I hate newsletters. I don't want them in my inbox. I want them in my RSS feed where they belong. Thankfully substack has feeds.
Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
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Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#12I hate newsletters. I don't want them in my inbox. I want them in my RSS feed where they belong. Thankfully substack has feeds.
A good platform should support both email and RSS, and give users the choice.
(Postcard, which I discuss in the submitted post, does support both.)
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#13I hate newsletters. I don't want them in my inbox. I want them in my RSS feed where they belong. Thankfully substack has feeds.
A good platform should support both email and RSS, and give users the choice. (Postcard, which I discuss in the submitted post, does support both.)
Yep! You can think of email as a version of RSS that regular people actually know how to use ;)
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#14Needs some work.
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#15Kind of a shameless plug for my newsletter, and also a nod in agreement. I love being able to share articles that I find interesting, share useful tidbits and stuff, and getting responses from folks who actually read it and want to talk more. I love the concept and hope more people do it!
Mine is here: https://cassidoo.co/newsletter
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#16This is what I liked about the open blogosphere of 2000 to 2008. Whereas something like Twitter is optimized for the fast-take and the brutal one-liner, blogs allowed actual conversations. You could write something serious, develop the idea, and maybe some other people would engage with it, also at a serious level. But then the walled-gardens began to gain ground (Facebook, Twitter, and then later Instagram) and the…
Before 2000, there were the "shared spaces" of mailing lists. I think of Winer the same way you probably think of Zuck.
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#17Newsletter to me reminds me of the tedious letters that people used to send out in their yearly Christmas card. No thanks.
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#18Newsletter to me reminds me of the tedious letters that people used to send out in their yearly Christmas card. No thanks.
But, newsletters have an unsubscribe button :-)
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#19Another social platform with extra steps.
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#20This looks really nice. I've been fiddling around building newsletter-adjacent products for a few years, and I've been wanting a simple Substack-alternative* that's good for casual use so that I can recommend it to users.
Can I make one request? Please provide single opt-in as an option! v2 invisible Recaptcha is effective for stopping bots, and most of the time people won't even be shown a challenge. Double opt-in confirmation emails only have about a 70% conversion rate in my experience (and that's counting only people who get past Recaptcha), so you lose a big chunk of subscribers. I almost started using Ghost a while ago for my own newsletter, but no single opt-in is just a deal breaker for me.
See also https://mailchimp.com/resources/why-single-opt-in-and-an-upd...
*Substack _is_ good for casual use, but I have various beefs with them, the main one being that they're trying to build yet another platform instead of being part of an ecosystem.