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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."
Sorry, Mike, no one wants to read your "newsletter" spam.
"My favorite new social network is my own newsletter"
Same with IRC. I listened to an interview with the founder of Slack and everything he said I just nodded along with "yeah, that's how we developed software over IRC."
No, SPAM is when you didn't ask for it to be sent.
I think this is one of the great features regarding an email newsletter. I can create filters in my inbox, and sort them accordingly. It's the polar opposite of the newsfeed algorithms which wrest control from the individual who is seen as the product. Every social network I've seen, which may not be many, being mostly Facebook, Google+/Google News, and Strava, have gone the AI algorithm route, meaning you have less control over the content of your newsfeed, you can't weight your friends for which ones you want to see at the top, it's predicted for you by past interaction.
With email I can have folders that I sort things into, even automatically by rules that I setup, not the company that hosts my email service, and determine which ones I might prioritize. Sometimes it's nice to let a folder get backlogged with 20 unread emails, then once a week go through that particular folder, rather than being inundated with everything, and paid posts, all day long with an endless scroll. It was the endless scroll "feature" which really showed me how worthless social media is, and the waste of time it had become. No way to know you're caught up, no way to know you didn't miss a particular post from a friend.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
You have done a really good job of describing social media and its effects. /.
One of the best posts on this topic I have read on
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range