Substack is giving writers expanded control over their comments sections.
The paid newsletter website announced in a blog post on Wednesday that it is introducing a new system called Reply Rules. With Reply Rules, individual writers who open up comments underneath their posts can write out a quick summary of what they'd like to see from said comments. Anyone who wants to write a comment underneath a post, or in response to a Note or in Chat, will see these rules. Examples given included "no AI slop" or "stay on topic," but theoretically, you could also ask people to exclusively reply in limerick form or something, if you felt like it.
Compliance is not based on an honor system, however. Substack says this new system will learn from whenever you hide any replies that don't abide by the rules, and will automatically hide other replies it thinks you would have hidden before you get to them. The Substack blog post was not highly specific on how this system works, but if it actually is capable of automatic moderation based on natural language prompts, that could be very useful to popular writers on the platform.