Substack Notes: Lets be frank, this is an experiment...
Substack has launched a Twitter-lite service called Notes for authors to send short messages and engage with eachother and our audiences.
Recently I published my first note on Substack Notes, and as a subscriber of a Substack publication you might find value in this additional opportunity to engage with authors such as myself.
This will either be a success and a rich source of content or will fade into obscurity. Given this, as I see it, we have nothing to lose by giving it a go.
Currently Notes has a bunch of my favorite authors starting to post there, so this is exciting for me as a reader and subscriber of many Substack newsletters. Notes appears to have quickly achieved for me what years of list curation on Twitter achieved previously - a source of useful content on my work and personal interests.
So what is this ‘Notes' thing? Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.
To be very honest about the current state of this service: there's also currently a lot of meta-spam, i.e. lots of posts about Notes itself. This was true of Twitter in the early days too. Lots of ‘this is my first Note' posts and ‘What do you think of Notes?’ posts. “Seems like a great place to post statements and questions about Notes” I am sure is the response :)
When I post to Notes I will keep it related to the themes of my publication Focus on outcomes. If most authors follow this pattern it could be a high signal to noise network. Hard to find these days.
Note: To be transparent there's also been recent concerning admissions from the Substack CEO about limited content moderation and a stance that suggests that content moderation will be very limited. For my publication and my posts on Notes I will always uphold a high standard and committment to be civil and respectful. So far for publications I follow it appears all of the authors follow the same committment but nonetheless this is important information to know if joining.
I'd love more engagement opportunities with readers so I hope you will join me in this experiment.
How to join
Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Focus on outcomes, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!
You can also share notes of your own. I hope this becomes a space where every reader of Focus on outcomes can share thoughts, ideas, and interesting quotes from the things we're reading on Substack and beyond.
If you encounter any issues, you can always refer to the Notes FAQ for assistance. Looking forward to seeing you there!