Substack Avaliações 148

I needed to factory reset my device. As anticipated, I then needed to reinstall every app. When I came to Substack, I found myself locked out with a vengeance.

Despite knowing my log in details, I cannot gain access because the 2FA wants a code I cannot get because I have no access to my account in order to set this in motion.

Granted, I could have been - should have been - better prepared for this, but aren't such events within scope of the chat bot?

Thereby hangs another tale - I cannot get the bot to chat. I found the page OK, but there's no one at home. The lights are on, but the house is vacant.

What a carry on!

I've given up trying to contact anyone. I'm afraid my publications may be lost. Well, not lost because information is never lost, at least according to quantum mechanics 😕

Handling it well, but seriously miffed!

I never even created an account, and suddenly my email is full of their Zionist propaganda!!!
The page acknowledge that there's NO account with my email and still I get their "Listening to the Sirens" blog, even after unsubscribing. Hate it.

Got account banned in less than 1 month. No details, and appeal reply was "We reviewed and decided to keep you banned" Again no details.
All content is mine, and the only other thing I did was to send a private message to someone I already know to check my new publication.

NO WAY TO CANCEL SUBSCRIPTION!!!!
The app directs you to the web page and web page to the app!
No customer service!

I never heard of this website nor subscribed to it. Somehow, it steals my email and keeps sending me spam.

Impossible to change email address of paid subscription. Phone number doesn't work.

"We've removed your publication from public view due to a violation of Substack's Spam & Phishing policy. If you believe this was a mistake, you can submit an appeal to our Trust & Safety team here."

Well, I'm surprised they even doing that. I'm pissed off. With all due respect, there are tons of other platforms and we got email lists exported anyway.

I got really pissed off because, for some reason, I trusted this platform like no other. I texted the support obviously, but if they won't fix it, I'd be very eager to not say a single positive word about this platform ever again.

Pretty sure they will revolve it positively, but I'll keep this in mind - this is just a platform and my work can be wiped out overnight.

They may waste my time migrating to beehive, but at the end of the day, they're losing.

To be clear - I wasn't trying to sell coke to anyone. I was just engaging as usual, as on any other platform.

I'm now scared to leave a comment or text anyone.

I'm really f****ng pissed off. That's what I get from being active on your platform and dedicating my twitter account for redirecting to you?

If someone gets same message and doesn't plan to give up on the project. You're just sending them to the direct competitor which is Beehive...

Well f****ng done Substack. Maybe you wasted my time and spread a bad world, but at least your competitor gets a new client :)

Full of technical bugs and no customer support.

I tried to create a Substack but they won't let me verify my email address. I've verified my email address more than ten times - every time I click on the verification link it says "you have successfully verified your email address" then when I go to settings, it still says "you have not verified your email account."

Substack have no customer support, just a terrible AI bot chat that can't even speak English.

The product is good. I wish the AI chat would have real humans responding. I needed people to help me import more of my blog posts with an RSS blog posts error and could not with all this wait time hearing from humans via e-mail. Had to figure it out myself. Substack used to have real people when I tried it a while back helping someone else.

Visually, it’s not that great and doesn’t have much room for basic custom design, but more than Beehiiv’s basic plan so I’ll take that. Everything works as it should. The free plan is just what we needed for our smaller newsletter/blog setup. $50 for a one time web hosting deal is unheard of these days when all the web hosts charge $150-500 yearly. Much appreciated, thank you for allowing that custom domain option, Substack!

Lots of the crowd is rough with has beens, never beens, deadbeats making fun of people and too many dreadful influencers. I feel like I’m taking a walk in humidity from influencer/creator soup on this website. The majority of the newsletters are people acting out for attention and gaining subscribers, like TikTok for writing! We will keep at it and try our best with our boring, happy, professional newsletter. Do I worry about Substack one day telling us we aren’t a good fit and to take our newsletter elsewhere? Yes. Or they might bury our feed and SEO in the depths of the ocean on their website over it. Here is to wishing we have more normal, boring people using Substack, fingers crossed because we want to stay on this platform for a while with what we do like about it. :)

Would love it if Substack fell somewhere between Linkedin and Tiktok on the professionalism scale with the users. A bit more humble than LinkedIn and friendlier, but more professional.

WHEN you can get ahold of them, the human staff are friendly.

I paid for 1 year plan of a newsletter. I canceled auto-renew.
It just cancelled the subscription and I lost access to paid content.
I tried emailing. I tried chatbots. I couldn't get a hold of real person.

So I filed a charge-back. Substack team sent a bunch of logs to the credit card company and now I lost the dispute.

I didn't have access to any of the paid content and I still don't. Go see check my account. and check the logs closely. I just kept reading free content.

I am going to re-open the dispute. This is a huge inconvenience. Go with another publisher

I am being charged for a subscription that I cancelled and am unable to get through to customer service either via email or their chat. This is sad for authors as it will now stop me from subscribing in future

Substack's customer service was so bad that I wrote a blog called '3 Reasons Why Substack Sucks'.

It's Tim Denning's fault. I love the guy; his emails are the only ones I always read, his work ethic is inspirational, and he shares tip top advice… except with his recommendation of joining Substack. This company may help Tim grow his readership and put a few more Ozzie dollars in his pocket, but they lack the most important part of a business: Good customer service.
Notice how I used a simple adjective to describe what they're lacking. Not 'exceptional', 'incredible', or 'mind-boggingly magnificient'. Businesses that offer that type of customer service are rare oddities. So rare that they deserve a blog all of their own, which I will write and add a link to it here once it's complete. No, Substack is quite the opposite, and are definitely in my top 5 businesses with the worst customer service (this will be a link too).
I don't ask for much, just simple good manners and being there for your customers when they need help. Do Substack offer that? Not even close. Quite the opposite. They take abysmal customer service to a whole new level.
But it's not just one reason this shambles of a company suck. There are three. And I call them a shambles despite their success. Me harping on about their ineptitude will hardly bring them to their knees. If anything, people reading this might not know about Substack and join them! Alas, as we all know, the most powerful companies in the world are the most unethical, unscrupulous, vile behemoths, with so much control it can be depressing. However, all we can do is spread the word, as many have done recently concerning companies supporting Israel, and it has made a small dent in their income and customer loyalty.
So, here are the 3 reasons why Substack sucks:
Banned without telling me why

I joined Substack earlier this year and added my blog posts that I started in December 2023. I added many and scheduled them for weeks into the future. I also added my email subscribers list.
Not long after I received an email from Substack saying that my account had been deactivated. All of the blogs I scheduled were gone. They didn't explain why. I appealed this decision. This is the reply I got:

Hi there,
Tex here from Substack Trust & Safety. Thanks for submitting this appeal.
Upon additional review we've determined that your publication is in violation of Substack's Content Guidelines and will not be reactivated.
Best,
Tex @ Substack

Right. Thanks 'Tex'. I replied asking 'How is my publication in violation of Substack's Content Guidelines?'

This brings me to my second reason to why Substack sucks…

2. No response

Their customer service is so knuckle-bitingly bad that not only do they deactivate your account without telling you why. They also don't respond to your emails asking them to explain why they deactivated it. This is lazy, unethical, and ruddy rude!

However, they did send an email asking me how I rated the support I received. Two options: 'Good, I'm satisfied.' and 'Bad, I'm dissatisfied.'

Here's the chance I've been waiting for. An opportunity to tell them what I really think about their so called 'support'. I clicked my knuckles and wrote the most stinking report about their shocking service. Which brings me to the third reason…

Rant into the abyss.

You know the question 'if a tree falls and nobody's there, does it make a sound?'. Well, a similar question could be made about Substack's support. I tapped the hell outta my keyboard, ranting and raving about their non-existent support, that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable from any company. I spent a good 20 minutes giving it my all and working myself up again about their disgraceful non-support.
SEND!
Ahh, that's told them. It felt satisfying; a weight off my shoulders.
I imagined it would be sent straight to the CEO and they'll be left with no choice but to buck up their ideas and start treating their customers with more respect. Customers, in fact, that are the lifeblood of the business. Without us writers there would be nothing on Substack.
So, I wait for their response.
In fact, I've been waiting for it since 10th February.
So thanks Tim. And thanks to myself, for wasting my time and expending my energy writing to an irritatingly successful business with atrocious customer service. Maybe the clue is in their name. They announced it to the word that they're a SUB business. A SUBstantial waste of time. A SUBstandard excuse for a platform. What a STACK of s**t. Avoid.

I needed to put in a request that was simple but required a human support person to do it. The only way to contact them is through their chat feature.

When you contact the chat, you speak to an AI bot, not a real human. The AI bot cannot actually do anything except forward you to articles in their help center, which I had already read. The article said to contact customer support, since this request must be handled manually... and that's what I was doing! The AI bot said they would forward my request to a human, and I should hear back from them in a few days.

A week later, I still had not heard anything, so I went back to the support center, and repeated my request. The bot gave me the same answer: it would forward my request to customer support, and I should get an email in a few days.

A week later, still nothing. I went back to the chat and demanded to speak to a real human right away. The bot said that was impossible. The only thing they could do was put in a request that a human contact me by email, and I should get that email within a few days.

Weeks later, I still have not heard back from anyone, and my request has still not been handled. I regret signing up with them.

No customer service. The app works great but just hope you never have a problem.

No matter how many times I unsubscribe, no matter how many filters I create to auto delete their emails, they find away to put their junk in my inbox. It’s like cancerous tumors that just won’t stop spreading. And it is by design. They hide, or don't even offer "subscribe from all" because retaining as much newsletter subscribers is core of their business model. but if you force people to stay, obviously the numbers are worth very little, because half of subscribers have mentally checked out a long time ago. Very shady practice.
I'm a very kind and giving person, but I truly - from the bottom of my heart - hope your business model fails horribly.

Sending lots of spam email, unsubscribe does nothing

No customer service. There is a bug on the podcast page that is limiting my reach to listeners (it is not showing 3rd party links). I have reported it more than 4 times to support and have been told by the AI bot that someone will look into it and get back to me but no response after weeks. I even wrote people on Linkedin but nobody seems to care. I am moving away from Substack now.

Extremely dodgy practice of stealing emails. My email has been used to subscribe to their web pages. Never heard of them, the more reviews I read the same is happening to many others, they even have a section directly highlighting this in their privacy terms so it's clearly a problem. So not only are they breaching privacy laws and stealing your information like scammers, you can't trust their stats and reviews as they're most likely fake. I wouldn't go near this site, being associated with scamming email lists and false information speaks for itself

Waste of time. The feelings is only the same: to write in a space where no one can ear you scream. "But if you give us 8 $ months we promise you the Moon and the Stars." Your writing does not appear on the search engines. Don't waste your money. It is the usual site for great business man, famous journalists and corporations with 1million contacts. No one care what you write. And the system of newsletter fake that you can be paid for it.

I never created a Substack account, yet I've had to delete two different accounts associated with my email, and I've just gotten a third email from them confirming my subscription to a random page on this scam site.
Try and keep your information as far away from them as possible, as hard as that is.