Does anyone else still receive round robin letters? Multi page letters from friends or family that were the same and sent to everyone at this time of year. I remember one person's in particular that was basically just a recap of this year's misery including their various health problems etc. It would be read aloud at the Christmas dinner table while the family would all giggle at their terrible experiences. My wife's family had a terribly dark sense of humour.
Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
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Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#22Tried doing a newsletter in my final year of highschool, around the time of the 2008 financial crisis.
Got a couple classmates and a few bemused teachers signed up, and once a month wrote up 500 words talking about what was going on in our small little town.
Turned out to be a precursor to my career in journalism. But still, it's an obsolete method of news. No one wants to click an email to see a wall of text anymore.
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#23This 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…
disclaimer: self-promotion
This is the exact reason I started working on Satellite. To be a platform where I could have a blog that talked to other blogs. If you have feedback I'd love to hear it.
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#24Edit, removed my previous message as it sounded quite negative, wasn't well thought out and was also partially off-topic. Product looks nice and simple, good job!
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#25Main issue I see with this form of trying to keep people up to date with your life is that it requires a more intense attention span and willingness to know what’s going on. I think social media as it is thrives on short form content because people who do care will call you or message you or whatever.
If you’re a very popular person - celebrity, executive, or otherwise some form of a status holding person in a community - I think something like this could be useful. For normies and the 99%+ of rest of folks - I don’t think this is really that relevant. I can’t really think of many normal friends who would use such a thing.
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#26This 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 c…
Thanks for the note!
I just ran a query, and 93% of email signups on Postcard have completed the email confirmation step. A quick look at the incomplete signups shows a lot of obvious fake emails, too.
I'm trying to minimize my reliance on big tech, so I want to avoid Google's captcha product. But, hCaptcha and Cloudflare both seem to have more privacy-focused alternatives that I'll check out.
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#27Edit, removed my previous message as it sounded quite negative, wasn't well thought out and was also partially off-topic. Product looks nice and simple, good job!
Email isn't terribly expensive to send--a common rate is roughly $0.80/1,000 emails. It's absolutely dirt cheap ($0.10/1,000 emails) if you can get past the application for AWS SES. (I didn't--don't know the magic words I guess!--so I'm a happy Postmark user instead.)
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#28This 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…
To my mind, the blogosphere had a lot to do with political polarization. Once you added a comment widget to a blog it was easy to build a following of very devoted fans who would argue on the blogger's behalf, amplify them diligently etc. Certainly blogs could foster thoughtful discourse with a wide variety of inputs, but they were just as likely to foster combative tribalism. One interesting example of a blog that followed this path only to later reverse course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Footballs
When Twitter, MySpace, and FaceBook came along, they were initially considered 'microblogs' that had the potential to democratize personal publishing (no need for complicated mechanics) and foster better discourse by getting people out of silos onto a common platform where there would be a greater diversity of opinion.
Of course, you could have said the same thing about gopher v usenet, web pages v blogs, blogs v social media, social media v defederation etc. A new medium becomes available that is less centralized, early adopters hop onto it (either to gain a voice or amplify an existing voice in a new space), followings/fandoms/communities emerge (and often clash), and eventually a meta-tribal identity develops around the new medium as being in tension with the old one.
Over the longer term there's a huge move away from centralized mass media publishing and the huge capital pools required to establish and compete in that market. This increases autonomy and opportunity and fosters greater diversity, but in the absence of clear market signals rhetoric is often substituted for reliable information, and influence by capital (political or financial) persists while being less visible or accountable.
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#29This 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 c…
Thanks for the note! I just ran a query, and 93% of email signups on Postcard have completed the email confirmation step. A quick look at the incomplete signups shows a lot of obvious fake emails, too. I'm trying to minimize my reliance on big tech, so I want to avoid Google's captcha product. But, hCaptcha and Cloudflare both seem to have more privacy-focused alternatives that I'll check out.
Ah, well that's encouraging then! Perhaps you can add that query to an automated report/dashboard in case the conversion rate decreases as the service grows.
Thanks for making this in any case!
Re: Personal newsletters as a calmer alternative to social networks
#30Tried doing a newsletter in my final year of highschool, around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Got a couple classmates and a few bemused teachers signed up, and once a month wrote up 500 words talking about what was going on in our small little town. Turned out to be a precursor to my career in journalism. But still, it's an obsolete method of news. No one wants to click an email to see a wall of text anymore…
Dunno about that. I subscribe to several newsletters. Dave Pell puts out NextDraft almost every weekday. https://nextdraft.com/. Also available on a website and via an iOS app.
There are several others I subscribe to, not all of which release daily (though I wish some of them did). So "no one" is the wrong term to use here.