Your Writing Is Not Safe On Substack

How using Notes puts your writing at risk

This isn’t what I was planning to write for my next article, but in light of some recent events, I feel I should share my experience (the article I should be working on right now will be out in a few weeks).

Last week my account was suspended for around 40 hours. While this might not seem like a big deal, and it mostly isn’t¹, it’s the way Substack handles it that’s so frustrating. Perhaps my experience had more to do with my status as a free newsletter — maybe this won’t apply to everyone, but if you have a free stack and have never been suspended, this is what you should expect if it ever happens to you... and if you use Notes, it very well could.

We’ve Removed Your Publication

When Substack suspends your account, not only do they immediately remove your publication from public view, they won’t even bother to inform you that you’ve been suspended. Unless you’re the type of person who signs in frequently, your publication could be offline for days before you have a chance to submit an appeal.

In the meantime, visitors will be greeted with a plain white screen with bold black text that says “Publication Not Available”, with a link directing them to other publications — users signed into the site won’t even see that (unless they go directly to your stack via url), your account simply ceases to exist.

Submitting an Appeal

When you do eventually find out that your account was suspended, you can submit an appeal. Thing is: the only confirmation that anything was actually submitted is an easy-to-miss notification in the top, right corner of the screen. You don’t get a ticket, or any kind of confirmation email. Nothing. So, now, not only has all your work been wiped off the internet, you’re not even sure if the appeal did anything. I actually submitted my appeal twice because I wasn’t sure if the first one worked — that’s when I finally noticed the notification in the corner of the screen.

After that, you just have to wait. You don’t get any information, other than that you should get a reply within the next 72 hours (3 days). Oh, and I guess this should be obvious, but you can’t use your account in any way outside of submitting an appeal. Literally nothing. They go so far as to hide all of your subscribers from you. If you try to export them, you’ll just get an error message telling you that your account is suspended. So much for “no gatekeepers”.

What Rules Did I Actually Break?

About 40 hours after submitting my appeal(s), I finally got a reply, and what did it say? “It looks like your account was incorrectly flagged as spam”. So… none. I didn’t break any rules, but Substack decided to treat me as if I did, and without actually knowing one way or another. Nice.

Seeing as they invited me to reach out, I did… I replied to this email asking a few questions about what happened and if they’re doing anything to stop it from happening again. It’s been a week now, and there hasn’t been any response, so… I guess that’s their response.

Substack Protects Crybullies

You might be thinking this was probably some kind of bug or legit mistake, but I don’t think it was, and I don’t think Substack thinks that either. After my account was restored, I noticed that the entire previous week’s-worth of notifications had been deleted. So, if you had notifications you were meaning to reply to — too bad, they’re gone forever².

What possible reason could Substack have to delete notifications of people contacting you? Because they know it’s likely not about anyone being “spammed”. It’s to prevent you from looking at your replies to see who it was with the unhinged response to something you said.

And what happened just prior to getting suspended? One of my recent comments had caused some oddly-intense reactions. I’m assuming it was some off-hand remark about how the image of inspo-text someone posted didn’t actually make sense. I can’t be sure, but I was getting multiple salty replies about something like that in the days leading up to this. So, I think I’d have a pretty good idea of where to start looking if I was trying to figure out how this happened… and that’s likely the reason Substack deletes all of your notifications for the previous week.

If I was an actual spammer, I don’t really see the logic in deleting notifications. Removing them seems to only serve one purpose: to protect the crybullies by restricting your ability to see any of your recent replies. Permanently removing all replies is basically an admission that your suspension was the result of someone abusing the reporting system, and not due to an actual “mistake”.

A Broken System

As previously mentioned, I’m not sure this applies to the bigger accounts, so an argument about the possible loss of income from being offline a few days because someone abused a system meant to help improve the site might not carry as much weight, but… the way reporting is handled should be updated, regardless of who it impacts the most.

If someone is suspected of being a spammer, what justification is there in removing their articles — which have no mechanism for being marked as spam outside of Notes? If you’re suddenly getting a bunch of spam complaints about an account and you’re not willing/capable to look into it immediately, why not just limit their ability to comment and maybe hide their comments until you can confirm whether the spam complaints are legit? How can Substack justify removing a user’s publication for the mere possibility of breaking a rule in Notes?

Substack is punishing innocent users not once, but twice: once by completely removing their account from public view until they feel like reinstating it (which, technically, could be never), and then again by deleting all their notifications (and Likes) for the previous week. How is that in any way helping to prevent spam? How is that not simply giving a tool to the crybullies among us? And why is Substack going out of their way to protect the people abusing the reporting system in the first place?

Not to get sidetracked, but can we talk about how lame this entire situation is? This is a site for “writers”. Why are you here if you can’t write your way out of a minor disagreement? Why are you running to the robot authorities? Why did making a false report seem like a better option than a well-worded retort? Anyway…

Substack needs to address the issues with their reporting system. As it is now, it effectively invites abuse from a certain subset of hypersensitive and vindictive users, while punishing users who did nothing wrong. Anyone using Notes is leaving themselves open to having their publication taken down for however many days it takes Substack to reinstate it.

If nothing else, I think making it known that abuse of the reporting system will result in some form of punishment³ would, at least, help reduce the possibility of any random user getting their publication taken offline because other users lack self-control. Short of that, the only thing users can do to protect their writing from being taken down is to not use Notes... and I’m guessing that’s not the scenario Substack had in mind, but until they fix the reporting system, that’s the only real solution — beyond moving to a different platform.

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1. Unless, IDK, say… one of your recent articles was getting some Hollywood eyes on it

2. They might also delete your Likes — I didn’t think to check that while I was suspended, but checking now, there appears to be a gap in my list of Likes… which is annoying if you happen to use Likes as bookmarks

3. For the people actually abusing the reporting system, that is