Thanks for all the research! I hope your internet is back by now. I've honestly been thinking about using the footnote feature but because my posts end up being in several parts I've just ended up putting my citations at the end of my multipart series and so I never fully utilized it.
My instinct on the "why" is, "they've got someone incredibly, deeply, profoundly, utterly, hopelessly, enragingly stupid in charge of UI/UX." There might also be some cross-feature bugs that are convincing them that footnotes aren't worth it (as opposed to, get off your butt and fix the bugs, you lazy engineers, it's literally what you are paid for).
Either way you can tell the end is coming. First they kill the functionality of formatting within footnotes, then they hide the footnotes button in the toolbar, now they kill link-anchors (an incredibly ancient html feature that should not be removed once used, because huge amounts of anchored links will be out there in the wild and suddenly all rendered useless at once).
What I am hoping for (and I apologize) is an "I am not as smart as a 'pre pandemic' fifth grader" translation on your ideas here. A cliff notes kind of thing.
That is the end goal - but even if (unlike a university-crafted expert) I can bring the memory of why these ideas aren't legible without speaking the expert lingo, it still takes extra time to reverse-translate them vs just having them and setting them down in "compressed" form. Hopefully either I will be able to refine the presentation or someone else will finally notice my failure and produce an explainer, haha.
Thanks for all the research! I hope your internet is back by now. I've honestly been thinking about using the footnote feature but because my posts end up being in several parts I've just ended up putting my citations at the end of my multipart series and so I never fully utilized it.
I'd say don't bother. Substack will bork footnotes any day now.
Why would they remove the footnote capability? For a well-researched and/or data-based article, it's critical.
My instinct on the "why" is, "they've got someone incredibly, deeply, profoundly, utterly, hopelessly, enragingly stupid in charge of UI/UX." There might also be some cross-feature bugs that are convincing them that footnotes aren't worth it (as opposed to, get off your butt and fix the bugs, you lazy engineers, it's literally what you are paid for).
Either way you can tell the end is coming. First they kill the functionality of formatting within footnotes, then they hide the footnotes button in the toolbar, now they kill link-anchors (an incredibly ancient html feature that should not be removed once used, because huge amounts of anchored links will be out there in the wild and suddenly all rendered useless at once).
What I am hoping for (and I apologize) is an "I am not as smart as a 'pre pandemic' fifth grader" translation on your ideas here. A cliff notes kind of thing.
That is the end goal - but even if (unlike a university-crafted expert) I can bring the memory of why these ideas aren't legible without speaking the expert lingo, it still takes extra time to reverse-translate them vs just having them and setting them down in "compressed" form. Hopefully either I will be able to refine the presentation or someone else will finally notice my failure and produce an explainer, haha.