Hey @kimboo, I enjoyed your breakdown about best practices for how to use sections and tags. In the article, you wrote, "...Confusingly, Substack refers to sections as both sections and newsletters. If you look at the URL for my section guide, Bibliotheca, you’ll see that it ends in /newsletters..."
I believe the reason Substack refers to sections as /newsletters is because you can set them up so readers are able to unsubscribe from them. For example, say you create a section devoted to extremist political screeds of the incendiary variety, but you also post sonnets devoted to extolling the beauty of nature. Say I don't want to read one or the other of those-- or maybe I don't want to read either of them, but I want to remain subscribed to your main newsletters, then I can unsubscribe from those sections. I believe it might even be possible to be unsubscribed from your main newsletter, but only one of your sections.
That is a very good point, and probably accurate as to why they made the decision they did! If I had money to bet, I'd lay it down on "newsletters within newsletters" was a legacy decision that simply got carried over as the app UX developed over time, and now changing it would be an investment of time/resources they don't have as substack's popularity starts rocketing up.
You might be right. I do think you raise good points about regardless of why they did it calling sections newsletters is confusing to people coming into this blind.
Hey @kimboo, I enjoyed your breakdown about best practices for how to use sections and tags. In the article, you wrote, "...Confusingly, Substack refers to sections as both sections and newsletters. If you look at the URL for my section guide, Bibliotheca, you’ll see that it ends in /newsletters..."
I believe the reason Substack refers to sections as /newsletters is because you can set them up so readers are able to unsubscribe from them. For example, say you create a section devoted to extremist political screeds of the incendiary variety, but you also post sonnets devoted to extolling the beauty of nature. Say I don't want to read one or the other of those-- or maybe I don't want to read either of them, but I want to remain subscribed to your main newsletters, then I can unsubscribe from those sections. I believe it might even be possible to be unsubscribed from your main newsletter, but only one of your sections.
That is a very good point, and probably accurate as to why they made the decision they did! If I had money to bet, I'd lay it down on "newsletters within newsletters" was a legacy decision that simply got carried over as the app UX developed over time, and now changing it would be an investment of time/resources they don't have as substack's popularity starts rocketing up.
You might be right. I do think you raise good points about regardless of why they did it calling sections newsletters is confusing to people coming into this blind.