It is not only discoverability, it is efficiency. Say you devote 30 minutes each day to reading newsletters. In that time let's assume you can read 6 newsletters. After you have subscribed to 6 daily newsletters, do you need to discover any more? Or course if they are weekly newsletters, that is more newsletters. I'd argue that reading newsletters in an inbox is inefficient and the friction is high. The desired result is that more people read more newsletters more often. I say this devoting a lot of time helping people discover newsletters on https://finding.email, the bigger equation has more variables.
I've wonder if Substack or anyone else has done a study of real people's newsletter reading habits and their attitudes towards receiving newsletters by email. I may have to go look for such a study. It would be especially fascinating to see a study which precisely measured the amount of time users spent looking at, and how they interacted with, emailed posts from newsletters.
Other than the search by topic feature, what tools are there to find literally new newsletters on Substack? I think it would be cool to be able to browse what new ones have just been created.
The current setup definitely seems to favor the already-big. And the problem with topic-based discovery is that many of the newsletters I read are less because of a special interest in the topic then an appreciation of a particular author.
So the question is: how does one find topic-agnostic new voices?
I feel that Substack should think about the ideas and questions in your comment.
It is possible to search on Substack for keywords. But my impression is that the searches favor more popular newsletters. (Admittedly, searches on most search engines favor more popular sources.) And I think the searches are only for words (or portions of words!) in the title and description, not the full content, of newsletters. I prefer Google and Stacksearch to Substack's own discovery tools.
I just found stacksearch right after writing that, thanks for mentioning it. I guess one of the problems is that "actually" brand new newsletters are likely to be either a mess or a bare skeleton (I know mine was). But something along the lines of being able to browse random newsletters that are on, say, their 3rd or so letter would be of interest at least to me.
Also one can imagine services popping up to sort through to review/recommend new ones, which would also be cool. It'd be nice to live in a culture that tried to nurture new voices instead of by default tilting the field in favor of the loudest, the most self promotional, or the otherwise established. But such is life I suppose. Adapt or perish lol.
I wrote about this the other day: https://news.findka.com/p/future-of-discovery
It is not only discoverability, it is efficiency. Say you devote 30 minutes each day to reading newsletters. In that time let's assume you can read 6 newsletters. After you have subscribed to 6 daily newsletters, do you need to discover any more? Or course if they are weekly newsletters, that is more newsletters. I'd argue that reading newsletters in an inbox is inefficient and the friction is high. The desired result is that more people read more newsletters more often. I say this devoting a lot of time helping people discover newsletters on https://finding.email, the bigger equation has more variables.
I've wonder if Substack or anyone else has done a study of real people's newsletter reading habits and their attitudes towards receiving newsletters by email. I may have to go look for such a study. It would be especially fascinating to see a study which precisely measured the amount of time users spent looking at, and how they interacted with, emailed posts from newsletters.
Other than the search by topic feature, what tools are there to find literally new newsletters on Substack? I think it would be cool to be able to browse what new ones have just been created.
The current setup definitely seems to favor the already-big. And the problem with topic-based discovery is that many of the newsletters I read are less because of a special interest in the topic then an appreciation of a particular author.
So the question is: how does one find topic-agnostic new voices?
I feel that Substack should think about the ideas and questions in your comment.
It is possible to search on Substack for keywords. But my impression is that the searches favor more popular newsletters. (Admittedly, searches on most search engines favor more popular sources.) And I think the searches are only for words (or portions of words!) in the title and description, not the full content, of newsletters. I prefer Google and Stacksearch to Substack's own discovery tools.
I just found stacksearch right after writing that, thanks for mentioning it. I guess one of the problems is that "actually" brand new newsletters are likely to be either a mess or a bare skeleton (I know mine was). But something along the lines of being able to browse random newsletters that are on, say, their 3rd or so letter would be of interest at least to me.
Also one can imagine services popping up to sort through to review/recommend new ones, which would also be cool. It'd be nice to live in a culture that tried to nurture new voices instead of by default tilting the field in favor of the loudest, the most self promotional, or the otherwise established. But such is life I suppose. Adapt or perish lol.
When I search for my substack I can’t find it at all!