Creators, this is one way that Substack Substack Team Chris Best could be purposely affecting your email posts. And it’s sneaky AF. It seems that when someone subscribes to a newsletter, the default notification for every subscriber is “app only” regardless of whether they want to get an email or not. And to change requires a real effort and is purposefully not intuitive for a reader to find (it would take a subscriber at least 3 clicks to find how to receive an email and not just the app.) You can see from the screenshots of the “manage my subscription” I’ve attached.

Considering Substack takes 10% of every paid subscription, it’s galling that the may be gaming one of creators most important metrics, which is email open rate.

Substack, that default setting needs to change immediately.