Cool New Feature: Substack Threads

Substack is building a cool new capability and you guys get to help me beta test it!

Hi everyone, some exciting news from Substack I wanted to tell you about.

I came up on the internet message board culture of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. I was on a couple MMA message boards, and another one for a economics/foreign affairs writer I enjoyed back then. For those of you who came up in the age of social media, it’s a bit difficult to describe to you what the internet was like back then. Our message boards were very tight communities. We had long debates, sometimes dragging on for months. We had a library of lingo and inside jokes. After a while we all felt like we knew each other well, and we’d celebrate when our message board pals would unlock a life achievement, like getting married or having a kid. On one of them we even had a Secret Santa. I have several good friends that I still talk to on a daily basis from message boards 20 years ago. There is something about the closed, interest-based community culture of the message boards that open-platform social media just doesn’t replicate.

Well, a couple months ago I was on a call with the Substack team so they could pick my brain. When I was asked to do the meeting, I just thought I was going to sit in and listen, but it turned out when I got there that the whole meeting was set up for me, and the whole Substack team was there ready with notes and questions to pick my brain about the platform. This is one thing I truly love about Substack. They’ve been helpful to me every step of the way, always available, as if I’m some VIP and not just a humble history podcaster.

Anyway, I didn’t realize I was going to be the focus of the meeting, so I wasn’t prepared to answer questions. But when they asked, I told them what I just told you about the old message boards and social media, and that I would love to see Substack move in a direction that encourages more community-building, and not just me posting and you guys responding in the comments. I told them that if the capability existed for my Substack subscribers to be able to interact not only with me, but with each other, create posts and have conversations with each other, with me maybe acting as an MC or moderator, but basically just being part of the MartyrMade community, I probably wouldn’t need Twitter, Facebook, or any of those sites ever again.

Well, it just so happened that Substack was already way ahead of me. At the time of our meeting, they were in the final stages of building a beta version of a new feature called Substack Threads, a feature on the app that, from what I can tell, works something like Telegram (at least in this early version). I asked about developing future capabilities, like allowing me to do live audio or video streams where I could respond to questions and comments as they come in (like Periscope), or even being able to bring in you guys to participate in the stream, and all of these things were already being discussed as potential future developments. I am very excited about this, if you can’t tell, because I really mean it when I say that I would love to be able to forget about social media sites and just hang out here with you guys.

Well, they could tell I was excited, and so they asked me and my readers to help them beta test the early version of the app capability. You and I will be the very first users, and they are actively seeking feedback about things they should change, features they should add, capabilities they should enhance, etc.

I will be using Threads to share a lot of pictures and book quotes I come across in my reading. I guess I could do that here, but I’ve got you guys trained to expect a 10-page missive every time I post here and I don’t want to let you down. I’ll also be posting about topics like foreign policy, and other things I think and read a lot about, but which usually don’t make it onto the main Substack. I’ll also be posting shorter thoughts that don’t merit a full Substack post, and hopefully we can use these as prompts for conversation in a way that feels less formal than responding to regular comments (which I can’t seem to do without writing an entire essay… even this is just supposed to announce the new Substack Threads feature and I’m already verging on essay territory, wtf is wrong with me…).

We are going online today (Monday, 8/15 at 9am ET), and I would love it if you guys would participate. I’m sure there will be kinks that need to be worked out, but that’s sort of the point of the exercise, I suppose.

During the testing phase, Substack Threads will only be available for iPhone as a feature on the Substack app (not the desktop website), but availability will of course be expanded in the future.

So, all you have to do is get the Substack app (if you don’t already have it) by clicking the button above or by following this link right here. Enter your Substack account information and you should already be subscribed to MartyrMade and have access to Substack Threads. Once you’re in the app, look for the little speech bubble icon at the bottom, like this:

And then… that’s it. I’ll start posting, and we’ll see what’s what!

Here are some other links the folks at Substack gave me for you guys:

Threads Pilot Announcement

FAQ

If you guys have any questions, I might be able to answer them, and I’m in direct contact with the Substack folks so one way or another we’ll get you sorted out. Thanks for doing this with me!