Substack's Secret Sauce

Subscriber Chat is a Goldmine. Substack Should Fix It.

It has been said that a tiny fraction of people create the internet while the vast majority of us consume it.

Yet the line separating a Substack content creator from a content consumer is blurry: do notes count as content? What about comments? When you interact with this post by restacking it, for example, our dynamic transforms from producer-consumer to co-creators of an experience that will be shared by others on the platform. Perhaps it’s one big orgy of creative expression and consumption, blurring all traditional lines between author and reader.

While Substack transcends our traditional relationships to the written and spoken word and threatens the dominance of legacy platforms, its subscriber chat feature is worth honoring as the largely hidden yet magical engine of community and creativity defining Substack’s essence as both social and media. Subscriber chat is Substack’s Secret Sauce.

The culture and economics of each subscriber chat are unique, as creators are free to set the terms of our own chat however we so choose. Some chats are fully paywalled, others are fully open, still others can be read and reacted to by all—but incentivize paid subscription by rewarding those who pony up with precious thread-initiating privileges. As a result, certain chats are more vibrant than others. Chats can even become unruly, to the point where participants may feel the space is undermoderated or unmoored.

But this is precisely when a chat has become a special place: When a Substack creator attracts a large enough following and cultivates an active enough chat among their subscribers, those participants become stakeholders in a community of likeminded people. They care about the health and energy of the chat itself. They have somewhere to go, somewhere people know and understand them. The publication provides a shared foundation, but the people in the chat become the living, breathing thing that can become more important than the words of its publisher.

Beyond the human connection found in these chats, they serve as rich sources of information and insight. For example,

Dark Woke

emerged as a self-justified aggregate of memes and hot takes expressed daily in the heterodox leftwing

ettingermentum

subscriber chat.

Anand Giridharadas

and

Simon Rosenberg

constantly chat with their subscribers to help shape both the form and content of their publications

The.Ink

and

Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg

.

My own work is deeply informed not only by other writers and podcasters, but by readers who say smart and interesting things in subscriber chats across the platform. And I’m not alone. Subscriber chats fills my cup, make me think, and give me a genuine sense of community.

The largely hidden, magical engine of community and creativity defining Substack’s essence as both social and media, subscriber chat is the platform’s Secret Sauce.

The wildest part of Substack’s secret sauce is that the chat room is so archaic in the history of the internet, in 2025 it feels almost quant. This kind of thing has almost always existed in one form or another, as it is inherently cool and exciting in its own right. But Substack is built to channel ideas into expressions, to hand writers everything we need to succeed. Crucially, that includes other people.

On this burgeoning platform, the internet chat room may have found its greatest application yet. Yesterday Substack Co-founder and Chief Writing Officer

Hamish McKenzie

relaunched Substack Reads as The Substack Post, lamenting “people who have overindulged in disposable online content”:

“The internet has solved the problem of boredom, inundating us with abundant entertainment, letting us scroll to the end of the universe, never bereft of content. And that’s the problem. We’re so busy consuming that we risk losing sight of what truly nourishes us.”

What nourishes us is us. McKenzie is talking about art, but more fundamentally our presence nourishes each other. As a sort of communal hub chat rooms would be mind-bogglingly unrecognizable to previous generations, but in today’s world they provide sorely needed connection, genuine inspiration, and valuable content.

Interacting easily and effectively with subscriber chat content is a priceless tool, yet on a platform where creativity is the coin of the realm it feels like an unfortunate afterthought. If you’ve ever tried to search for an old comment in a chat, you know how frustratingly disorganized the process can be. Perhaps you’ve tried to copy the text of a thread, only to find you’re stuck copying a link to the thread and just can’t grab the text or image you should simply be able to clip.

Smooth interaction with chat content is a priceless tool, yet on a platform where creativity is the coin of the realm it feels like an afterthought. If Substack is to live up to its fullest potential, chat functionality must be brought to the next level.

Live video is well and good, and I appreciate Substack’s investments and emphasis in this supplemental media module. But now that video is active and taking off,

Hamish McKenzie

and his team should get to work improving subscriber chat functionality:

• Modernize chat search results to appear chronologically.

• Allow one or more pinned threads for easy access.

• Enable authors to share community “rules” or “guidelines.”

• Make text, images and links easier to copy.

• Debug the extremely-light-touch glitch in chat search results.

• Fix emoji search to match standard iOS terms.

Subscriber chat is already wonderful, whether you’re a writer, a chatter, or merely an active lurker. But if Substack is to live up to its fullest potential, chat functionality must be brought to the next level. And if these issues don’t yet apply to you, please allow me to recommend you explore subscriber chats for some of your favorite Substack authors until you find one that feels like home.

Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name.

ICYMI, check out these related essays:

---

---

---