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Since its founding, Substack has sought to create the best possible conditions for cultures of many varieties to flourish online. Doing so often involves difficult trade-offs, but on top of our core model—where we only earn when writers, artists, journalists, musicians, and so on earn—we’ve managed to chart a distinctive course relative to other platforms. We hope that people, their work, and the communities that form around it all can be more real here than has historically been possible elsewhere, where massive scales and advertising models seem to drain reality even from good-faith creators over time.
A few months ago, we shared this vision for what Substack can be: a place where you can build your own corner of the internet. That means your branding, your community, and your rules, without sacrificing the network that helps you grow. Today, we’re excited to announce the next feature in that effort, which we think will make it possible for even more people to be fully themselves and at home on Substack. We call it Reply Rules, and it combines a couple of elements:
Anyone can now set their own Reply Rules, which will appear to anyone replying to them: in comments on their posts, in replies to their Notes, or in Chat.
There is now a system that learns every time you hide a reply and preemptively hides replies it thinks you would hide yourself (you can always see these and un-hide them, which the system will also learn from).
Soon, this system will read your Reply Rules when you set them and use them as guidance for its actions, in addition to what it sees you do. Our hope is that it gives you more time to focus on what matters: creating the work that encourages people to stop by your corner of the internet in the first place.
Learn how to set up your Reply Rules here.
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Your house, your rules
It will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Substack’s arc over the years that we try to think carefully about how moderation of various kinds can help or hurt writers, artists, journalists, musicians, and other creatives. To us, the following principles are of the utmost importance:
Putting power in the hands of individuals and communities, rather than platform owners;
Reducing administrative burdens—it shouldn’t require extensive learning, mastering interfaces, or fiddling with controls to have a good experience; and
Facilitating clear zones of ownership. Substack may be lightly moderated, but in your house, your rules should apply.
Reply Rules reflect these values, and use contemporary technologies to make it easier than it’s ever been for Substacks to scalably set and maintain the kind of order that matters to them, using natural language and natural behaviors. Take a look at how some creators are already using Reply Rules to shape the conversations in their communities:
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Write the rules you want. Hide the content you think shouldn’t be there. Let the system learn from you and, eventually, take much of the burden of this work off your plate.
Reply Rules are available today to all publications with their language set to English. To get started, go to your publication settings.
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