• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

As it becomes an increasingly popular and more valuable company, Substack is in the process of pushing its community-led approach while trying to help creators maintain a safe environment to build audiences around their original content.

While Substack has faced criticism in response to the freedom the platform allows creators to have over regulating their own communities, the company is launching a new feature that creators can use to shape the way users interact with their posts.

“Reply Rules,” now available for English-language newsletters, enables creators to decide how users comment on their posts, reply to Notes, or interact in Chat.

For example, subscribers will see an automated message from the creator that could say, “No AI slop, no slurs, and no self-promotion,” or “Be nice, no spam, no affiliate links.”

According to the company's announcement, there is a system in place that “learns every time you hide a reply and preemptively hides replies it thinks you would hide yourself” as a way to help creators enforce their desired community ecosystem.

Creators can also un-hide automatically hidden replies, which will also inform Substack’s system.

“We try to think carefully about how moderation of various kinds can help or hurt writers, artists, journalists, musicians, and other creatives,” the company’s post states, adding that Substack’s approach is “putting power in the hands of individuals and communities, rather than platform owners.”

This lenient approach to moderation has gotten Substack in trouble before, as the company has profited from popular antisemitic, racist, and far-right newsletters published on the platform.

Still, Substack has grown immensely since its founding in 2017. Now worth over $1 billion, the company has boosted its valuation by over 70% since 2021. In March, the platform surpassed 5 million paid subscribers, up from 2 million three years prior.