Substack *Has* a Random Button! 🔀 🎉
Well, ok, it's a link. But you can turn it into a button.
This is a brief but happy follow-up to last week's Substack Needs a Random Button.
If you scroll thorough that post’s comments – and by the way, please look at all of the comments, they're interesting and educational – Bailey @ Substack reveals the random button, I mean, link.
Try it. It works!1
Sometimes you'll get a newsletter that's “coming soon” 🙏 or hasn't published in a year.2 But sometimes you'll find content that you may like and even subscribe to.3
Sure, the link is not a button. But it can be:
For April Fool's Day next year, I might post a “Random Substack Newsletter” button and have it go to my Subscribe or Share page. 😉
I have a few ideas about what I hope to see beyond the random button. I’ve said some previously; I'll collect other ideas in a later post. For now, I'd like your comments on the random button and anything else you want to say about finding Substack newsletters.
For a moment, I thought the link might go to a page called “Random.” 🤨😉
You may notice that some Substack newsletters never launch or stop after one post or few posts. While I imagine some people just kick the tires and decide not to proceed with a Substack newsletter, some want to continue publishing but can't for whatever reason. A lot can happen to a person. A lot has happened in the past two years – the pandemic, for example.
I'll give a shoutout here to KSR DCNY, which I found because I was adding Substack creators to Twitter lists. Would I have learned about Karyn-Siobhan Robinson's newsletter without my project to find all the Substacks? Or without a random button? Maybe, maybe not. In any case, I'm glad I found this newsletter. 😊
"When the gods wish to punish us they merely answer our prayers."
I hit it 15 times and 13 of them were spam or abandoned single posts. I suspect in the current age in which everyone writes and no one reads curation is where the real demand is.
an actual randomized link would eventually only produce garbage links. Because as the amount of substacks that gets created goes up, so does the amount of dead substacks. Enjoy the button now if it even gives 1 out of 10 active engaged substacks.