46 Comments
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Larry C. Brown's avatar

Does this only work when using Chrome? I use multiple browsers.

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HarrisWalz FTW 2024's avatar

I like the sound of this, but no offense, how do I know it's safe to download?

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Patrick God's avatar

Totally fair question! The extension is safe, but right now it has to be installed manually because we’re waiting for approval from Google. It’ll be available soon in the official Chrome Web Store, so you’ll be able to install it there directly.

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HarrisWalz FTW 2024's avatar

I’m on a desktop Mac, so I don’t know if that helps me or not.

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Meg Harris's avatar

Love it! I just added CalmYourStack and it worked instantly. My dopamine-seeking brain thanks you!

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Kira Foxfeet's avatar

Hey, so I just opted in and got the extension set up, followed all the steps... and it doesn't work. Any ideas for trouble-shooting? I use Chrome. I want to share this with my people, but want to make sure it's functional before I restack :)

I love this workaround idea, by the way!

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Buku Sarkar's avatar

You can also just zoom your browser view a little over 100% and the side panel disappears. I’m half. Kind and mine is always zoomed at 150 so I didn’t realize what everyone was complaining about. But I tried and it works at 115% too

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Nikki M Finlay, PhD's avatar

I hate the new design. Let me know when you have a version for Safari!

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Tracy Friedlander's avatar

This is great!

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BJ Prynne's avatar

I hate the new clutter... reading and processing is more difficult because the side bar makes it hard to read anything at all. Ugh. I'll try the extension thing, but I'm sure they will find a way to push only trends and ads inside the feed anyway.

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Kristina God's avatar

Well, I'm not a Subtack emloyee but could imagine this could happen...

For now we can hide it :)

Also if you're interested in collabs, my husband built a tool for us to find collab partners!

https://www.onlinewritingclub.com/p/finally-we-built-a-tool-to-find-other

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Sam's avatar

THANK YOU!

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Kristina God's avatar

You're sooo welcome Sam.

Have you tested StackBuddy yet? My husband built it to help us with collabs. It's free, too!

https://www.onlinewritingclub.com/p/finally-we-built-a-tool-to-find-other

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JHong's avatar

This is wonderful, thank you Kristina and Patrick for using your talents to bring back zen here.

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Kristina God's avatar

Hey, love this motto. Bring back zen here :)

Oh and if you're looking for collabs we introduces StackBuddy Collabs:

https://www.onlinewritingclub.com/p/finally-we-built-a-tool-to-find-other

It's free.

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Judith Ashcraft's avatar

I love this! I love seeing people take control over their own Substack experience, since the product team at Substack seem hellbent on ignoring user feedback.

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Kristina God's avatar

Oh hi Judith. Just sent you a DM!

Yesterday I talked with Zach from Substack and shared my feedback.

But I guess... it will stay, at least for a while. They need to collect data points before they gonna sunset it.

With Medium, as I shared in the post, I've seen it, done it and am DONE talking... so Patrick just said: I'll help you,

HOPE help one person every day ois my motto and with helping this ONE person Patrick also helped now many more people.

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JHong's avatar

I'm glad you two connected. Thanks both for sharing your wisdom + actionable extensions! Restacked you and included a note about Judith's upcoming... <3

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Kristina God's avatar

Yay! I sent Judith a DM.

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J D Lear's avatar

FYI this extension caused Substack to freeze when writing an article and it tries to save the draft.

To reproduce:

1. I am using Brave browser (I haven't tried the extension on other browsers, but Brave is based on chromium).

2. Duplicate or create a new post in Substack

3. Start writing. When it does its autosave to draft, note that the page becomes unresponsive.

Disabling the extension fixed the issue.

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Patrick God's avatar

Thanks so much for flagging this! I really appreciate the clear steps you shared. Super helpful. I’ll check this out on my end.

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Sharon Hines's avatar

This is awesome! And so are you and Patrick!

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Gary Mucklow's avatar

Oh my, this is like returning home to find your children have actually cleaned the house! It's so tidy. Thank you muchly, both to you for sharing it and to your husband @patrickgod for making it!

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Jezz Lundkvist's avatar

I notice that last night, and it so distracting and annoying.

And also, what does ti even help me to grow? Not much. They focus more on the big names over smaller.

I also like go into the different tabs of subject like ”art & illustrations” something they have hidden now. And I think that is super bad move from them!

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Tania Truskalo's avatar

personally i thought the banner is great for discoverability. I like the idea of the home page being more like a dashboard of whats going on. i dont like having to click between different pages, i like seeing it all in one spot. my brain just works that way i suppose. i'm the type that has a million tabs open at once and i'm constantly toggling between pages. i dont stay in one place mentally, so i quite like the update.

it also better aligns with my growth goals at the moment. when i write i usually do it on a text doc with no distraction anyway, and when i post notes i usually do that from the app, which is still separated out for the most part.

i like that its sorta like a newspaper with different sections on the home page. it sorta reminds me of windows 98' era Yahoo home page.

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Kristina God's avatar

Hi Tania, nice reading from you again. You're a multi-tasker then. Read an article about that we were all multi-taskers as homo sapiens.

Patrick can't remember the Yahoo homepage but says maybe it was like this :) See? For you this new feature is brilliant then.

I also have hundreds of tabs open. Do you know ONE TAB? Sometimes this helps me ^^ sometimes not

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