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."
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