If any of you guys at Substack can answer this, it would be great: I'm a huge fan and proponent of Substack as a professional space writer and "blogger" from the days of the old. But if there's one thing I think Substack does wrong it's the "Welcome page". Can we please get an option to disable showing the Welcome page" to people who haven't subscribed? I don't want to shove the email form in people's faces before they've read or browsed anything. I've personally seen the welcome page also being confusing to many readers, and it deters them from browsing at all—"Let me read first" isn't intuitive. It's also really annoying for people who choose to browse my articles from the Web and just don't prefer email.
The welcome page is my single biggest gripe with Substack. Sending people to the /about or /archive pages directly doesn't help because the moment people click on the logo or title to visit the homepage, the email form is shown again. If Substack is marketing the platform as being designed for "Bloggers" too (https://substack.com/for-bloggers), then you shouldn't treat publications as merely being newsletters with an email form. You acknowledge it yourself in this HN post intro that Substack is much more than a newsletter! And I agree, except it doesn't feel like it.
The new Substack app allows people to read and discover Substacks without being shown the welcome form, it only makes sense to have the Web version behave the same too. While I would understand not changing it by default but why not at least have it as an option for writers? Substack already lets writers toggle a bunch of major and minor settings to tweak their publication, why not this too?
I think there's a way to skip that with a URL parameter, I just unfortunately can't remember what it is -- something like /about?welcome=false or whatever. (I realise that's a hacky workaround and only solves part of the problem, but at least you can save some readers from the welcome screen)
The welcome page is my single biggest gripe with Substack. Sending people to the /about or /archive pages directly doesn't help because the moment people click on the logo or title to visit the homepage, the email form is shown again. If Substack is marketing the platform as being designed for "Bloggers" too (https://substack.com/for-bloggers), then you shouldn't treat publications as merely being newsletters with an email form. You acknowledge it yourself in this HN post intro that Substack is much more than a newsletter! And I agree, except it doesn't feel like it.
The new Substack app allows people to read and discover Substacks without being shown the welcome form, it only makes sense to have the Web version behave the same too. While I would understand not changing it by default but why not at least have it as an option for writers? Substack already lets writers toggle a bunch of major and minor settings to tweak their publication, why not this too?