My Frustrations with Substack
It's 2023, Right?
As a platform, Substack is pretty cool, sending out emails, letting friends know I’ve published something, and I am chuffed to bits at having a Flapjack Substack because it's super fun to say out loud, but as a writing tool it leaves a lottle1 to be desired.
Take, for instance, the enormous amount of lag from when I’m tippity-tapping on my phone, versus seeing the text appear on the phone’s screen. It's usually full of errors and sometimes will even jump around to other paragraphs because i’m typing, with my thumbs, mind you, too fast.
The second irk involves the formatting bar not following your cursor as you continue to fill the screen downwards. So, if I want to italicize something, which i do rather a lot of, i have to hold finger-to-screen to select the word and VERY CAREFULLY scroll back to the top of the document to click the <I> button.
And it's even worse if I try to embed a hyperlink, often times on my phone the little link box doesn’t even show up, and so I’m forced to use a laptop or desktop to actually finish edits. As someone who doesn’t have a lot of free time and space2 on his hands to work with, this can be really frustrating. Somedays (mostdays), all I have is my phone, and what happens is I have something I want to write on Substack and what I have to do is wait until I get a day off to go in and edit the fk out of it on an old laptop. The laptop/desktop version of the Substack editor is pretty good, btw, and I have a hunch most of the Substack user group uses that instead.
Just in case, here’s a link describing what I’m talking about:
https://konstantin.digital/blog/how-to-build-a-floating-menu-with-lexical-react
At first blush this all might seem like first world problems, and gosh I must be so rich to have such problems, but if you’re in a position where the only access to the Net is via handheld, it might very well not be. A lot of the world can only connect on the net through hand-held devices—does this mean their textual missives need to look like trash? The frustrations I’m noting here are also because I can’t seem to find a person to interact with, lol, and I don’t like just firing off an email into the void and twiddling for a maybe/maybe-not response. I did find a nice FAQ about how Substack is built to grow my platform. And things.
Don’t take me wrong, building and maintaining a constantly saving-your-data platform that you can access at anytime, for free, is hard work. The amazing thing about computers and the networks they connect to is that they work at all. And then to put another layer on top of that to allow a fussy word-peddler a platform to be fussy on is downright saintly. And engineers, regardless of what techno-branch umbrella they work under, are fussy perfectionists who get frustrated when economic demands force projects out of the barn before they’re good and ready. Managing such a project could easily become one big rolling bundle of headaches.
I just hope that the platform itself isn’t abandoned in such frustrations, or not allowed to grow more because of unintended consequences of design.
In this case meaning a lot if little things.
I really like the footnotes button. It chuffs me to bits. And the space thing, well, both grown-adult ‘kids’ are still stuck at home with us in a townhouse that should probably at max have two people in it. I timeshare the space when I’m not working OT at The Tax Engine (did you know that nothing is certain but Death and Taxes? It’s true! I spend ten hours a day in a vortex of absolute certainty and it’s weird.) with my family. And we’re all trying real hard not to piss each other off because this is what we have to work with in a time of increasingly accelearating inequality.
This hyperlink brought to you today by an old laptop version of Substack.
I have been debating about migrating over to substack to play with the big kids. I too mostly use my phone as my primary interface with the net. So many cuss worthy debacles on Instagram have led me to do most of my writing in a notes app that can be copied and pasted into the awkward editors while retaining the intended flaire. Don't lose heart! Your readers are with you.