• The primary mode of communication is email, but Substack does everything it can to get you out of the open ecosystem of email and into their closed ecosystem of their web reader and app.
• The declared intention is to get more people reading longform writing, but Substack bombards you with constant suggestions to subscribe to new publications and to follow new people, rarely leaving you to just read.
• Although Substack tracks how and when every person opens every email, it doesn’t mark a post as read in the web reader after having read its email. This essentially creates a duplicate inbox just for Substack subscriptions.
• It’s very unclear how and why “subscribe” and “follow” are different.
• Subscribing and unsubscribing to a publication in the web reader does not function like a feed reader; instead, only posts from after the point of subscribing are added to the inbox, and they remain even after unsubscribing.
• There appears to be no way to delete a post from the web reader. The only option is to archive. Once a post finds its way into your web reader it’s there forever.
• Nazis.
• Navigating to /subscribe provides no way to navigate away, only to start a paid subscription.
• By default, no email confirmation is required for subscribing an email to a publication.