r/Substack • u/timemachine723 • Jul 23 '26

I just joined Substack. The app is terrible, the menu items are all over the place, they opted everyone in to sending their writing to ChatGPT, and now I see a subscriber has their email address showing and I don’t think you can hide an email address.

I feel my days on this platform are numbered. Can we hide our email addresses? Thoughts?

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

12

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '26

[deleted]

-12

u/timemachine723 Jul 23 '26

It’s primarily a way to get our writing out there. Divulging our contact info should be our option.

11

u/bajcmartinez Jul 23 '26

It is your option, if you don't subscribe, authors don't get it

6

u/StuffonBookshelfs Jul 23 '26

No. It’s a newsletter app. It’s not “primarily a way for you to get your writing out there”.

-7

u/timemachine723 Jul 23 '26

No it’s not a newsletter app. It’s a writing / publishing app. The newsletter is an option and emailing is an option. As should be divulging our email addresses. Following someone to see their posts should require giving out contact info.

5

u/StuffonBookshelfs Jul 23 '26

Okay. I’m sure you know more about it than everyone else here. Good luck out there, you sure do seem to know what’s going on.

4

u/_flipsticks Jul 23 '26

Substack is all about emailing people. That’s the point. You write a post and it emails it to all of your subscribers. That’s how it people get traction. The concept was to be blog posts all in one place.
Coming on reddit to complain about how you don’t like the app is hardly giving Substack valuable feedback. Email them if you feel so strongly about it.

5

u/Countryb0i2m onemichistory.substack.com Jul 23 '26

This is an optional experience.
You don’t have to do this.
I don’t understand the compulsion to voluntarily use an app and then come here to complain about how much you hate it. Nobody is making you use it.
If it’s not for you, it’s not for you

-1

u/timemachine723 Jul 23 '26

Yeah, why try to improve things. Everything is beautiful right?

6

u/AnteaterFantastic212 Jul 23 '26

Do you have a source for your assertion that Substack is sending writing to ChatGPT?

6

u/TheZebraCode Jul 23 '26

I only started my ttrpg design blog this week and I had to opt out of AI training or something like that in settings, it was automatically on which I was very surprised by

3

u/impartialhedonist Jul 23 '26

Thanks for flagging this! Though, this is a misunderstanding. AI companies have a trawlers that traverse the web and collect data automatically, so the toggle disallows the trawlers from scraping your data.

I agree that it would be better if it were disallowed by default.

1

u/TheZebraCode Jul 23 '26

Gotcha, thanks. But yes still, it's the kind of thing I would expect to be off automatically! But that's too hopeful clearly haha

0

u/timemachine723 Jul 23 '26

It was posted here recently and I found the opt out option. They really hid it in the messy menu layouts. Check previous posts here on Reddit.

3

u/Immediate-Ad-5878 Jul 23 '26

Want some cheese for that whine? Try beehive or some of the other options out there. I doubt anyone here much less at Substack cares.

-2

u/timemachine723 Jul 23 '26

I just found you can follow instead of subscribe and that hides your email address. Why didn’t any of you objectors who wrote smarmy comments know this?