I'm not calling for a boycott. By all means, take out paid subscriptions, but also, cancel them. Do it right away, so they don't renew. Do it while the credit card is still warm.
It'd be nice if Substack had a feature like "Buy Me a Coffee." Sometimes I come across a piece I like and would like to send the author $1-5. Although sending money in the early Web was hard, it's not now, and Substack could take a cut of this. But I guess they make more from pushing subscriptions.
FWIW, I suspect that you can hide these simply by not showing them as subscriptions on your profile. There has always been an option to hide any or all subscriptions from your profile here at the bottom of the page: https://substack.com/profile/edit. Not many people know about it.
There was a similar uproar when Notes was released and they made subscription info public on folks’ profiles.
Haven’t tried to see whether hiding on your profile also removes the badge, but I bet it does.
It doesn't remove the badge. It just adds "n private subscriptions" to it. But then it also removes the respective subscriptions from your "reads" section in your profile. I feel these are two separate issues. I may be willing to list who I'm subscribing to without also stating that I'm a paid subscriber.
It'd be nice if Substack had a feature like "Buy Me a Coffee." Sometimes I come across a piece I like and would like to send the author $1-5. Although sending money in the early Web was hard, it's not now, and Substack could take a cut of this. But I guess they make more from pushing subscriptions.
FWIW, I suspect that you can hide these simply by not showing them as subscriptions on your profile. There has always been an option to hide any or all subscriptions from your profile here at the bottom of the page: https://substack.com/profile/edit. Not many people know about it.
There was a similar uproar when Notes was released and they made subscription info public on folks’ profiles.
Haven’t tried to see whether hiding on your profile also removes the badge, but I bet it does.
It doesn't remove the badge. It just adds "n private subscriptions" to it. But then it also removes the respective subscriptions from your "reads" section in your profile. I feel these are two separate issues. I may be willing to list who I'm subscribing to without also stating that I'm a paid subscriber.
To see how hidden subscriptions interact with the badge, check out this profile: https://substack.com/@whatarethechances/reads