Slashdot Mirror
Is Social Media Losing Ground To Email Newsletters? (qz.com)
"My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications," brags New York Times technology writer Mike Isaac. "When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web.
"That's because my new social network is an email newsletter." Every week or so, I blast it out to a few thousand people who have signed up to read my musings. Some of them email back, occasionally leading to a thoughtful conversation. It's still early in the experiment, but I think I love it. The newsletter is not a new phenomenon. But there is a growing interest among those who are disenchanted with social media in what writer Craig Mod has called "the world's oldest networked publishing platform." For us, the inbox is becoming a more attractive medium than the news feed...
For me, the change has happened slowly, but the reasons for it were unmistakable. Every time I was on Twitter, I felt worse. I worried about being too connected to my phone, too wrapped up in the latest Twitter dunks... Now, when I feel the urge to tweet an idea that I think is worth expounding on, I save it for my newsletter... It's much more fun than mediating political fights between relatives on my Facebook page or decoding the latest Twitter dustup...
"You don't have to fight an algorithm to reach your audience," Casey Newton, a journalist who writes The Interface, a daily newsletter for technology news site The Verge, told me. "With newsletters, we can rebuild all of the direct connections to people we lost when the social web came along."
The article suggests a broader movement away from Facebook's worldview to more private ways of sharing, like Slack . "We felt this growing sense of despair in traditional social media," says the CEO of Substack, makers of a newsletter-writing software. "Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- they've all incentivized certain negative patterns."
"That's because my new social network is an email newsletter." Every week or so, I blast it out to a few thousand people who have signed up to read my musings. Some of them email back, occasionally leading to a thoughtful conversation. It's still early in the experiment, but I think I love it. The newsletter is not a new phenomenon. But there is a growing interest among those who are disenchanted with social media in what writer Craig Mod has called "the world's oldest networked publishing platform." For us, the inbox is becoming a more attractive medium than the news feed...
For me, the change has happened slowly, but the reasons for it were unmistakable. Every time I was on Twitter, I felt worse. I worried about being too connected to my phone, too wrapped up in the latest Twitter dunks... Now, when I feel the urge to tweet an idea that I think is worth expounding on, I save it for my newsletter... It's much more fun than mediating political fights between relatives on my Facebook page or decoding the latest Twitter dustup...
"You don't have to fight an algorithm to reach your audience," Casey Newton, a journalist who writes The Interface, a daily newsletter for technology news site The Verge, told me. "With newsletters, we can rebuild all of the direct connections to people we lost when the social web came along."
The article suggests a broader movement away from Facebook's worldview to more private ways of sharing, like Slack . "We felt this growing sense of despair in traditional social media," says the CEO of Substack, makers of a newsletter-writing software. "Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- they've all incentivized certain negative patterns."
It is SPAM
Man, this Social Media echo chamber is too noisy, I think I'll make my own smaller one that doesn't ever challenge my broader views and just wants to argue the finer details that we can all agree are difficult to get right.
When Big Brother tells you what to think and bans you for wrong think did you think people were going to stay in the social justice echo chamber circle jerks?
Around here the word is "freeze peach" and "facebook and New Zealand can block whomever they want" (but you have to bake gay wedding cakes because muh silver librariez or something)
So other forms of communication crop up - this is a good thing to counter the oppression of social media (so called).
It’s time to update our social network’s stodgy image and give it the sleek, dazzling veneer of the 1980s!
#DeleteChrome
Every week or so, I blast it out to a few thousand people who have signed up to read my musings.
Where's the spam, dumbass.
Sorry, Mike, no one wants to read your "newsletter" spam.
to track and monetize the newsletters.
Most email services strip out all the links, images, javascript, like buttons and donate buttons.
All they can do is cull a list of valid email addresses...
No.
It started out great. Then it became filled with spam. And Facebook was nice and clean.
Now Facebook is filled with garbage, and email is getting close to spam free.
Let's see what happens next.
History really does repeat. The electronic mailing list makes a comeback. What next? Newsgroups?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list
The short answer is no.
The longer answer is also no, but with more detail. It's still typical to use social media to connect with audiences, because that's where they are.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"My favorite new social network is my own newsletter"
I never switched from email in the first place, so it's a little weird seeing a normal tool treated like some weird, vintage retro-technology being rediscovered by marketing hipsters.
I eagerly await a breathless news story that postal mail still functions and can send letters directly to other people.
Should have added RSS for that "your chamber has a leak" feeling.
Congratulations, you've just reinvented the Amateur Press Association, commonly referred to as an APA. Yet again, history repeats itself.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
No, it is not.
Aren't blogs supposed to be for that sort of thing, giving readers a little more control about when and where? Disallow comments and don't post an email address if you're worried about reaction from the unwashed masses.
''I'm so glad i kept my e-mail address. Seems in the future it will be just as useful as how it was in 1995.''
Finally some common sense. And (younger) people valuing e-mail and mailing lists amidst all smartphone- and other hypes. Cause it just-works. And always has.
Because of jumping on bandwagons like this. Every one wants to have a maling list these days, filling up our once spacious multi gigabyte inboxes which we thought would never fill up.
What's old is new again. Facebook is dead! Long live the Mail List.
That's actually an *old* form of communication - before the www people actually printed them and sent them by snail. Millennials seem to finally be catching on to a degree that they've been lied to by their parents and their technocratic society for most of their lives. It was not, as they would have you believe, 'always this way, what can you do?'. As far as social media companies go, they blew it themselves with their creepiness and their greed. They squandered a truly golden opportunity to do good, and they will never, ever get their credibility back.
Usenet
FTP
Forums
P2P
Web sites
Yahoo messenger with chatrooms.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Forums never stopped working
...it's the new vinyl!
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Social media needs to be erradicated, it's a cancer on our entire civilization at this point.
And moderated USENET groups.
Usenet will be "discovered" and make a comeback.
Nope.
Requiem for the American Dream
I remember getting my first email account back in 1988, it was like a very fast letter, very scary but you quickly learned to be careful with your words. One badly place phrase or ministerpretation and the other party was offended. You had to learn to write correctly and with empathy. Modern social media tried to offer us very, very fast communication that we thought we'd need for the modern fast moving world, turns out what we really needed was the complete opposite. We need brakes on our communicaiton, we need to time to process, to be thoughtful and compasionate. We've swung from one extreme to another another and back.
I got sucked into the Facebook/Twitter world, met a lot of good people both online and then in real life but in the last 6 months I've simply cut my usage down from around 2 hours a day to around 10 mins a week, sometimes I won't post for 2-3 weeks at a time and I feel way better now.
The social media networks want you confused, constantly posting and never sure, that's how they keep the numbers up and keep you looking at the ads. They want to "on edge" and worrying about your status, else they lose their ad money. Sorry but they're simply worth it and the sort of "friend" that needs you in that state, certainly isn't worth it. Ease it back, use it like a local community hall and visit once a week or once a fortnight and feel better.
This little phrase reveals the rot in social media platforms: They exist my monetizing their subscriber's content: That requires behaviour (eg. activity-tracking, automating spam, destroying privacy, creating addiction) that doesn't benefit their subscribers.
can I subscribe to your newsletter?
I was fine curating my blog reading with Google Reader. All the meaningful up to date content I wanted.
I have no idea where all those great content creators are now. Creating email newsletters?
Social media for a time was about having the most followers. Its all about the numbers you could garner even if you really didn't know or care about those people and their own lives. I do think the smaller more focused model is much better suited to people actually benefiting from a social group.
Is it a Newsletter or a Web Page over SMTP? Sounds like a Web Page over SMTP.
Overnight success and near instant rises to positions of influence are the huge draw of Twitter and social platforms -- you broadcast not just to the world today, but also in the future.
Email newsletters won't replace that, and the author will quickly get sick of receiving dozens of them from relatives.
In a nutshell, it works for those who are already successes, but does nothing for the average, who are the target of the platforms...
amazing, next week we'll read something about a guy who says blogs are his new old prefered social media!
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I think I'll make my own smaller one that doesn't ever challenge my broader views and just wants to argue the finer details that we can all agree are difficult to get right.
It's adorable that you think people use social media to broaden their views. How impressively optimistic of you.
Never mind that exactly the opposite tends to happen and most people demonstrably seek out channels to reinforce their existing views and confirmation bias.
You know what's great about those email lists? Once you're done reading (or skimming) them you can just delete the ones that you don't need to look at again and only flag interesting ones for later reference.
You made sense (though in a very out-of-date way) until that very last word (newsletter). It's just email, and newsletters are an obscure niche within. And newsletters are probably the least social, since it's usually just one entity shouting at a bunch of others, without replies. Newsletters are nearly asocial, a great example of taking "socialness" to the absolute, barest minimum without be totally disqualified (still technically "social" since a person is talking to others). Get away from newsletters, though, and email gets a lot more social.
But for many (granted, not all!) people, email is one of their old social networks (other popular ones being Usenet, CompuServe/AOL forums, etc), and over the last 25 years a lot of people have transitioned to WWW-based social networks.
I think anyone who thinks people are generally moving from the web to email for social networks is just plain wrong. But there are signs that some people are moving from the web to proprietary messaging protocols. They're not email, though.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Isaac's newsletter is delivered by a vendor with all the same info harvesting and privacy harvesting as the social networks. Same old, same old.
I envisioned that happening a few years ago.
Next month it's my four year anniversary without Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Hope more people realize the bad things social networks contribute to society and downgrade their communications like that.