tag words or folders for us readers to categories the many subscriptions. Or any other way of filtering reader subscriptions. Thanks!
It's indistinct how any of this functions some straightforwardness on that so scholars can either add important labels or accomplish another thing to expand the odds of fitting a classification would be useful for https://www.thequadfathers.com/. As another person referenced, a watchword search would be welcome - particularly for discovering posts on explicit points.
Hi, a newbie here.
How does one actually find NEW writers? If I click on Discover and let's say, the 'Culture' tag, it's always those very same names and newsletters that come up first - and they were launched months or even years ago.
And there is no any indicators of an algorithm there, like most popular, best paid or such - it just seems to be random.
So how does it work? I just launched my stuff - how will people find it here on the site?
@PRESIDENTSTEVENKING #PRESIDENTSTEVENKING I know the cure/treatment for covid.
How long until discover would recommend less popular writers based on current subscriptions and engagements? Did anyone else enjoy the app Zine before it was sold a neutered?
I noticed that you have at least two Substack newsletters in the political category. Are there more than two current newsletters in the politics, category — and is there the ability to provide sub-categories within a single category?
A few questions:
A) There was a page on here in which Questions were presented -- such as what does home mean to you, what sort of advice would you give to new writers, etc. Writers responded to those questions and other writers could then e mail the writers who responded to those questions. THIS ENABLED ME TO SPEAK TO OTHER WRITERS. I can't find the portion of substack that contains this page; apparently, someone has re-juggled the placement of pages on here. (I don't mean to criticize substack. Everyone believes in fixing things even if they are not broken and we must all deal with needless changes)
B) Many pages on substack refer to substack beta. What is substack beta. Of course I know the second letter of the Greek alphabet, but I don't know, specifically, what characterizes substack beta from the rest of substack. I suppose it is some way lessor, or inferior to, substack proper, but in what way(s).
C) Is there glossary of substack terms
D) Is there a glossary of terms used re "social media."
E) Please peruse my material: https://davidgottfried.substack.com/
F) Since I don't know if I will find this page again, I might not be able to return to this page to find your answers. I would be happy if you would write to me directly at DavidGottf@gmail.com or call at 646 750 8765. I will be ready, willing and able to reciprocate and tender aid and advice to you.
G) Attention staff and moderators at Substack: If my inclusion of my email address and phone number in the immediately preceding paragraph contravenes your rules, please delete them as opposed to deleting this post.
thank you
How to remove an RSS feed?
Hi, can the reader be also be designed to read non-substack newsletters ? I think it would be of great value to readers to consolidate all their newsletters in a single place to consume.
It would be great if Substack had a page where the most recently published post from any writer would be listed on top as a link in the way that posts appear in the "Archive" section: picture, tittle, subtitle, author and category. This way visitors to "Substack.com" could see a live feed of the latest publications, and in that way discover a new newsletter. It would also be nice if Substack allowed a self-promotion page where writers could post links to their posts. It's in the interest of Substack to allow all writers, including new writers, to find an audience. Substack should not behave as a publication that needs to restrict what can be seen by the public, but rather as a venue that lets readers and writers connect easily to grow both.
Love the substack reader. But why opening new window every time I click on the newsletter? Why not just stay inside the interface?
I think we should have a weekly promotion post, where we can all promote our substack newsletters
What's the point of this tool when we have RSS?
Will there be a mobile app for this feature sometime in the future (also PWA would be good enough)?
We would love to build a proper mobile app for Reader too, at some point. In the meantime, the PWA version works quite nicely. Try adding reader.substack.com to your home screen, and it'll look something like this: https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/16/substack-reader-service-ios/
Thanks, Jeremy, it works.
Amazing. On the homepage, add one more category 'Random' which features random publications.
This feels so organized now and I don't have to look deep into the mailbox to check for newsletters, they're all here. I really appreciate this feature. Great work, folks! 💪
Great feature! I like seeing who I subscribe to in one place. Is there a section for travel? (I know, not the hottest category for 2020, but would be good to see it). Also, I've tried searching for "travel" and "Asia" in the search and there are no results.
Is it possible to import .opml files? would like to have one feed
It’s on our list! Stay tuned.
I hope that writers would be able to work towards getting themselves discovered. Any plans of what your algorithm considers??
I keep getting emails from davidsirota@substack.com; I block his emails and they don't stop. Help me for my subscriptions to ryan grim and matt taibbi keep but I don't like david sirota harassing with a daily emails despite my block of his method of contact with me. I will not subscribe to david sirota. I don't care how many followers he has.
Cool flashbacks to the golden age of RSS. Please expand the categories and let writers select where they fit. I'd love to see History, Architecture and Historic Preservation, and with so many newsletters covering local politics, Civics is a natural.
This is great for both writers and readers. Very good job at Substack keeping both sets of your customers in mind and doing things in a mutually beneficial way. Appreciate it and know good things will keep coming.
This is awesome! Specifically love the business section! Looking forward to climbing up the ranks!