Controlling who can see your poems
Set each poem to Public, Followers Only, or Private with a share link — and choose how visible your whole profile is.
Reviewed regularly to match the current app.
Overview
You decide who can see your work on GS Poetry, and there are two layers to it: the visibility of each individual poem, and the privacy of your profile as a whole. This guide covers both, plus a couple of related controls like hiding your location.
Setting who can see a poem
Every poem carries its own visibility setting, chosen in the Privacy section of the composer as you write it (and changeable later from the editor). There are three options:
- Public — anyone can see this poem, including visitors who aren’t signed in. It appears on your public profile and in streams. This is the default.
- Followers Only — only the people who follow you can see it.
- Private — only you and anyone you share it with can see it. Publishing a private poem gives you a private link — anyone you send it to can open the poem — and you can also share it with specific poets by username (up to 100).
Because visibility is set per poem, you can keep a tender first draft Private, share a work-in-progress with just your Followers Only, and publish your finished pieces to everyone — all from the same account.
Some features only make sense in the open, so they lock a poem to Public: a highlighted (pinned) poem, a scheduled poem (a GS Pro feature), and a response poem can’t be set to Followers Only or Private. If you try to narrow one of these, GS Poetry will let you know before it saves.
Changing a poem’s visibility later
You can change any poem’s audience at any time. Open the poem, choose Edit, adjust the Privacy setting, and save. Narrowing a poem — say, from Public to Private — immediately removes it from the audiences that can no longer see it.
Your profile’s overall privacy
Separately from individual poems, you can set how visible your whole profile is under Settings → Privacy, in Profile Privacy Control. There are four modes; by default every profile is Public:
- Public — everyone can view your profile, signed in or not.
- Private (GS Poets Only) — only registered GS Poetry members can view your profile.
- Private (Hidden) — no one can view your profile, though you can still browse the site yourself.
- Followers Only — only your followers can see your profile.
When your profile is set to Private (Hidden), new followers have to ask first: their follow becomes a request you approve or decline from your Follow Requests inbox. See Follow requests for how that works.
Hiding your location
If you’ve added a location to your profile but would rather not broadcast exactly where you are, open Settings → Edit Profile and turn on Hide Location. Your city and state are hidden while your country stays visible — so you can show roughly where you write from without the specifics.
Poem visibility and profile privacy work together. A Public poem written by a poet whose profile is Private (Hidden) is still reachable by its own link, but the profile page itself stays hidden. If your goal is to be fully out of view, set both.
Where to go next
To hide the green dot that shows when you’re online, see Hiding your online status. To keep a specific person away from you entirely, see Block, mute, or report a user. Still have a question? Contact support.