Substack's UI is fairly minimal and does not appear to have many anti-patterns. My only complaint is that it is not easy to see just the people I am subscribed to.
On the first or second page view of any particular blog, the platform likes to greet you with a modal dialog to subscribe to the newsletter, and you have to find and click the "No thanks" text to continue.
Once you're on a page with text content, the header bar disappears when you scroll downward but reappears when you scroll upward. I scroll a lot - in both directions - because I skim and jump around, not reading in a rigidly linear way. My scrolling behavior is perfectly fine on static/traditional pages. It interacts badly with Substack's "smart" header bar, whose animation constantly grabs my attention, and also it hides the text at the top of the page - which might be the very text I wanted to read if it wasn't being covered up by the "smart" header bar.
Substack absolutely refuses to stop emailing you. It's simply not possible to subscribe to paid content and NOT have them either email you or force push notifications. Enough people have complained about this that it's pretty obvious this is intentional on their part.
