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Is Social Media Losing Ground To Email Newsletters? (qz.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the in-your-inbox dept.

"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."

60 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Echo Chamber by Zaelath · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Echo Chamber by rtb61 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Down to numbers and not an echo chamber. So real name social media with say 100 million users. Even a tiny, super tiny unrepresentative grouping, say 0.01% not even 1 in 100 but 1 in 10,000. You divide 100 million by 10 thousand and that still is 10,000 people. Now you have 10,000 people screaming at you on the internet and your social media life becomes shite, even blocking becomes impossible. Now add in fake accounts or paid to troll and that becomes worse.

      Quite simply broad based real world social media is shite because numbers. I mean in real life, coming across those 1 in 10,000 arseholes (from your perspective), extremely unlikely, yet on the internet, very likely and once you gain the attention of one, you will also be targeted by the others. So yeah broad based social media makes life hell for everyone because numbers and people forget they are not just making a personal statement to a small audience, their crowd, they are making one to the entire world and it hangs out there, like a bad smell that just will not go away.

      Real name social media, is an extremely bad idea and the only use is for targeted control and manipulation, all those who use it should sanely, delete their account, all you will do is expose yourself to your ideological enemies of what ever ilk, and no matter how small the percentage, in still sizeable and extremely disruptive numbers.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    2. Re:Echo Chamber by Megane · · Score: 1

      So what's next, forums? Usenet? RSS? As I was reading all the replies, I'd think of something like "this is the new vinyl", scroll down, and see that someone had already said that! Have we finally reached Peak Facebook, and it's time for them to join GeoCities, MySpace and Digg?

      I have been faithfully resisting joining FakeBook all these years, and it looks like I may be one of the cool kids soon. It's time to get to work setting up a blog on my domain/web site that I've had since the dotcom era!

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
    3. Re: Echo Chamber by rickb928 · · Score: 1

      I remember when people actually typed most of these psots.

      --
      deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
    4. Re:Echo Chamber by Sir_Eptishous · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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
    5. Re:Echo Chamber by whitroth · · Score: 1

      Correction: that's "my social media chamber that only challenges my views by online trolls, and sells information about me to spammers and targeted ads."

    6. Re:Echo Chamber by doom · · Score: 2

      I think the problem with what we call "social media" is not that it uses "real names", but rather that it promises real identities, but is unable or unwilling to actually deliver-- hence the farms of shills and jammers that infest all public discussions at present.

      What we really need is actual verified IDs combined with TOS that (at a minimum) demand disclosure of conflicts of interest with severe penalities if any violation is proven.

      But that won't get you a solution to the numbers problem-- clearly we also are always going to need some form of curation and moderation that attempts to filter for the good stuff. Radically democratic anarchic access of all to all clearly doesn't scale real well.

    7. Re:Echo Chamber by doom · · Score: 1

      I've been saying for some time that in a world where vinyl LPs can make a come-back there's still some hope for web standards. My prediction (and hope) is a trend for retro no-javascript web sites.

  2. Social networks need an update by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 3, Funny

    It’s time to update our social network’s stodgy image and give it the sleek, dazzling veneer of the 1980s!

    --
    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:Social networks need an update by Matheus · · Score: 1

      I think Gopher is making a comeback...

  3. Yeah no by 110010001000 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Sorry, Mike, no one wants to read your "newsletter" spam.

    1. Re:Yeah no by caseih · · Score: 2

      And yet they apparently do. At least a couple thousand people who signed up. Might be insignificant compared to having a million followers on twitter. But let's be honest how many people really want to read others' facebook posts either.

      There's always going to be a place for a more traditional email newsletter. I'm subscribed to several for business purposes. It's a heck of a lot easier to just open my email than it is to log into some social media site for something like that. And twitter is just too short for thoughts on market analysis, pricing trends, etc.

    2. Re:Yeah no by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      People frequently do, newsletters and the like distributed via email lists remains the best way. Everybody on that list has the ability to have themselves removed if they want to, so you know that they're not on it if they're not completely disinterested. Sure, there are a few people who don't bother ever opening it up, but there are ways of cleaning those addresses.

      Social media was never a particularly great way of making a sale, with the possible exception of the very early days. The big thing that it gave is ways of targeting users, but ultimately, you're counting on FB or whoever to do the right thing and you're largely held hostage to whatever their current whims are.

    3. Re:Yeah no by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm more likely to read or at least skim over a newsletter that I only get once a month. Meanwhile I "miss" stuff all the time on social media because it keeps getting drowned out by the latest cat video or whatever that everyone keeps commenting on.

    4. Re:Yeah no by Obfuscant · · Score: 1

      Everybody on that list has the ability to have themselves removed if they want to,

      Uhh, sure. There's a company whose name I shall not mention, but their business model is to keep spammers, I mean companies, in constant contact with their victims, I mean customers. They charge for this service, so have a vested interest in never removing anyone from any list. One of my suppliers decided I should get their regular newsletters and it was simply impossible to get off that list. It was one of the early entries in my procmail junk filter.

      Just because an email has email management information doesn't mean there is anyone or anything paying attention to the unsub attempts. And even if it works once, there's nothing stopping the spammer from putting you right back on the list.

      but there are ways of cleaning those addresses.

      The only way I know of knowing whether your email to someone has been opened is if you send HTML email (strike one) which includes a one pixel image (strike two) linked from a special URL that is logged and monitored (strike three).

      Social media was never a particularly great way of making a sale,

      Spammers always knew that, and that's what makes this amazing discovery by the "technology writer" so utterly unamazing. He's a tech writer and suddenly figured out that email is a great way of dumping his message out onto others? Really?

      you're counting on FB or whoever to do the right thing

      I've found that FB more often does the right thing than the spammers running their email "newsletters".

  4. But there is no good way by bobstreo · · Score: 1

    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...

    1. Re:But there is no good way by caseih · · Score: 2

      Which is exactly why I like them! But I am old and very unhip.

      But also the kinds of things I get in the form of email newsletters are already monetized in the form of a subscription cost (business analysis).

    2. Re:But there is no good way by Dayze!Confused · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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]
  5. Mailing Lists. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    History really does repeat. The electronic mailing list makes a comeback. What next? Newsgroups?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mailing_list

  6. Ask Betteridge by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    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.'"
  7. What a self-absorbed P.O.S by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "My favorite new social network is my own newsletter"

    1. Re:What a self-absorbed P.O.S by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Any more self absorbed than having an account on Facebook, Twitter, ...

  8. Re:Remember what email used to be like? by darthsilun · · Score: 1

    Is it time for Usenet to make a comeback?

  9. Thanks for making me feel old by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

    1. Re:Thanks for making me feel old by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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."

    2. Re:Thanks for making me feel old by Obfuscant · · Score: 1

      so it's a little weird seeing a normal tool treated like some weird, vintage retro-technology being rediscovered by marketing hipsters.

      Not a marketing hipster, a TECHNOLOGY WRITER. For a major newspaper. Kinda makes you wonder about his insight as a technology writer, huh?

      Next week's news: you can actually listen to music and stuff on a device that fits in your pocket!

  10. Congratulations! by techno-vampire · · Score: 2

    Congratulations, you've just reinvented the Amateur Press Association, commonly referred to as an APA. Yet again, history repeats itself.

    --
    Good, inexpensive web hosting
  11. Is Social Media Losing Ground To Email Newsletters by youngone · · Score: 1

    No, it is not.

  12. Why not blog? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

  13. Re:CAUTION: American Dumbass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Thanks friend, for pointing out the American.

  14. Re:Well what did you expect? by infolation · · Score: 1

    Big Brother might have been concerned by Social Media's claims that it's future is messaging, encryption, and privacy.

    But if people instead switch to old-fashioned unencrypted email, the TLAs who were relying on social media access don't lose their personal info data-pipe.

  15. Is this why every site pops up wanting your email? by xack · · Score: 1

    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.

  16. What's old... by WOPR+Jr. · · Score: 1

    What's old is new again. Facebook is dead! Long live the Mail List.

  17. Re:Ah we have a name for these by bferrell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, SPAM is when you didn't ask for it to be sent.

  18. Re:CAUTION: American Dumbass by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Funny

    I find your ideas intriguing.

    Do you, like, have a facetube channel or something?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  19. Soon to be new again by AHuxley · · Score: 1

    Usenet
    FTP
    Forums
    P2P
    Web sites
    Yahoo messenger with chatrooms.

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
  20. Re:Remember what email used to be like? by Teckla · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is it time for Usenet to make a comeback?

    This seems highly feasible to me. A few features that I think could make it explode in popularity:

    • * A really nice web-based interface for people that prefer accessing Usenet via the web.
    • * Really nice clients for iOS and Android.
    • * A way to "sign up" and have a "proof of identity" that all your messages would be signed (automatically) with (this "sign up" would obviously just be local).
    • * A way to avoid spam, perhaps similar to ad-blockers for web browsers where you subscribe to a list and it handles the filtering for you.
    • * Support for inline images (perhaps embedded base 64 in messages).
  21. Re:Remember what email used to be like? by greatLearner4575 · · Score: 1

    Usenet/Newsgroups would be great but it fell away back in the day, I think, due to spam. Now Reddit seems to have taken tts place.

  22. Fuck social media by Red_Forman · · Score: 2

    Forums never stopped working

  23. E-mail... by Hallux-F-Sinister · · Score: 2

    ...it's the new vinyl!

    --
    Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
    1. Re:E-mail... by Matheus · · Score: 1

      Yep.

      The return of the Listserv is imminent! Gawdammit.. I administered a bunch of these. There's a reason they faded from existence and it's really fscking annoying how fast people forget the past.

      Y'know what a newsletter is? It's a blog that's spammed to my inbox. I read about 0.001% of my friends' blogs as it is.. I don't need that shoved down my throat. The timing of this is kinda funny as a friend of mine recently abandoned all of the social networks and is in the process of starting a newsletter. GFY. Not subscribing...

      Check this: I have about 2500 friends on Facebook (all IRL friends) ... let's say about 20% of those post regularly so 500. If Facebook went away today and all of those 500 switched to writing newsletters that's 500 emails hitting me at least monthly but likely the chattier ones go weekly or even daily so I start getting (another.. I get about 200 emails a day personal.. about 500 for work) probably a few thousand more emails a month of 'longer' length because "Newsletter!" which is a ton of text content I can spend hours scrolling through or I start filtering a bunch of it which tbh means I won't read most of what gets filtered out of my inbox and my filters will be pretty static so I'll start losing out on a bunch of stuff I might actually be interested in.. Meanwhile 2000 people I used to be able to get a hold of via FB-chat/etc are harder or impossible to reach (I've had the same number since '94.. sadly my friends aren't the same).. SO I code algorithms to try to get the content out of these thousands of emails that I want to actually read and I create a contact system to get a hold of all of my people and... guess what I JUST FSCKING CREATED A PERSONAL SOCIAL NETWORK!!! I don't want to do that.. I have other things to do like see these people in the real world as often as I can SO thankfully Facebook (and the others) did this work for me. Is it perfect? no. Is it for everyone? no. Will it last forever? highly unlikely Does it provide a lot of value for me right now? absolutely.

      Long story short: Rose colored glasses are shite. Technology (in sound and in social engineering) is not good or bad it is what you make it. Get off my lawn... I'm about to throw a Jart at you.

    2. Re:E-mail... by doom · · Score: 1

      I have about 2500 friends on Facebook (all IRL friends)

      Oh, bullshit. No one can manage that many friends "IRL". It's way more likely you don't have a single real friend and you don't know what I'm talking about.

  24. Killing 'social media'? Sure hope it is! by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

    Social media needs to be erradicated, it's a cancer on our entire civilization at this point.

  25. Pretty soon by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 1

    Usenet will be "discovered" and make a comeback.

    1. Re:Pretty soon by Tunefix · · Score: 1

      More likely some upstart will create somthing that behaves like usenet, and claim that it is nothing like usenet at all, it is "new and revolutionary way to connect and interact". And the screen (on any device) will be at least 50% whitespace.

  26. Re:Ah we have a name for these by dryeo · · Score: 1

    Seems that for a lot of people, it is when they've changed their mind and can't be bothered to unsubscribe, forgot they signed up for it or using an email program or web page that hides important info such as how to unsubscribe.

    --
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
  27. Re:Remember what email used to be like? by dryeo · · Score: 1

    There's a bunch of beta refugees at comp.misc which has some interesting posts. Lots of other interesting groups still out there as well.
    Not much spam either now.

    --
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
  28. Re:Remember what email used to be like? by dryeo · · Score: 1

    I hope so. I've been thinking about it recently.

    You can get a free text-only Usenet account here:
    https://www.eternal-september....

    Then install and configure Pan or Thunderbird.

    Also free accounts at http://www.aioe.org/ and if you don't mind paying, http://www.astraweb.com/ where I payed $10 for 25GBs. 25GBs is a lot of text posts.

    --
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
  29. Re:Remember what email used to be like? by dryeo · · Score: 2

    Yes, Usenet is much better now that the spammers have moved to reddit.

    --
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
  30. -o- by easyTree · · Score: 1

    Nope.

    --
    Requiem for the American Dream
  31. Extremes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.

  32. It's google's fault by User0x45 · · Score: 1

    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?

  33. wow! by sad_ · · Score: 1

    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.
  34. Social media leads to echo chambers by sjbe · · Score: 2

    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.

  35. Re:Ah we have a name for these by rickb928 · · Score: 1

    This is one of the drivers of that vigilante movement, the RBL. 90% useful, 10% destruction.

    But nothing is perfect.

    --
    deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
  36. Re:RSS Chamber by rickb928 · · Score: 1

    I've relied on RSS for a very long (in Internet terms) time. Most of the topical news I read is from subscribed feeds, and my viewer/aggregator takes a lot of formats. And nearly every one of these lets me get it via RSS or other more direct push tech as well as by email.

    The social media feeds I read I subscribe to there. Exposing myself to the public spew results in both massive and deep duplication and an overwhelming unity of subject matter. I can condense it to a fraction with subscriptions and miss nothing.

    --
    deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
  37. Re:Remember what email used to be like? by rickb928 · · Score: 1

    "email is getting close to spam free."

    Only because of filtering.

    You do not want Facebook, Twitter, etc to filter for you. If that's ok to you, then you are plainly doing it wrong. You do not want to be free to choose, and why bother to even open the app.

    --
    deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
  38. Re:Remember what email used to be like? by rickb928 · · Score: 1

    Spam and cross posts. But since most media is duplicated anyways, and spam is in the beholder's eye when it comes to whatever is considered 'news' today, then Usenet becomes more and more attractive.

    --
    deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
  39. No by Cajun+Hell · · Score: 1

    "That's because my new social network is an email newsletter."

    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
  40. Re:Remember what email used to be like? by doom · · Score: 1

    I have a contrary opinion to what happened with usenet-- many people who were around at the time started saying they gave up on it "because of spam", but my own experience was that a decent newsreader and minimal management of kill files kept my encounters with spam to a minimum, and the amount of trouble we've had since then with spam in other forums (email, blog comments, etc) has been way worse than what usenet was subjected to.

    I think it's a lot simpler than that: when the web became big, usenet stopped seeming so bright and shiney, and everyone got distracted by the new latest thing-- after usenet traffic dropped below a critical level, it stopped seeming like a great place to go to discuss anything.