Substack's comment handling is a dumpster fire, which you mostly don't notice on other substacks because (a) they hide almost all comments on a post by default

Substack's comment handling is a dumpster fire, which you mostly don't notice on other substacks because (a) they hide almost all comments on a post by default (Scott got them to disable that for him because the comments are a big part of his blog), and (b) most blogs hosted there don't have a community the size of Scott's. Open the network requests tab in developer tools and cry a little: they actually have an elegant system that would let them minimize the data churn needed to host exactly this size of comment thread, but instead it reprocesses the entire comment tree every time just about _anything_ happens on the page.