Substack’s new Reply Rules feature lets creators control how people respond

Substack on Wednesday announced a new feature called “Response Rules,” designed to give creators greater control over how their audiences are able to respond.

With this feature, creators can create specific guidelines for comments on their posts, in notes, or in chat. These guidelines may include requests to remove profanity or profanity used by the AI, or anything as silly as requesting responses only in the form of haiku.

Substack explains that the system learns from users’ actions, such as when they hide replies, and will automatically filter out comments that don’t match the creator’s preferences. Creators retain visibility into these hidden replies and have the option to show them if they change their mind.

Response rules are currently available for all English language posts.

Substack has always taken a decentralized moderation approach, where writers are responsible for moderating their communities. Creators have access to tools such as the option to lock posts or threads to prevent additional comments, delete comments, and the ability to block or suspend users when necessary.

The new feature may reduce the need for creators to manually sift through each comment.

However, it is important to note that Substack has faced criticism regarding its content moderation practices, especially regarding far-right newsletters. Critics argue that the platform’s more lenient approach allows harmful speech to flourish. In today’s announcement, Substack appears to be addressing this and reaffirming its commitment to fostering diverse online communities, despite the challenges this entails.

As Substack says: “Since its founding, Substack has sought to create the best possible conditions for multi-genre cultures to thrive online. Achieving this often involves difficult trade-offs, but combined with our core model – where we only earn when writers, artists, journalists, musicians and others earn – we have been able to forge a unique path compared to other platforms.”

This year, Substack rolled out several updates to its platform, including a built-in recording studio for creators to pre-record and publish videos. It also launched a TV app for subscribers to watch video posts and live streams on their living room screens.