Substack now helps you to follow writers, offering a way so that you can keep tabs on what a author is doing without having to subscribe to their newsletter. When you follow a author, “you may not sleep up to now with what they’re reading, liking, publishing, and subscribing to — through the Notes feed and on their profiles,” Substack says in a blog post.
Substack is maybe best often called a newsletter platform where writers can generate income from getting people to join paid subscriptions. But the platform has also been dabbling with more traditional social networking features similar to its tweet-like Notes, and a follow button looks like Substack stepping much more toes into the social networking waters.
The company stresses that follows, that are free, are intended to assist writers as they construct out subscription networks. “Following helps writers grow their audience via the Substack network, which is already home to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most respected readers,” Substack argues. “We built this feature to assist maximize — and never replace — subscriptions, which can all the time be crucial sort of relationship on Substack.”
But now, Substack writers could have the added burden of occupied with ways to convert followers and non-followers into subscribers. (Substack is promising that in the long run, it should “make ‘upsells’ to subscriptions easier” through notifying followers about “trending posts and other milestones.”)
Last week, Substack’s co-founders said that they need to make the platform a greater place for readers, not only writers. The company has already introduced a handful of features to encourage reading things directly on the platform, including mobile apps and the flexibility to bring RSS feeds to your Substack feed.
For people in search of a recent place to read text and post some microblogs given the overall degradation of X / Twitter, the follow button is likely to be a useful feature to see what writers are as much as without clogging up your email inbox with newsletters.
