What is Wrong With Substack Notes?

Almost daily I see these Notes from other Substack accounts in my news feed about how to use Notes to grow your following.

For some reason the Notes that I post, I suspect, never get seen in anyone’s news feed. The reason I think this, is that they get no engagement, no likes, no comments, no subscribers.

I went through and counted how many Notes I’ve posted about two weeks ago, and it was 150 Notes.

Collectively, all of those Notes received around 20 likes and 2 comments.

I’ve mentioned this, that it seems like I’m writing into the void, on some of those various accounts that promise more subscribers from Notes. And their advice is to change up the Notes content. Feel free to go look at my Notes, and you’ll see that it’s of varied content. My page isn’t really “about” anything, except what interests me, which is a whole lot of things.

I don’t have a content niche in my posts or my Notes.

There’s a way to look at the “View stats” in your Notes, to see what the engagement is, such as Clicks, Comments, and I’m guessing New Subscribers (I’ve never gotten a new subscriber from a Note, so I don’t really know if this shows up in the Stats). You have to be on Substack on a browser, there’s no way to check from the app on your phone.

Your Stats are supposed to be available after an hour of publishing a Note.

On some Notes, such as this one, they just don’t show up at all, even after days.

So I chatted with their AI chatbot, asking why the Stats aren’t available, why there is no “impression” statistic in these Stats analytics (which would show how many people saw the Note go across their news feed), and it was elevated to where I was contacted by an actual human from Substack.

Here is our conversation:

Hi there,

Gavin from Substack support here.

Can you send a link to one of your Notes from days ago where the stats are unavailable? On my end, I looked a few, here and here, and the stats are available.

I hope this clears things up! Please let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best,
Gavin

My response:

I'm not seeing the "Stats Unavailable" any longer, whatever the problem was, y'all must've fixed it.

Why doesn't the Stats view show the amount of people who see a given Note? All I see are things like "Clicks", and almost all of the "Clicks" show only 1 Click. What is a Click, and how's it determined?

Thanks,

Jake

I guess they only temporarily fixed the Stats View, because I’m now back to seeing the Stats Unavailable again (what I screenshot above).

Gavin’s response to me:

Hi Jake,

Thanks for the feedback around Notes stats and the request for a count of views. Clicks means any sort of click engagement, so things like clicking the Note itself to expand it, or clicking the Substack article linked in the Note, etc.

I hope this clears things up! Please let me know if there's anything else I can do for you.

Best,
Gavin

Notice how Gavin didn’t answer the question “Why doesn't the Stats view show the amount of people who see a given Note?”

So I asked some clarifying questions, over three emails, and so far I’ve just been ignored:

Me:

What do the Stats show if there is no engagement? So what is displayed in the Stats View if there is a Note that is only seen but not clicked on or liked or commented?

Still waiting on a response to the questions in my last two emails.

Any update on this?

Here is the thing. Almost all 150 + of my Notes show this:

Almost all show 1 Click and that’s it.

Now there are a few possible explanations.

1. There is something wrong with my account technically, and so far, it hasn’t been fixed, despite my last attempt with Substack support.

2. Substack’s algorithm deems some accounts worthy to show to other accounts, and some not worthy, and the user, such as myself, is left with no idea why.

3. My Notes are all so bad, so ridiculous, so unimaginative, so uninteresting, so uninviting, as to be ignored without exception across all of Substack and all who see them, all the time. No likes, no comments, no new subscribers.

I’m thinking the problem is in the first two options. I see all sorts of content on my news feed, so I don’t think Substack curates only certain content to appear on their news feed.

Here’s the thing, if No. 2 is right, then all of the accounts that promise new growth through Notes, are bluffing, because they cannot control the algorithm anymore than any other user. They’re assuming that anyone’s Notes will be seen, and be seen in a large way, in order to grow the subscriber base of the person they’re giving advice to. I don’t mean that they’re intentionally being disingenuous, they have no idea why the algorithm shows some people’s Notes and not others. It obviously would require knowledge of the algorithm, which none of us users have, because it’s proprietary to Substack. I’ve mentioned this a few times in their posts about growing subscribers using Notes, and so far have gotten no meaningful or actionable insights.

I’d also like to just point out, that their experience of growing by “teaching” others how to grow as writers, is apples and oranges. Their account grows not because they’re writers, writing about history or fiction, let’s say. Their accounts grow because they’re dangling a chance to monetize accounts to those who do write about history or fiction or whatever it is. But the thing that gets me, is that they use their own metrics of growth from their own accounts to “prove” that they have a winning strategy. Meanwhile they haven’t written a thing about history or fiction that attracted their new subscribers. Their new subscribers are strictly there to learn how to monetize their own pages, not because they want to read what the growth promoter has to say about history or fiction. So that does seem very disingenuous to me.

I don’t know what the issue is, but I will say, that writing into the void with Notes certainly feels like a huge waste of time and effort.

Do you have any insights Andrea Hoffmann, David McIlroy, Tom Kuegler, Escape the Cubicle, Alex Mathers, Ana Calin?