I can’t believe how bad the Substack UX is

Here’s a screenshot of an article on Substack:

At the time that I took this screenshot I had spent ~10-seconds trying to click on the link to Wikipedia. It wasn’t working. Was my trackpad out of battery? No. Was my browser frozen? No. Had the NSA hackers finally taken control of my laptop? No (I think).

I gave up on clicking the link, and continued reading. I then scrolled down a few more pixels and this appeared:

It’s a fucking modal. And of course, because a modal is on the screen we need to make all the other elements on the page uninteractable. If you look very closely at the previous screenshot you can see it appearing it at the bottom of the screen. Of course you wouldn’t notice, because it’s the same colour as the background and it’s on the part of the screen you’re not looking at.

It’s 2025 now. We all know that modals suck. Modals that slowly scroll onto the screen and block your view of what you’re trying to read, and prevent you from clicking on links suck even more.

Time till Substack is viewed in the same light as medium.com - 175 days.