Substack Threads, Chats and Notes - a Primer

Substack’s community engagement tools explained

If you aren’t already writing on Substack, this post is not for you.

If you are already using Substack and you’re confused about threads, chats and notes, join the club of millions of creators and readers who are scratching their heads daily.

How did we get here?

When Substack was new, publication owners could create posts. Simple. Every post can have comments enabled, or not, and open to all subscribers or only to paying subscribers. Also simple.

Then Substack made a new type of post, a ‘thread’. A thread is much like a normal Substack post, but comments are enabled by default and can’t be switched off. Substack writers use threads to foster discussions on single posts.

Threads can be seen on a publication’s home page and are displayed with a speech bubble icon

Then Substack launched chat. Chat is also about creating discussions between subscribers. Chat threads dwell in a different space to posts within the Substack environment. Because they are not tied to single posts, the conversations in Chat can continue over weeks or months.

So Substack’s engagement tools used to be comments, threads and chats: simple.

Last month, Substack launched Notes. Notes is also a place for conversations…