16 Comments
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Stephen W.'s avatar

4 - Pay for an individual post is really interesting. That would be a step for Substack towards a full e-commerce experience. Makes me think of Gumroad a bit.

The way they jumped into social media features makes me think this would be possible.

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Steve Phelps's avatar

Markdown support!

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Logan Thorneloe's avatar

I would love full markdown support. Substack almost supports it.

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Steve Phelps's avatar

Currently I use oandoc to convert markdown to html and then open the html in a browser and copy and paste to the substack editor. https://pandoc.org/

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Alejandro Piad Morffis's avatar

Cool! I copy/paste from Obsidian preview which is exactly the same ;)

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Tags on Notes would be useful for similar reasons, too. I'm not sure how messy it makes the world, though, since that's more social media-esque than what you're describing here.

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Nat's avatar

When I open my Notes the first thing I see are old Notes, written 20 days ago. I find it hard to locate new ones.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Desktop or app?

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Nat's avatar

app.

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Andrew Smith's avatar

Ah, I only ever use desktop. I'm not saying it's better, just sayin' I'm not sure if I can help. But maybe try it on a computer if you get a chance- maybe it'll be easier to navigate. Nat-vigate?

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Logan Thorneloe's avatar

Agree with them all! Especially individual paid posts. Restacking for others to read. :)

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José J. Rodríguez's avatar

A good latex support would be great as well

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Alejandro Piad Morffis's avatar

Ohh absolutely! I forgot that one ;)

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Clintavo's avatar

Great list. They also need the ability to have a post that is for subscribers only. In other words currently we only have two options for posts:

1. Free for everyone (including non-subscribers)

2. Paywalled

I think Substack needs THREE options:

1. Free for everyone (including non-subscribers)

2. Free for subscribers (both free and paid, but not available to non-subscribers)

3. Paywalled

That way, you could have posts that were "teasers" to get people to subscribe but that did not require forking over money. It would help people build their subscriber lists. IMO.

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Herbert Yang's avatar

Great post. I've been blogging for close to 20 years and used every platform there has been. I recently started on Substack and am surprised to find that it actually does not support syntax highlight. I also write a lot of technical guides with code blocks. Not having syntax highlight is very inconvenient.

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Alejandro Piad Morffis's avatar

Thanks! Yeah, and it's 2025. This post is almost a year old and while Substack has added a ton of (imo) pretty useless features in the meantime, nothing I mentioned here has been addressed.

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