Thanks for the recap here. I'm new to Substack but already learned that when on the Home tab, I only look at "Following"
The only other social media I'm really active on is LinkedIn (strictly for work purposes). It's been around plenty longer than Substack and everyone there will tell you the feed is completely useless.
The way I "follow" people is by going to their profile, going to their history of posts, and bookmarking that in my browser.
I don't know why social media platforms are so bad at making a feed anyone likes but... don't expect it to get better any time soon.
Hi. I can’t find any way to ‘subscribe’ to your Notes, but any screen I look at your site or newsletter on, using the iPhone app, shows ‘subscribed’. I believe whatever SS did when they moved “following/explore” from the top of the notes to the top of the page sent stuff wonky. I see more of who I follow and subscribe to if I’m not on ‘following’. Tech with SS’s stated purpose should be MUCH MUCH MUCH more intuitive than it is.
I have been having to do that since last May. Suddenly I woke up and I wasn’t subscribe to several dozen publications! My activity has changed a lot too!
I’m not all thumbs with tech, I’m all toes and not big sturdy capable big toes, but little ornamental pinky toes. They’re like purse dogs, they look cute and growl when needed but they’re not much use otherwise. Lol. I’m teaching myself but if I have to geekle everything I’m trying to do your tech needs work. They are here to make money on payed subscriptions, not make user friendly tech. So I understand their motivation but that doesn’t help me stop wanting to chuck it all in the trash and walk away because I have more important things to do with my remaining seconds on this rock. Lol sorry that grew horns didn’t it?!🤪
It's just a glitch. They work really hard to correct bugs when they see them but it often takes the users reporting them to know that they are there. So, we have to pipe up so they know what we're seeing on the user end so that they can fix it. :)
I don't believe they do work to fix things that they want to keep. And I don't believe Substack's code team is even remotely interested in honour, decency, integrity, working code, good user experiences, or freedom. Like I said the one time Chris Best replied to one of my comments it was to let me know he was overwhelmed by the number of comments he needed to review and had no time to respond to the substance of my comment. Really, how very droll, to spend time on a reply to assert an insufficiency of time to reply. Very meta.
Here is a bit more information on the ways the latest updates are affecting the web interface. I just went to your page on Substack's web site to look at your posts to find The Scroll so as to add my comment here in a sensible place rather than somewhere random. But, no, your posts are not displayed complete and in chronological order as a rational person would want. Essentially all I could find were your various 'what I'm reading' posts, going back several weeks. The Scroll and the Memedrops were skipped, by the new algorithm. Nuts.
Here is a thought on the two different audiences. When someone subscribes to L5 News, I get an email message from the system which lets me know who has subscribed and the same is true for the people who follow me on Substack. But the notifications are very different, including meta information in the email header. This strongly suggests that the software treats the two classes of interaction in very different ways (which we see exhibited in the behaviours you note in The Scroll for this week).
I suspect that there are entirely different teams of coders working on the code for each set of experiences. Someone "helpful" decided that seeing the archive for your page wasn't a good thing, so it didn't show up for me on the Substack web site presentation of your profile. So, now let me go to your Starfirecodes.com web site.
Yep, behold, here is The Scroll top centre, and your archive shows up as expected (default to "latest" presentation, but "top interactions count" presentation is available under the "top" heading, etc.).
It's a mess. There is no clear vision for how the user experiences Substack. So there is a separate code base for notes users who follow and interact with notes, compared to the code base for newsletter subscribers who subscribe and interact with posts. At a guess, there is also an entirely different set of code for dealing with reply threads, especially longer threads with more interactions.
By the way, there is a noticeable "margin creep" so they are definitely using the Simple Machine Forums open source automatic reduction of reply width, which is how Coleman's Fight Club generated the tategaki. It'll happen here if we let it, which is among the reasons I backed up to your latest reply instead of replying under my own.
Someone fairly high up the food chain should call for a code freeze and not have more new stuff deployed for a few weeks, bring the team leads together for a vision session to assess what users actually want, and then build an integrated coding path forward. My experience with tech companies is that they will probably choose instead to develop a vision for what the Substack owner operators want, and do roughly zero feedback based interaction with the user community, but maybe they will take the opportunity. It needs some serious thought, a whole bunch of marketing research as to what users experience and how much they dislike the darkness and what kinds of indirect and direct lighting would improve their experiences, and how to build a good set of outcomes. Focus groups, statistically significant surveys (rather than self-selection error useless online surveys), and meaningful design of the inquiry process can be involved in collecting good marketing research. But, again, big tech tends to punt and grab at the low hanging fruit of easily obtained but mostly misleading online surveys and make zero effort to collect good data. =shrugs in Steven Kerr=
I agree with that in terms of how most tech companies function, but you have no idea how many times they have reached out to me directly without my prompting to check on me and to see if I had found any additional issues. And then they have diligently worked on the issues I have found and have checked back in with me on those.
I do believe you, because I have had many reasons to look at things you write very closely and pray about them and believe them. So, thank you for this reply because if it were from anyone else I would most likely still not believe it.
But I also want to mention that things that work for them are not going to be fixed by them because they want to keep those things. I don't expect to ever experience a feeling of relief from never seeing any post from Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Jim Cramer, Pamela Anderson, or a thousand other famous people whose words and views have no value to me. I expect to continue to see them because the algorithm is designed to push engagement with accounts that provide revenue to the platform. It's the egregore thing, the platform cannot avoid rewarding for behaviours which profit the platform for very long, so it doesn't.
Similarly, my views are not even slightly interesting to the people coding the platform, no matter how often or carefully or politely I complain, because despite having had social media accounts with over 11,000 followers, I am not ever going to agree to work with Stripe given their previously exhibited behaviour. The platform cannot afford to express any interest in me because any subscription revenues that result from people coming to Substack because of me are not primary subscriptions to my work but secondary or tertiary because I recommend (profoundly and sincerely) a number of other content creators (including you). And Substack dgaf in mnsfho. And I am okay with the platform hosts being persons who dgaf. The sans souci runs both ways. Turnabout is fair play.
The Scroll! It’s like the warm afterglow of an Indian Buffett, so much to digest and you need to be careful and prepared when laughing. Happy to be on the Buffett and you can find me over by the couscous.
Thanks! The chart pictured in the link is revealing...between "input" and "output" are a "set of rules to obtain the expected [desired?] output from a given input." Why waste the effort at all, if the output is decided upon?
I now have comments missing in my thread .. just vanished .. i was going to repost a funny comment on one of my posts, repost the comment with a reply and it was gone.. the whole thing.. even the notification of his reply.
The Home and the Following options confuse the heck out of me!! I switch between them both regularly because they both offer up notes from those I do follow and those I don't.
I LOVE puzzles- but this seems to be one I can't solve. 🤷♀️😂
I've noticed the same thing, so I tend to check both and, if time permits, some of the other tabs as well. But I find I am often served articles that I can't imagine any algo would ever pair me with. They're probably still tweaking it because what that actually IS tends to change from day to day. I just roll with it.
This digest is so interesting, thank you for all this recap!
btw it's somehow so out of expect to find an English post mentioned me as the first thing I do after getting up, and very fun to see my name stuck in a sea of letters ;)
I don't pay, but I love The Starfire Codes. (One day, I will give in, I think.)
I do read The Scroll, but sometimes I *speed* scroll, looking for my name.
Okay, with my mea culpas established and documented, I have a comment, which I used to call a post, but today's Scroll scroll has corrected, making me even more perfect, if that could even be possible!
Strangely (to me, anyway), I feel comforted that 'stackers like our host and Stone, etc., are as confused as I concerning the Notes scroll algorithm-of-choosing-what-I-am-exposed-to.
Why, I am even tempted to say, all is well with me and my precious, I mean Precious, sorry My Precious.
Thank you so much for being here! Yes, we've been pretty confused as well. I hope at some point we'll figure it out or anything that was glitchy might be corrected through the use of our comments! It's important to catalog that so that they know what we're seeing as users! :)
Yes, I used to be wary that all I posted on digital media was forever.
Now that I am in a position to, for lack of better phrase, stick my chest out and proclaim to the world this-is-me-to-the-best-of my-judgment-take-me-or-figt-me, I am simpatico.
What about the zillions of notes about how to get followers on substack? Am I the only person who HATES those posts and doesn’t engage, but gets them constantly?
See the note above the special thanks. If a comment by you is not listed here, it's because you were interacting with one of the posts by liking or restacking. I err on the side of inclusion in that case. Thanks for being here! Welcome to The Scroll! :)
What is featured most in my activity feed these days are big name accounts. None of who I subscribe to on Substack. It’s frustrating not seeing my favorites! 🤬
In fact, I don’t receive email notifications for my paid publications. So some strange algorithmatic is happening.
As a matter of fact, I don't even notice your posts hitting the top of the page scroll very often either. As others have said in the Notes exchanges you shared in your post, Notes engagement is off - down - and the algorithm seems to completely suck in the past few months. At first i thought it was post election and the holidays but it is not.
When Substack added all the new categories it seems that a couple of things happened - the Leaderboards went south, you can't scroll through them anymore either on a computer based browser or the phone Apps. And there are not more "Trending Posts" in the categories.
As Cori Bren noted below the follow/explore seemed to have messed things up as well.
I feel as though I have completely lost track with so many people I used to interact with on a regular basis here on Notes.
Thanks for the recap here. I'm new to Substack but already learned that when on the Home tab, I only look at "Following"
The only other social media I'm really active on is LinkedIn (strictly for work purposes). It's been around plenty longer than Substack and everyone there will tell you the feed is completely useless.
The way I "follow" people is by going to their profile, going to their history of posts, and bookmarking that in my browser.
I don't know why social media platforms are so bad at making a feed anyone likes but... don't expect it to get better any time soon.
Hi. I can’t find any way to ‘subscribe’ to your Notes, but any screen I look at your site or newsletter on, using the iPhone app, shows ‘subscribed’. I believe whatever SS did when they moved “following/explore” from the top of the notes to the top of the page sent stuff wonky. I see more of who I follow and subscribe to if I’m not on ‘following’. Tech with SS’s stated purpose should be MUCH MUCH MUCH more intuitive than it is.
I keep having to resubscribe or refollow people I am already subscribed to or following as well.
I have been having to do that since last May. Suddenly I woke up and I wasn’t subscribe to several dozen publications! My activity has changed a lot too!
I’m not all thumbs with tech, I’m all toes and not big sturdy capable big toes, but little ornamental pinky toes. They’re like purse dogs, they look cute and growl when needed but they’re not much use otherwise. Lol. I’m teaching myself but if I have to geekle everything I’m trying to do your tech needs work. They are here to make money on payed subscriptions, not make user friendly tech. So I understand their motivation but that doesn’t help me stop wanting to chuck it all in the trash and walk away because I have more important things to do with my remaining seconds on this rock. Lol sorry that grew horns didn’t it?!🤪
It's just a glitch. They work really hard to correct bugs when they see them but it often takes the users reporting them to know that they are there. So, we have to pipe up so they know what we're seeing on the user end so that they can fix it. :)
I don't believe they do work to fix things that they want to keep. And I don't believe Substack's code team is even remotely interested in honour, decency, integrity, working code, good user experiences, or freedom. Like I said the one time Chris Best replied to one of my comments it was to let me know he was overwhelmed by the number of comments he needed to review and had no time to respond to the substance of my comment. Really, how very droll, to spend time on a reply to assert an insufficiency of time to reply. Very meta.
I have personally worked with them directly to fix bugs I've found in the past. And they were proactive and helpful about it.
Here is a bit more information on the ways the latest updates are affecting the web interface. I just went to your page on Substack's web site to look at your posts to find The Scroll so as to add my comment here in a sensible place rather than somewhere random. But, no, your posts are not displayed complete and in chronological order as a rational person would want. Essentially all I could find were your various 'what I'm reading' posts, going back several weeks. The Scroll and the Memedrops were skipped, by the new algorithm. Nuts.
Here is a thought on the two different audiences. When someone subscribes to L5 News, I get an email message from the system which lets me know who has subscribed and the same is true for the people who follow me on Substack. But the notifications are very different, including meta information in the email header. This strongly suggests that the software treats the two classes of interaction in very different ways (which we see exhibited in the behaviours you note in The Scroll for this week).
I suspect that there are entirely different teams of coders working on the code for each set of experiences. Someone "helpful" decided that seeing the archive for your page wasn't a good thing, so it didn't show up for me on the Substack web site presentation of your profile. So, now let me go to your Starfirecodes.com web site.
Yep, behold, here is The Scroll top centre, and your archive shows up as expected (default to "latest" presentation, but "top interactions count" presentation is available under the "top" heading, etc.).
It's a mess. There is no clear vision for how the user experiences Substack. So there is a separate code base for notes users who follow and interact with notes, compared to the code base for newsletter subscribers who subscribe and interact with posts. At a guess, there is also an entirely different set of code for dealing with reply threads, especially longer threads with more interactions.
By the way, there is a noticeable "margin creep" so they are definitely using the Simple Machine Forums open source automatic reduction of reply width, which is how Coleman's Fight Club generated the tategaki. It'll happen here if we let it, which is among the reasons I backed up to your latest reply instead of replying under my own.
Someone fairly high up the food chain should call for a code freeze and not have more new stuff deployed for a few weeks, bring the team leads together for a vision session to assess what users actually want, and then build an integrated coding path forward. My experience with tech companies is that they will probably choose instead to develop a vision for what the Substack owner operators want, and do roughly zero feedback based interaction with the user community, but maybe they will take the opportunity. It needs some serious thought, a whole bunch of marketing research as to what users experience and how much they dislike the darkness and what kinds of indirect and direct lighting would improve their experiences, and how to build a good set of outcomes. Focus groups, statistically significant surveys (rather than self-selection error useless online surveys), and meaningful design of the inquiry process can be involved in collecting good marketing research. But, again, big tech tends to punt and grab at the low hanging fruit of easily obtained but mostly misleading online surveys and make zero effort to collect good data. =shrugs in Steven Kerr=
I agree with that in terms of how most tech companies function, but you have no idea how many times they have reached out to me directly without my prompting to check on me and to see if I had found any additional issues. And then they have diligently worked on the issues I have found and have checked back in with me on those.
I do believe you, because I have had many reasons to look at things you write very closely and pray about them and believe them. So, thank you for this reply because if it were from anyone else I would most likely still not believe it.
But I also want to mention that things that work for them are not going to be fixed by them because they want to keep those things. I don't expect to ever experience a feeling of relief from never seeing any post from Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, Jim Cramer, Pamela Anderson, or a thousand other famous people whose words and views have no value to me. I expect to continue to see them because the algorithm is designed to push engagement with accounts that provide revenue to the platform. It's the egregore thing, the platform cannot avoid rewarding for behaviours which profit the platform for very long, so it doesn't.
Similarly, my views are not even slightly interesting to the people coding the platform, no matter how often or carefully or politely I complain, because despite having had social media accounts with over 11,000 followers, I am not ever going to agree to work with Stripe given their previously exhibited behaviour. The platform cannot afford to express any interest in me because any subscription revenues that result from people coming to Substack because of me are not primary subscriptions to my work but secondary or tertiary because I recommend (profoundly and sincerely) a number of other content creators (including you). And Substack dgaf in mnsfho. And I am okay with the platform hosts being persons who dgaf. The sans souci runs both ways. Turnabout is fair play.
The Scroll! It’s like the warm afterglow of an Indian Buffett, so much to digest and you need to be careful and prepared when laughing. Happy to be on the Buffett and you can find me over by the couscous.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
🎵
He's a smooth operator
Smooth operator
Smooth operator
Smooth operator ...
🎵
I seent this one too.
Was going to change my status to "Cascading towards invisibility" but my algorithm didn't see me. Also, what's an algorithm?
LOL!! 🤣
This: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/introduction-to-algorithms/
Thanks! The chart pictured in the link is revealing...between "input" and "output" are a "set of rules to obtain the expected [desired?] output from a given input." Why waste the effort at all, if the output is decided upon?
I don't have any idea how to access notes-
In terms of subsription or substack.
But I'll just take the time to figure it out.
I now have comments missing in my thread .. just vanished .. i was going to repost a funny comment on one of my posts, repost the comment with a reply and it was gone.. the whole thing.. even the notification of his reply.
...
The Home and the Following options confuse the heck out of me!! I switch between them both regularly because they both offer up notes from those I do follow and those I don't.
I LOVE puzzles- but this seems to be one I can't solve. 🤷♀️😂
Thanks for the mention, sister. 🥰
I've noticed the same thing, so I tend to check both and, if time permits, some of the other tabs as well. But I find I am often served articles that I can't imagine any algo would ever pair me with. They're probably still tweaking it because what that actually IS tends to change from day to day. I just roll with it.
Love you!! Happy Sunday!! ❤️🥰❤️
Rolling with it is definitely our best bet!! Happy Sunday! Love you, too beauty! ✨❤️🎵
This digest is so interesting, thank you for all this recap!
btw it's somehow so out of expect to find an English post mentioned me as the first thing I do after getting up, and very fun to see my name stuck in a sea of letters ;)
Thank you so much for being here! Welcome! 🙏🏻💜💫
I don't pay, but I love The Starfire Codes. (One day, I will give in, I think.)
I do read The Scroll, but sometimes I *speed* scroll, looking for my name.
Okay, with my mea culpas established and documented, I have a comment, which I used to call a post, but today's Scroll scroll has corrected, making me even more perfect, if that could even be possible!
Strangely (to me, anyway), I feel comforted that 'stackers like our host and Stone, etc., are as confused as I concerning the Notes scroll algorithm-of-choosing-what-I-am-exposed-to.
Why, I am even tempted to say, all is well with me and my precious, I mean Precious, sorry My Precious.
Thank you so much for being here! Yes, we've been pretty confused as well. I hope at some point we'll figure it out or anything that was glitchy might be corrected through the use of our comments! It's important to catalog that so that they know what we're seeing as users! :)
Yes, I used to be wary that all I posted on digital media was forever.
Now that I am in a position to, for lack of better phrase, stick my chest out and proclaim to the world this-is-me-to-the-best-of my-judgment-take-me-or-figt-me, I am simpatico.
I feel the same way about it. This is me. I am who I am. If anything, I intend to be even MORE me, not less.
You are most welcome, Demi.
I will pay-subscribe when I can; you are high on my list.
Thank you so much! That's very kind of you! I'm honored! :)
What about the zillions of notes about how to get followers on substack? Am I the only person who HATES those posts and doesn’t engage, but gets them constantly?
I don't know anyone who actually likes those. 🤣
Apparently thousands of “people” 🥸
Hahaha. :)
I'm not seeing a ton of posts.. the scroll alone
There are so many great people and writers here.
I remember reading the first chapters of a book on someone's substack-the story was so vivid and engaging, and it was early days on substack for me.
I subscribed but then couldn't find it.
I feel bad, it was some of the freshest and best writing, it was about these animals on an adventure (no not 1984 style).
That's one of the great things about Demi's scroll and notes, bringing together similar creative people.
I've been tagged in this post but cannot find out where or why... can someone please help me
See the note above the special thanks. If a comment by you is not listed here, it's because you were interacting with one of the posts by liking or restacking. I err on the side of inclusion in that case. Thanks for being here! Welcome to The Scroll! :)
It's caused by disalgorithymia. 😂
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
What is featured most in my activity feed these days are big name accounts. None of who I subscribe to on Substack. It’s frustrating not seeing my favorites! 🤬
In fact, I don’t receive email notifications for my paid publications. So some strange algorithmatic is happening.
Demi, I have not seen you in Notes in forever!
As a matter of fact, I don't even notice your posts hitting the top of the page scroll very often either. As others have said in the Notes exchanges you shared in your post, Notes engagement is off - down - and the algorithm seems to completely suck in the past few months. At first i thought it was post election and the holidays but it is not.
When Substack added all the new categories it seems that a couple of things happened - the Leaderboards went south, you can't scroll through them anymore either on a computer based browser or the phone Apps. And there are not more "Trending Posts" in the categories.
As Cori Bren noted below the follow/explore seemed to have messed things up as well.
I feel as though I have completely lost track with so many people I used to interact with on a regular basis here on Notes.