Substack Surfacer: countering Substack overwhelm

A Python script to rank Substack posts by likes per subscriber

There was a golden age of Substack where I subscribed to <50 newsletters, and I could more or less read everything I wanted to. Now, however, I subscribe to >200, and I just don’t have time to keep up.

Enter: Substack Surfacer, a Python script I created that produces CSVs like this with the posts from all of the Substacks you follow, in a form that makes it easy to sort by the number of likes or (even more useful) the number of likes per subscriber (since of course, newsletters with more subscribers tend to get more likes).

Right now it requires basic knowledge of Python (pip install), and it can take a while to complete due to Substack’s rate limiting (about an hour per 100 newsletters).

Some of the posts from the last couple of months that it helped me surface:

• Death of a knowledge system (331 likes from 759 free subscribers) and Birth of the Wisdom Economy (122 likes from 759 free subscribers) by

  Nicolas Michaelsen

• Deep AF Green by

  Tucker Walsh
  (16 likes from 182 free subscribers)

• Finding balance with technology by

  Aaron Gabriel Neyer
  (6 likes from 94 free subscribers)

• Becoming Soul (24 likes from 269 free subscribers) by

  Sabra Saperstein

• Live threads through my favorite city — London (14 likes from 107 free subscribers) by

  Eirini Malliaraki

• How to Start a School With Your Friends (96 likes from ~1,000 free subscribers) by

  Priya

Let me know if you find it useful!

Best,
Stephen