Leave a Review Substack
Warning! Big problems.
Update: as a writer using SubStack, I would not recommend that writers jump onto the SubStack platform until things get worked out. Stripe, the company that processes payments, charges 15%. That is outrageous and unacceptable, and they don’t tell you that up front. As stated before, there is NO way to contact any customer service. While there are some things I like about SubStack, I really regret having jumped into it at this point. Now that I have subscribers, there is no easy way to just stop. I think that’s what SubStack is counting on.
Currently, the app is not working. There is NO customer service. You cannot talk to a human being if you encounter a problem. The thing I like about Substack is it’s simplicity. It’s a newsletter only, without extra nonsense. It’s great when it works. When it doesn’t work, I guess you just have to hope it does work again, eventually, somehow.
I got the impression that SubStack was all about connecting readers and writers, and the whole concept seemed clean and honest. So far, it is not turning out that way.Show lessPseudotsuga
Choosing Truth over Propaganda.
I’m a devoted Substack subscriber for one simple reason: with the exception of some content from “The Wall Street Journal,” and “The Spectator,” newspapers (the UK edition is a weekly newspaper—published as what is a glossy-paged magazine, in American vernacular) I don’t trust the legacy media, nor the Twitter/Meta-world/Google triumvirate to give me straight journalism. I get to choose to read whom I trust, not be force fed Pravda-esque propaganda because that’s all there is. I occasionally read stories in the NY Post, because I trust the integrity of Miranda Divine and the editorial staff in general. However, Substack is my oasis in the desert of modern journalism.Show lessPhuqit
Cannot sign in
I downloaded this app yesterday and have tried five times to enter in my email address to get started. I get the email, click the link, and get an error on my iPhone saying “The network connection has been lost”, and then the app asks me for my email address again. I do not want to leave a one-star review without having seen the app (I’m actually very excited for it!) but apparently you can’t contact Substack’s tech support without logging in, and I cannot log in, so…here’s hoping someone sees this and addresses the bug. I’m on an iPhone 7, iOS 15.3.1, if that helps.Show lessCg593
Good but missing a few things
For the most part I’m really enjoying the substack app. The UI is great, it’s easy to navigate between specific substacks or just look at your combined chronological feed, etc. I’m only giving three stars for now because there are a few features missing (or not working on my device? iPhone X, so not that old):
- minimize comment thread! This exists on the main site, so hopefully it was just a small oversight (or it wasn’t considered a priority for release) that it’s not on the app
… - minimizing a comment thread should send you to the next comment, rather that keeping your distance scrolled constant. This matters because oftentimes I’ll spend some time reading replies and then want to close the parent comment and move on to the next one, but the way minimizing works on the desktop site if you do that you’ll be in the middle of the replies to a later comment
- if you tap the top of the screen and are sent back to the top of the article, it would be nice to be able to tap it again to return to where you were. As someone with aggressive thumbs this feature is a lifesaver elsewhere that it exists
Again, the app is mostly great, but these three issues are huge for my enjoyment, so I’ll be leaving my review at 3/5 until they’re added.Show lessRkdvh
Great app - could use a few UX tweaks
Loving the app so far. A few wish list items
- wish I could navigate from one post into the next without going back to the main post list
- wish I could mark posts as read and remove them from the main post list
- wish there was a more intuitive way to save articles for later and remove them from the saved list when I’m done reading
- wish there was an easier way to filter for Substacks I’m following to read posts from the same author back to backShow lessJohnGalt93
Good content and design at expense of features
Substack content is generally high quality, and the app is well designed. I’d like to see more exploration of the RSS reader feature as a competitor to apps like Feedly, with features such as OPML imports to be a more powerful media source and experience.pgo4i
Disappointed
I was really excited to see there was finally a Substack app and I was really pleased with the experience of the app until I realized I wasn’t receiving all my posts into my inbox. I’m baffled by this but it turns out that rather than including your whole feed inside the app it only shows posts that were sent as emails. making this a essentially a sandboxed email app rather that a Substack specific feed reader. This means that you will be completely aware of any posts your subscriptions post to the web only. And in turn this means that if you want to read ALL of your feed the app (what a crazy idea!) you need to go to each subscription individually to check for any posts not sent as email. Nobody is going to do that. Nobody sane. The funniest part is that the “beta” version of Reader on the web DOES show all post in your feed. So until this is resolved I will be deleting this app and sticking with the web.Show lessChadAHall
The last bastion of unfiltered truth telling
In a remarkably short period of time sub stack has become the last bastion of honest unedited (and unexpurgated) writing. The collection of writers from Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald to Andrew Sullivan, David French, and Lyons seems to have become the last great hope for free thought against a rising tide of KantAnd groupthink. It is well worth picking some writers and funding them as if you may not have a choice in the future. Because that is a possibility.Show lessSouthron John
The app works fine and makes things a lot easier.
Five stars.
Just also while I’m here, you might want to put in an option to unarchive posts once they’re in your library archive folder. Only at the moment once you archive something there is no way to reverse it, which could lead to someone archiving a post by accident and it then being stuck there.
Thanks.Show lesssonnytaylor01
Can’t adjust really small font size
This app is a mixed bag but has promise.
On the “needs improvement” side: the app only uses a random serif font that appears to be 10 points in size (maybe 9), with text in single space. Neither the font size nor the type are adjustable.
It’s a poor reading experience. And … this is a reading app! It’s job is to produce a great reading experience. Which it decidedly does not do.
Hopefully future improvements will include letting the reader adjust the font size, have greater line spacing and let the reader choose from fonts. These are all pretty common for reader apps.
On the good side: the app’s business logic and organization work flawlessly. It’s nice to be able to see articles from my various Substack subscriptions organized in chronological order. This works well.
So, the apps does the hard things well (management and presentation of content from various subscriptions) and does a quite mediocre job on the garden variety UI stuff that most reading apps already do. Hopefully they will improve that in future updates.Show lessbmc atx
