Substack now enables you to observe writers earlier than subscribing to them

Substack now enables you to observe writers, providing a approach so that you can hold tabs on what a author is doing with out having to subscribe to their publication. If you observe a author, “you’ll be able to keep updated with what they’re studying, liking, publishing, and subscribing to — by the Notes feed and on their profiles,” Substack says in a weblog submit.

Substack is probably greatest often known as a publication platform the place writers can earn cash from getting folks to join paid subscriptions. However the platform has additionally been dabbling with extra conventional social networking options reminiscent of its tweet-like Notes, and a observe button looks like Substack stepping much more toes into the social networking waters.

The corporate stresses that follows, that are free, are meant to assist writers as they construct out subscription networks. “Following helps writers develop their viewers by way of the Substack community, which is already house to thousands and thousands of the world’s most useful readers,” Substack argues. “We constructed this function to assist maximize — and never change — subscriptions, which can at all times be a very powerful sort of relationship on Substack.”

However now, Substack writers could have the added burden of occupied with methods to transform followers and non-followers into subscribers. (Substack is promising that sooner or later, it should “make ‘upsells’ to subscriptions simpler” by notifying followers about “trending posts and different milestones.”)

Final week, Substack’s co-founders mentioned that they need to make the platform a greater place for readers, not simply writers. The corporate has already launched a handful of options to encourage studying issues instantly on the platform, together with cellular apps and the flexibility to deliver RSS feeds to your Substack feed.

For folks on the lookout for a brand new place to learn textual content and submit some microblogs given the overall degradation of X / Twitter, the observe button is likely to be a helpful function to see what writers are as much as with out clogging up your e-mail inbox with newsletters.