Today, we’re launching new content preferences: a set of dials that put you in charge of what your feed shows you.

Almost exactly a year ago, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote, “Substack is social media. Yes, okay. It is.”

We started Substack in 2017 as a response to the ways social media was warping culture, so it might seem odd that we’ve somehow built … a social media app. But that doesn’t capture the whole story. Traditional social media apps are designed to lure us into an attention game that keeps us locked in an endless scroll. It can be fun, but it’s often maddening and divisive.We’re building a new kind of social media—or maybe what social media should always have been. Here, you have a media ecosystem with a different set of rules that serve you. This is a place for real human relationships built around stories and culture. The feed is designed to lead you to deeper experiences. Meaningful connection—not shallow attention—is the fuel for the whole machine.

We started Substack in 2017 as a response to the ways social media was warping culture, so it might seem odd that we’ve somehow built … a social media app. But that doesn’t capture the whole story. Traditional social media apps are designed to lure us into an attention game that keeps us locked in an endless scroll. It can be fun, but it’s often maddening and divisive.

We’re building a new kind of social media—or maybe what social media should always have been. Here, you have a media ecosystem with a different set of rules that serve you. This is a place for real human relationships built around stories and culture. The feed is designed to lead you to deeper experiences. Meaningful connection—not shallow attention—is the fuel for the whole machine.

In short, the Substack feed isn’t built to maximize time spent scrolling but to get you to the work you’ll care about—work you’ll stick with and, ideally, pay for. And we have evidence that it’s succeeding. In the past six months, the Substack app has driven nearly 800,000 paid subscriptions and more than 80 million free subscriptions to writers and creators. More than half of paid subscriptions from the app came directly from the Notes feed.

It’s also fun. Open Substack and you’ll find good acupuncturist merch. A celebration of soup season. Photography from Kyoto Station. A founder’s review of Dostoyevsky. A haiku for every World Cup game. It’s a place to dive deeper into the stories of the day and to find and support the culture you care about.

The new dials—which you can find in the content preferences section of your settings—let you shape your feed the way you want it. See more or less video, audio, longform, or community features; mute specific keywords and phrases; fine-tune the topics you follow; and automatically label AI-generated material.

Want to hear more about baseball while the playoffs are on? Feel like snoozing politics for a week? How about seeing more community chatter—like the chat thread debriefing the latest episode of your favorite podcast—or less video in your feed? You get to decide.

This level of control serves both the creators who share their work here and the people who come to discover and enjoy what they publish. We’ve heard that both sides of the relationship want less noise and more help connecting readers with work that they’ll find meaningful. These updates aim to do exactly that.

On Substack, you’re in control: of the culture you support, the audiences you build, and now, the feed you scroll.