Substack

About Substack: email crisis!

/ annettehamilton82 / 1 Comment

This is not a proper Post but a comment for anyone reading this who is newly on Substack. I started a Substack account a few weeks ago, along with many others who don’t feel good about Facebook, Instagram and Techbro world-control. I thought it might be a worthy substitute especially since it is completely ad-free and follows the basic principle that writers should get paid for their writing.

I do love Substack. It is the first thing I turn to every day, sometimes at 3.00 am on the Insomnia Shift. I feel I have learnt more in the past few weeks about what is happening in the Big World than I ever could discover via the Australian legacy media, on Facebook or Instagram. I have never gone for Twitter-X and haven’t bothered with the new Blue thing. I do subscribe to a couple of magazines, in the digital version (Atlantic, New York, N+1) and NLR, for a Brit/Euro perspective. But for a quick ad-free tour of the playground from people I feel close to, Substack has been the goods.

But the downside is: I have realised I can’t manage what’s happening in my email inbox. And, from what I can see on various other chats and comments, other people can’t either. Even my dear one doesn’t want to be on Substack any more because he is getting emails from accounts he didn’t even know existed.

I am drowning in Substack emails from accounts I did subscribe to. I’ve paid for several, and I am glad to hear from those writers via email. It seems only proper. All the rest: I love you, but I can’t afford to pay for you all. I want to read you, but not via my email inbox. That is pretty much reserved now for emergency pleas from alarmed relatives, the occasional “hullo” from a friend, but mostly for official stuff from every agency with which one is obliged to intersect, not to mention dentists, doctors, review-seekers, restaurant-reservation-persons, Paris Metro updates and the company which offers good deals on worm-farm blankets and other real world necessities.* (In order to write this post I have done some instant research on my own in-box, and I think it will take a week of steady work to actually unsubscribe to the advertising junk I have realised is now there).

Substack writing shouldn’t be included as junk, but as I woke up this morning I realised that if I don’t delete all the accounts I am following (the ones I haven’t paid for, I mean), I might have to. I went into my settings (on the computer, not on the phone) and there seemed to be no setting which allows access via App or website only, ie which does not send out an email every time there is a post or a chat or whatever.

I guess like others I had thought Substack would be an alternative to the “get an email newsletter list” instruction. This advice is given to all indie writers, who are told to send out a newsletter once a month to those who have bought their books or followed them in some other way. Subscribing to Substack is not like this. People are posting two or three times a week and sometimes more than once a day, so it is turning into a kind of Facebook but with much longer stories so it takes ages to scan them let alone read them.

Is there an answer? Have I missed something? Off to “research” the problem …

ANSWER: Apparently yes. There are two possible answers, so far I have tried only one.

If you go into your Substack on your IPhone (or equivalent) and go to your Settings, there is a Notification setting. There is a NEWSLETTER DELIVERY heading. Under that is Prefer Push option. There is also Prefer email and both email and push. So I have set “Prefer Push”. I don’t know what that actually means, but I guess I will find out. I don’t even know what a Push email is. I used to be part of a radical social movement in Sydney known as the Push, but I don’t think this has anything to do with them. Everyone’s pretty much dead already. Pushed out you might say.

Another answer: set up your inbox subfolders and instruct your mail provider to deliver all your Substack emails into that folder. That way, they will be there in scores, then hundreds, then thousands, and presumably you can then delete the folder. I haven’t tried this because it seems more protracted and I can bet my boots that I’ll forget to delete them, or will delete the wrong folder.

So I’ll wait and see how it turns out. I know there are some other good discussions on this subject on Substack but am having trouble finding them right now. I don’t want to become a Substack Email Refugee, so let’s hope we can all move towards a manageable system.

*If there happen to be any other worm-farm enthusiasts around, get in touch please! I’d love to have a chat about the ups and downs, triumphs and pains of worm-farming. Or maybe there’s a Newsletter I can follow. I guess another Newsletter won’t hurt!

Healthy plump worms in a perfectly formed soil: sadly mine don’t look like this!

SUBSTACK OR FEUILLETON?

/ annettehamilton82 / Leave a comment

Remember back in digital prehistory when Facebook was first a Good Thing? You had “friends” and you could post stuff and they could see it and vice-versa, and as I recall it lasted on your feed for longer than five minutes. It was great for groups interested in the same subject, yes, but it was also great for whatever circles of people you were connected to or inserted in. I don’t know exactly when that changed but now, apart from a couple of still-effective writers groups and one or two painting sites, most of the time all I seem to get is ads for bunion treatments and dodgy looking products introduced by persons in white coats who drone on at length about one of the many infirmities you share. Of all my “friends”, most of whom were actual real people who I knew, and/or relatives, I hear little or nothing. Maybe they have defriended me. I know some of the relatives did. Or maybe they just don’t use Facebook any more.

So when I began to hear about Substack I thought well maybe this was a good way to keep in touch with people you knew, or would like to know, or who knew you, and I imagined lively discussion groups focussing on the usual weird stuff I enjoy thinking about but find it hard to share in the normal run of things lined up at the supermarket or chatting to some bored relative, if you can still find one willing to talk on the phone (therefore must be over 60). So I joined up and only later realised that the primary intention is to get people to pay money to read whatever the writer is wittering on about. Perhaps I haven’t gone into it enough, and perhaps I am not sufficiently committed to supporting the writing of others, but I really can’t see paying regular monthly subscriptions for the privilege. I know this shouldn’t have anything to do with television or streaming services but I can’t help reflecting that I already have to pay dollars and dollars to access Netflix, Stan, Binge etc. and they are seemingly limitless. And the Substack feeds seem limitless but all the same somehow. While I sympathise with the writers for wanting to be paid, I can’t help thinking there is a more important need for places to talk to each other. Sadly, Substack is not it.

Although I mistakenly signed up for two different Substacks with two different email addresses, I am now trying to cancel them. I didn’t sign up to any paid subscriptions so that’s good. But I did want to write things people might read, outside the strict limits of what this blog and site are about, so I thought I would make up my own little Substack thingie and call it a FEUILLETON and put it in my regular POSTS every once in a while. And it will of course be absolutely free to anyone who goes to this website. I haven’t set up a Newsletter so maybe this will do.

The next post will give more on the history and context of the FEUILLETON. Introduced into popular cultural circuits via Herman Hesse’s book The Glass Bead Game, very influential among proto-intellos in the 1950s and 60s, it turns out to be a very powerful way to think about the effects of contemporary information circuits. More soon.

He’s a miserable looking fellow, unfortunately. Likewise so many of those serious Germanic thinkers. But they do seem to dominate the philosophy of the last century.

Hermann Hesse, 1877-1962

I like to think of that Monty Python sketch where they are all playing football.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophers%27_Football_Match

Watch the match here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KX-ZFfCn6s