Disable Substack Comment Moderation

A stealth opt-out launch

In early June, Substack launched a feature that automatically hides comments that disagree with their filter. To keep with Substack’s “you own your audience” ideology, they gave authors theoretical control over this feature. However, they made it default on, resulting in Substack’s filters being applied to the 99.9% who don’t figure out and care enough to turn it off. Here’s the control to do it:

Personally, I use Substack to avoid the algorithmic filtering done by most megacorps, and try to avoid algorithmically-suggested Notes since they are beholden to Substack’s choices of what to show and what not to. So I turned this one off.

Given what the automatic moderation filters by default, I suspect that Notes will get less interesting and more politically filtered as time goes on. C’est la vie.

Feel free to post politically incorrect things and other likely-filtered speech in the comments to see if Substack filters you despite my settings-wrangling—though please don’t post anything illegal!

Now back to your regularly scheduled book-related content… I’m publishing a new novel June 11th. Wish me luck!