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."

Comments

Echo Chamber

[Zaelath]

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.

Re:Echo Chamber

[rtb61]

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.

Re:Echo Chamber

[Sir_Eptishous]

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 /.

Re:Echo Chamber

[doom]

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.

Social networks need an update

[93 Escort Wagon]

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

What a self-absorbed P.O.S

[Anonymous Coward]

"My favorite new social network is my own newsletter"

Congratulations!

[techno-vampire]

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

Re:Thanks for making me feel old

[0100010001010011]

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."

Re:Ah we have a name for these

[bferrell]

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

Re:CAUTION: American Dumbass

[Hognoxious]

I find your ideas intriguing.

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

Re:Yeah no

[caseih]

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.

Re:But there is no good way

[caseih]

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).

Re:Remember what email used to be like?

[Teckla]

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).

Fuck social media

[Red_Forman]

Forums never stopped working

E-mail...

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

...it's the new vinyl!

Re:But there is no good way

[Dayze!Confused]

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.

Re:Remember what email used to be like?

[dryeo]

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

Social media leads to echo chambers

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Yeah no

[Anonymous Coward]

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.