It’s a start. Hopefully they’ll improve the reader experience. Having a single general-purpose forum (a “firehose”) doesn’t really work for me since it’s so random, but with so little content, it’s probably necessary for now.<p>Subscribing needs improvement. Subscribing to a hashtag might make sense? It seems like subscribing to someone’s notes and their blog should be independent, because maybe someone has a good blog but you don’t care for their notes, or vice-versa. Having them tied together also doesn’t work for people like me who use RSS. I don’t usually want email from blogs I read, so I only subscribe to blogs where I’m interested in the paid content and usually turn the email off.<p>I think this loses what makes Substack interesting, though, which is keeping the community for each blog separate, so you don’t care what people are saying on other blogs that you don’t read. Putting everyone in one community, or an unclear blob of overlapping communities, seems likely to be bad for the same reasons Twitter can often be bad.<p>I guess blogs need discovery, though, and maybe external sites aren’t enough?<p>(I think I’ll repost this as a note, since they need the content.)