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I'm so new to this forum I am unsure just what SubHub is/does and have no knowledge of Substack.

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Substack is a service that allows anyone to publish an online/email newsletter. Sub Pub is a Substack newsletter about Substack newsletters.

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Wow, a Substack newsletter about Substack newsletters. Anyway, I presume you mean well with your answer but it is a non-starter for me. What motivation would one have to use a Substack newsletter? Anyway, something informational would be a help for me.

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I suppose the best place to start getting information about Substack is its home page, https://substack.com. There are many articles about Substack; one relatively comprehensive article is https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/11/business/media/substack-newsletter-competition.html.

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Generally, my experience in reading different Substack newsletters has been positive. I think the lack of anonymous posting helps that quite a bit. For my newsletter, I think the biggest factor in avoiding trolls and such has been the general lack of political content. That said, the few times I have ventured forth with an opinion on something, I've seen a quick set of subscriber churn (people leaving, new people signing up). One important point though, is that most of my engagement with my readers comes through Facebook, Twitter, and other non-Substack channels where I generally know who the commenter is. So, all that to say, uh, me good. You?

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I didn't know the commenters prior to starting Sub Pub. In any case, so far, I've had a good experience on Sub Pub and elsewhere on Substack. No trolling, no spam, no flame wars, etc. Which surprises me a bit, since I've seen even innocuous-looking non-political forums (fora?) and threads devolve. Even non-anonymity hasn't helped in some discussions I've had the misfortune of viewing (or even participating in). Maybe, outside of Substack, I'm visiting the wrong kind of places?

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So far, I've had a mostly positive response. That being said, I have banned two people from my Substack already for being very inappropriate in their comments and emails to me, and I've started to see some trolling comments in our discord channel, and have banned them too. It's definitely a weird part of the internet, it freaks me out to think about some of the weird people out there reading my newsletter. But I will just keep banning, and I will take care to not divulge too much personal detail in my newsletters (which can be hard as a writer!).

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I'm glad to hear about the positive response, but of course sad about the inappropriate comments. Somewhere I read a rough estimate that 3% of people on the internet routinely engage in inappropriate behavior. Because they're more active than typical users, it seems like more than 3% – and in any event they make the internet worse for everyone. (Wise not to divulge personal details, I'd say. I'm surprised sometimes by how much people reveal.)

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