This is How Substack Could Actually Make Things Better Instead of Just Talking About It

Hello there. I’m the person who shows up in the comments of every one of your little corporate propaganda pieces to point out how you are falling short of your ridiculous blue-sky rhetoric. Hamish must surely know who I am by now.

Yes, you are driving me crazy to the point that, on occasion, I have wondered if you are trying to assassinate me via aneurysm. Never mind that, though. I’m being productive today.

You know what annoys me? People who add me to their terrible newsletters without my permission. They’ve picked up one of my email addresses from somewhere, so they decide that I want to see their shitty blog even though I haven’t had anything to do with them in the better part of a decade.

I could give you any number of examples of this happening, mostly involving people from random Medium blogs whining because they aren’t getting big bucks for their Medium blogs that like twenty people read, but I’m going to give you a much more recent one. About an hour ago, I was added to the newsletter for someone from a publisher that I could not recognize but that I had presumably submitted to in the past. His opening post was comprised primarily of complaining about how bad all the writers who submitted to them are, which made me feel great. Nothing like having someone slam the door in your face, then pull you in close a few years later to spit in your eye again.

Now, Substack is far from unique in this problem. I was writing about politics a decade and a half ago, and to this day I have “philosophers” clogging up my inbox with their insipid thoughts because they managed to scrape my address before I quit. It’s frustrating, especially because I swear I unsubscribed from some of these people years ago, and yet they’re still shoving their blogs in my face.

So no, not a problem unique to Substack. I’d argue that it’s worse, as it’s not only possible to sign someone up to a Substack newsletter if they don’t have an account, but then it becomes harder for such a person to unsubscribe. Never mind, that though.

I’m being positive here. I see a way that you can live up to your rhetoric and - for once - do something for the readers of your terrible, paranoid newsletters.

This is what I want: I want to see a checkbox in my options that, when I tick it, prevents me from being signed up to a newsletter without my permission.

I don’t expect that anyone at Substack is ever going to do this. I don’t expect it because almost all of your marketing copy is aimed at the content creation side. What about the consumers, the readers? Well, you’ve obviously decided that they have no choice if they want to read their favorite writers, so they can eat shit. It’s why this platform is terrible to read on - it’s by design.

But you know what? If you did this, you would finally be living up to your rhetoric. You could legitimately say that Substack is better than similar services because users are less vulnerable to spam. Instead of merely talking about making the internet better, you would actually be doing it.

So what do you say, Hamish, you self-aggrandizing prick? It’s a small change, but it would instantly improve things. Think of it as a refreshing change - instead of talking about how saintly your people are, you could actually try and help out for a change.