I Tried Substack and I’m Back

A little while ago I looked up what else I could explore in social media apps other than the usual Facebook and Instagram type of sites.  Substack came up as highly recommended for writers.  At first it seemed quite promising.  Other writers on the site seemed kind and encouraging.  I liked the Notes part where I could write a paragraph on what my thoughts were for the day.  And I could write a longer article when I chose to.  There are other features like Pod Casts as well.  Three choices of followers are offered; Subscriptions, Paid Subscriptions or Followers.  People can like your Notes or Posts and they can comment on them as well.  It seemed like a nice community.

Setting up the app was straight forward.  And if you want to set up paid subscriptions, it’s also easy.  There are a couple of downsides that I found though.  For paid subscribers, Substack takes 10% off the top.  Plus Stripe, the independent money handler takes 3%.  So you lose 13% of your pay.  The other is when a paying subscriber receives the record of payment, your phone number and address is visible.  This is on the Stripe side not Substack.

The one thing that drove me away was the DM feature.  Personally I don’t like direct messages.  To me that function should be reserved for people I actually know.  Instead on this app it’s a free-for-all for lonely men looking for a good time, and to collect women.  After naively engaging with a few that I thought were interested in writing, all of them ended up blocked.  After a week they were back.  I checked the blocked list, they were still blocked, yet had found a way to still message me. 

With more than 8 billion people on our planet, there are bound to be just a few creeps and they all seemed to be on Substack.  Facebook is bad for that too.  At least on Facebook you have a choice to not accept the friend request and the predator won’t know if you’ve declined the request. 

It’s strange to me that social media sites don’t have a feature to turn off DMs.  As a woman and an introvert I would feel much safer having no DMs.  Is it just me?  Am I too old in my thinking?