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Comment by alisonatwork | Hacker News Reader

Are there any plans to allow readers/subscribers to decouple identities between different newsletters? Or, asked a different way, will the app allow you to "subscribe" to newsletters anonymously?

I find myself very reluctant to sign up for new newsletters on Substack now because my identity is shared across all newsletters, so I feel I can no longer keep my interests separated. To be clear: after commenting on one newsletter, it becomes impossible to comment on any other newsletter without compromising my privacy. I am not certain because I do not publish myself, but I worry that writers might have an insight into other newsletters I have subscribed to as well. I would really like to have an anonymous reading (if not commenting) mode, without having to manually open an in-private tab and only be able to view the public posts of whoever's newsletter I am trying to read.

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Honestly, I hope this doesn't change. As an author, I think the reason why the comments section of my newsletter is such a positive place is because all of the commenters are doxed and have a profile. In addition, that's how I find other writers to follow—you can see who follows what and follow that thread which is nice.

I don't think people being "doxed" is the secret to creating positive interactions. See Facebook, for example. Even LinkedIn has a surprising amount of toxic threads, considering people's professional reputations are at stake.

The issue I have with Substack in particular is that it was essentially founded around political newsletters. I'm not sure, but I think Bill Bishop might've been their very first newsletter... and he writes about Chinese politics. Of all topics, that is one where people might have good reason to want to be able to preserve their anonymity. Of course, you could get around this by signing up for different newsletters with different email addresses, but that makes it unnecessarily difficult to read paid subscriber-only posts. I feel like the company took a wrong turn in adding social network features instead of keeping the focus on individual writers and their individual audiences.

I think it's a helpful but not sufficient condition

I would suggest that, as an example, letting people be able to have separate 'technical subscriptions' and 'political subscriptions' identities might still have the positive effects you describe and if anything more so.

Also consider somebody who wants to engage honestly and openly with mental health related content without risking that being dragged in to conversations elsewhere via somebody reading a unified profile.

https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22R...

Are commenters doxed? You can signup with a throwaway email.

> after commenting on one newsletter, it becomes impossible to comment on any other newsletter without compromising my privacy.

We tried to build reader profiles in a way that can handle this nicely - you can choose on a per-subscription basis which publications to display on your profile and which you'd like to keep hidden. This is almost like an anonymous subscription although it doesn't quite support a fully anonymous commenting use case, since theoretically someone could recognize you from different comment sections.

One thing I could see us trying in the future is giving writers more control over who can comment and how, on their particular publications. Already, writers can choose whether to allow comments from all subscribers, only paid subscribers, or to turn off comments entirely. Allowing writers to choose to support anonymous commenting doesn't seem out of the question.

Thanks for the response. Your example of someone recognizing you from different comment sections is exactly the thing that concerns me.

I do think giving writers the choice to enable anonymous commenting would help to improve things, although it's a little bit closing the barn door after the horse bolted, since we can't go back and anonymize comments that we already made. If allowing different pseudonyms (including avatar) for different newsletters isn't on the cards, I think the idea mentioned elsewhere of allowing the app to compile multiple logins into a single client-side feed could make the existing workaround of creating multiple accounts a bit less painful.

Either way, despite my frustrations with the identity behavior, I do appreciate the platform you have built, and how it seems to have revitalized the blogosphere. I also very much like the focus on email, since it allows me to read whenever I want instead of just when my device is online. So thanks for helping shift the culture of online writing in this way.

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