About Substack’s Discovery

And Medium

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

For most of 2025 and before, I was convinced Substack was great for discovery. Notes. Recommendations. The Substack app surfacing new writers. Momentum.

4 months into 2026, I’ve been going back through my own read counts on both platforms, looking at what articles are still getting reads 60, 90, 120 days after publishing.

And those numbers on Substack have little to do with Substack-internal discovery. Also, my Substack numbers do not nearly compare to my Medium numbers.

Changes

Substack Notes seemed to bring a big change to Substack. The “social media“ change… but in a good way (we hoped).

It did… and it didn’t.

Short posts, real engagement, writers recommending writers. A discovery engine. And for a while, it probably was, for people who were already on Substack and for newcomers.

But Substack discovery happens mostly inside Substack. Notes reaches people who already have the app. Recommendations push you to other newsletters’ subscriber lists. It’s circular. It’s closed.

Other forms of discovery aren’t closed. And they work better, at least for me.

Look at Medium here as well. Medium’s discovery happens a lot on Google. Internally too, of…