Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cyberdrunk2 1560 days ago
Are there any plans to help writers with discovery? It seems the only way to to build an audience is to already have an audience of some sort. This is one of the things that I like about Medium. They will recommend articles based on interests and have great SEO.
1 comments
sachinmonga 1560 days ago
Definitely. The current Discover tab in the app is admittedly pretty basic - just search, the same featured publications from the homepage on substack.com, and categories. We have a lot of ideas for how to improve this tab, as well as other discover mechanisms throughout the app.

One area I'm especially excited about: discovery through the lens of the writers you trust. What are those writers reading themselves? What else are their readers (whose taste you ostensibly share) reading? We have a light version of this already with reader profiles in the app (and on web) - when you subscribe to a publication, you can choose whether to display it on your profile. Lots more we could do though.

link
moviewise 1560 days ago
Discoverability based on more specific categories, like "humor/comedy" "movies" "advice" would be more helpful than trying to triangulate between what a writer/author reads and what a new reader is reading. Writers who are more open-minded subscribe to newsletters that have nothing to do with the content they write about. If a reader is interested in more "humor" writing, for example, it doesn't make any sense to suggest a travel newsletter simply because the author of the article they are looking at reads it, and you are deeming it higher quality because of that when it may not really be better than other newsletters in the same category but rather a reflection of a personal relationship the author has with another author. To a lesser extent the same goes for the readers of a publication. People have eclectic tastes and are not monolithic. But as a reader if I'm enjoying an article under the category "movies" then I would appreciate seeing articles that are tagged with related terms like "film" "cinema" "movie recommendations" "movie reviews." The lack of tagging or more nuance in the categories Substack offers really limits discoverability.
link