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The Media Social Networks

Is Social Media Losing Ground To Email Newsletters? (qz.com) 102

Posted by EditorDavid 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."
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Is Social Media Losing Ground To Email Newsletters? More

Is Social Media Losing Ground To Email Newsletters?

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  • Echo Chamber (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Zaelath ( 2588189 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @04:38PM (#58326748)

    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @09:45PM (#58328254) Homepage

      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 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Sir_Eptishous ( 873977 ) on Monday March 25, 2019 @11:00AM (#58331036)
        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: (Score:3)

        by doom ( 14564 )

        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

    • 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: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      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!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by doom ( 14564 )

        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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by whitroth ( 9367 )

      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."

  • Social networks need an update (Score:4, Funny)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @04:56PM (#58326836)

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

  • Yeah no (Score:1, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 )

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

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      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

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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 gav

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by 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.

      • 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

  • 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...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by caseih ( 160668 )

      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).

    • 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.

  • Mailing Lists. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

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

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

  • 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.

  • What a self-absorbed P.O.S (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "My favorite new social network is my own newsletter"

    • Re: (Score:1)

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

  • Thanks for making me feel old (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • Re:Thanks for making me feel old (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @06:07PM (#58327274)

      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."

    • 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!

  • Congratulations! (Score:3)

    by techno-vampire ( 666512 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @05:35PM (#58327082) Homepage
    Congratulations, you've just reinvented the Amateur Press Association, [wikipedia.org] commonly referred to as an APA. Yet again, history repeats itself.

  • Why not blog? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.
  • 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.
  • What's old is new again. Facebook is dead! Long live the Mail List.
  • Usenet
    FTP
    Forums
    P2P
    Web sites
    Yahoo messenger with chatrooms.

  • Fuck social media (Score:3)

    by Red_Forman ( 5546482 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @08:42PM (#58328008)

    Forums never stopped working

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday March 24, 2019 @08:47PM (#58328036)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Matheus ( 586080 )

      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by doom ( 14564 )

        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.

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

  • Usenet will be "discovered" and make a comeback.

    • 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.

  • Nope.

  • Extremes (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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

  • 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?

  • wow! (Score:2)

    by sad_ ( 7868 )

    amazing, next week we'll read something about a guy who says blogs are his new old prefered social media!

  • "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

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