11 ms·

Oh God, It's Raining Newsletters

209 points by cmod 8y ago

georgebarnett 8y ago
Somewhat related: Create an email filter that moves any email with the word “unsubscribe” into its own folder out of the inbox. It’s an amazing signal for separating direct and bulk mail.
- pizza 8y ago
  Thank you for this, I just unsubscribed from like 10 mailing lists within the last 5 minutes.
- berberous 8y ago
  similarly, you can use gmails + operator: for example, whenever you sign-up for a newsletter, you can use username+news@gmail.com, and then filter anything to that address to its own folder.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- andrewstuart2 8y ago
  Careful, though. I added this rule to my inbox (automatically marking them read, though) years ago and just a month or two ago figured out why I was _never_ aware I had pull requests or issues on GitHub, among quite a few other things I was constantly missing.
  - georgebarnett 8y ago
    Yes, good catch! I haven’t really noticed this since I have a habit of clicking unsubscribe on anything that does actually show up and so my bulk folder is usually empty.
- nicky0 8y ago
  I've done the same, it works brilliantly. I also added an exception not to move emails from senders in my Address Book. That way I can whitelist senders just by adding to address book.
revx 8y ago
I started a meme newsletter for my friends. I publish it occasionally - not on any schedule, and with whatever content and style I feel like. It's like publishing a small, private website from time to time. And it's completely decentralized, and responses come back straight to me, so there's no fighting in the comments. I almost never post on social media anymore.
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  Are you using tools like mailchimp or plain old e-mail ? Templates ? Fancy graphics ?
  - themodelplumber 8y ago
    The Thunderbird add-on that lets you compose directly in HTML is fun for this kind of thing. You can also abuse those signature-maker site HTML signatures into full emails, tightly composed. I also think PDF newsletters are cool if you're doing anything people might like to store. I have been trialing Textmaker 2018 for this in Linux and it will do most desktop publishing stuff like linked text frames really easily, plus export to HTML, pdf, and epub.
  - revx 8y ago
    I use mailchimp but probably could get away with plain old email (I have about 45 subscribers). I just use the HTML editor that mailchimp provides and write some inline CSS. It's all "handcrafted" which is what I want. Hope this helps :) I will say that their free tier (I think it's 10k emails per month?) is way more than enough for my use case. I'm not affiliated with mailchimp.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  > I publish ... it's completely decentralized What do you mean by decentralized in this context?
  - cyphar 8y ago
    I think they're saying they have a mailing list set up for communication between friends, and it's "decentralised" in the same way email is (rather, it's federated).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
telesilla 8y ago
This is handy right now: I've been looking for a good newsletter service for a non-profit I volunteer for. Any recommendations?
- scraplab 8y ago
  I’ve not tried it, but this looks good: https://buttondown.email/ https://buttondown.email/
- samdung 8y ago
  Try https://sess.email/ https://sess.email/
mevile 8y ago
There's a whole slew of content being created in all forms, from newsletters, blog posts, books, podcasts, music, video games, video on demand and live video. A lot of it is actually really high-quality content. We're being inundated with too much good stuff. I see all these newsletters in my inbox I don't have time to read that I want to. Tv shows, youtube videos I want to watch but don't have time for. I'm listening to a podcast when I cook while I have a game on and a book in my bag. It's like a really good problem to have tbh, but there's a problem with managing this. This week there was a post about how to pick a good non-fiction book. Figuring out what the best content for me for the time I have is the problem. It's a problem we all have right now. Also that was a really well written post, a love letter to newsletters. I really enjoyed it.
- trevyn 8y ago
  >Figuring out what the best content for me for the time I have is the problem. And, of course, sometimes the best choice is no content at all. I do wonder how increasing quantity and quality of content will effect markets and create new opportunities. Maybe Ev Williams is right and it’s about curation. Maybe something deeper.
  - bookofjoe 8y ago
    "The best response is no response."—Dr. Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics"(1960)
- nefitty 8y ago
  It gets frustrating to feel like every moment another decision needs to be made. Driving to the store: what will I listen to? Free time: video games, tv, reading or what? At work: music or podcasts or radio as background noise? I am not sure if decision fatigue is real, but working from that assumption, too much of my energy is used up on ultimately inconsequential things like this...
  - pathseeker 8y ago
    >I am not sure if decision fatigue is real, but working from that assumption, too much of my energy is used up on ultimately inconsequential things like this... I think it is and have largely given up on trying to plan entertainment for trivial things like driving to the store. I either just sit in silence and enjoy it or let someone else in the car pick radio if they want it.
robin_reala 8y ago
I don’t mind newsletters, but I still prefer the anonymity of RSS. For every dedicated author as per the linked article there are ten company backed newsletters that will take your email address and use it as an advertising target on a specific subject. Illegal, but of course it happens.
- vertis 8y ago
  I get so much of this. I actually have a couple of newsletters that I enjoy, but every tech product I sign up for has a newsletter attached that I haven't asked for. I found https://leavemealone.xyz https://leavemealone.xyz just before the end of last year and unsubscribed from 238 newsletters. It's made by a couple of IndieMakers. My inbox is much cleaner now, some might say even boring. Though are they are starting to creep back in as I go about my internet life.
  - megakid 8y ago
    Thanks for the leavemealone link!
- cmod 8y ago
  I've tried to split the difference. All my newslettering is also published on my site, with attendant RSS feeds. The thing about the newsletter I love, as I explained in the essay, is the quality of conversation is so much higher than anything I've found outside of the inbox. (Hacker News excepted; this place deserves its own love letter.)
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    Obviously having both is the best of both worlds! (by the way, thanks for the content, I’ve subscribed. Walking the mountain paths of Japan is an underrated pastime for sure, had an amazing time at Yoshino and Hakuba last time I was there)
    - cmod 8y ago
      Yoshino is a gem. I'm running a retreat there later this year with Jan Chipchase.
temp1928384 8y ago
The rise of Slack has made me love and appreciate email even more. I love that one of the oldest internet technologies is actually decentralized and thriving...makes me bullish that something out of the crypto space will one day work.
- anonu 8y ago
  That's a bit of a leap... Email and crypto are decentralized... Sure.... But in very different ways with very different goals.
the_librarian 8y ago
This may sound strange, but I am subscribed to no newsletters. In fact, I had no idea such specific, elegant newsletters even existed. I may add to the rainstorm, whether that's bad or good...I don't actually know. In any case, I'm working on site that is to hopefully serve as a hub for 2d game developers to share their scripts and thoughts freely, gaining access to "the restricted sections" of the site as they contribute (and yes, this is inspired by Pagemaster.) and as such, the site will become a library over time. People can take a penny, leave nothing, or give a roll of pennies and never take any pennies. People should have as much or as little access as they wish. The best thing about this idea I think is when users sign up for their "library cards" they will actually receive something that functions like one in digital form. (I may try to look into making physical cards which I have designed already! but I still have to work out the logistics of that..., haha.) When they have cards, they will instead of "chcking out books", be able to create the books that they want, similar to wikipedia's pdf/book system. (Everything hosted on site will be open source too, to be used for whatever purposes including commercial.) And here's where the ourobouros comes back to bite, I swear this isn't a tangent. I think a newsletter would be a better place to start for me to prototype this idea. WEven though the site is under construction already. It will be in that state for a long time too, as this is my first time developing web content, instead of games! But I could do this. Thanks for sharing! (I don't self promote in posts, but if you are interested, just see my profile.) Really enjoying the content of this website and am glad to have found it.
- groestl 8y ago
  You might want to edit your post and remove all the newlines, it's got a very weird formatting (at first I thought it was a poem).
  - the_librarian 8y ago
    I'm sorry, again. (I'm doing better than yesterday, yikes, look at that one!) I though doing a line break in between every line would make it better, and it did, but man it definitely looks like a poem. I will do my best to get this right! Apologies, seriously. So few rules on the formatting is throwing me off.
llbowers 8y ago
Any recommendations for newsletters pertaining to typical Hacker News interests, e.g. programming, start-up business, cybersecurity, technology, gaming, etc.?
- jeremy8883 8y ago
  For JavaScript, https://javascriptweekly.com https://javascriptweekly.com is pretty good.
  - ascorbic 8y ago
    I subscribe to several of their newsletters, and they're all good: https://cooperpress.com/publications/ https://cooperpress.com/publications/
    - petercooper 8y ago
      Thanks for recommending us, folks. If it helps, they're mostly edited by HN readers too(!) (me in most, but not all, cases).
- andyjohnson0 8y ago
  It's a bit more general-readership, but I find Kevin Kelley's Recomendo [1] newsletter useful. It's lightweight and doesn't require much time to read. Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings [2] newsletter is arts/literature oriented, well produced, and full of insights - but often quite long. [1] http://recomendo.com/ http://recomendo.com/ [2] https://www.brainpickings.org/ https://www.brainpickings.org/
  - peatfreak 8y ago
    > Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings [2] newsletter is arts/literature oriented, well produced, and full of insights - but often quite long. I love Brain Picking, although unfortunately I feel that her articles have a certain sort of "sameness" to them. I love long-form reading. Personally I feel that encouraging long-form reading is important. I disagree that reducing the attention of time required to read is the answer.
rgoulter 8y ago
Why the obnoxious "sign up for my newsletter" popup? The best reason I can think of is it gets more people to sign up to the newsletter. (Who are these people, that would sign up for a newsletter b/c something interrupted them reading the blogpost, but wouldn't sign up on their own?). A popup is nice for the people who would sign up for a newsletter anyway, but a PITA for anyone else who cares to read the blogpost's content, right?
- a_imho 8y ago
  There really should be a adnauseam for newsletters to discourage this practice.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  Because it turns out that there are design patterns that are simultaneously user-hostile for the overall set of readers, yet convert enough people to make the hit worthwhile to the owner. See also: undirected AB testing, designing for anxiety, etc etc.
- cmod 8y ago
  I've struggled with this popup (keeping it or nixing it; I'm the owner of the site). Sadly, it's insanely effective at converting folks (thousand of subscriptions over the last few months; high retention as I track those subs separately). It shouldn't trigger while reading unless you leave the window. And also won't trigger until you're at the bottom of the screen. And if you dismiss it once, you should never see it again with that browser on the site. That said, it is annoying, especially on a page about newsletters. So I just modified my templates to take a variable to turn it off on a page-by-page basis (using Hugo to generate the site). Won't appear for this post anymore.
  - rgoulter 8y ago
    Thanks. :-) I didn't know it was such a big difference.
  - stordoff 8y ago
    > It shouldn't trigger while reading unless you leave the window One thing I've noticed is that they often appear (can't speak to this one specifically) if you alt-tab to another window to note something. That can be almost annoying as appearing while you are reading.
AJRF 8y ago
Anyone know of a service that will summarize a batch of different news letters for you? Say you subscribe to 30 newsletters, but a lot of them contain fluff, legal & disclaimer, ads, etc - but you only want a summary of the good content sent to you on say a Sunday. I would imagine the interface being a list of newsletters, with a drop down to say how much of the content you would like, an option for what time and what day you wish to recieve the summary and then the actual email to just be the summary with a single link to the full newsletter underneath. Does something like this exist? My google-fu is returning nothing.
kumarvvr 8y ago
I love the python and postgresql weekly newsletters. Concise, very targeted info, no anxiety of privacy issues, etc. I dont directly click on links though, just DDG search of the library or article. And, I usually can access the email from my office inbox, so there's that.
mxstbr 8y ago
I am so glad Craig mentions https://buttondown.email https://buttondown.email. It is such a great service, and Justin (the creator of Buttondown) is engaged and friendly with his users. I use Buttondown for my newsletter and would highly recommend it!
- revx 8y ago
  Oh, that's super cool. I write my newsletter emails in markdown, change them to HTML, and then publish them on mailchimp (which is a bit overkill for my 45 subscribers). Definitely going to check this out!
- exolymph 8y ago
  I use Buttondown also. It is not full-featured compared to MailChimp — I wouldn't use it for serious marketing or ecommerce — but it's beautifully streamlined for the purpose of maintaining a simple newsletter.
perseusprime11 8y ago
Along with raining podcasts. How do we fix this? Go back to Web?
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
“In truth, it’s a newsletter about the design of walking.“ Oh my God, we don’t need this.
eswat 8y ago
> Email is definitely not ideal, but it is: decentralized, reliable, and not going anywhere – and more and more, those feel like quasi-magical properties. But wouldn’t a website hosted on a platform you control also serve this purpose? Even with the services mentioned in the essay you have a third-party looking over where you data is and have to rely on them if you ever want to retrieve your data back. I guess you’d also have to add a method for facilitating contact though (uh… email?)
- theNJR 8y ago
  It’s mostly a distribution problem. Depending on what you write about, your audience may not use rss. How do you get them to come back to something they enjoy reading, amongst a sea of clutter? They no longer get notified through social. As Craig says, email let’s you own your audience. The use of the word “own” is slightly problematic but accurate enough.
ilikehurdles 8y ago
Newsletters feel like a step (or more like a plunge) back from subscribing to websites via RSS feeds. And yet this seems to be the direction that technology is moving in. I’ve chosen not to subscribe to certain blogs simply because I don’t want to place my email address in more hands who have no incentive to care about my privacy.
- dddddaviddddd 8y ago
  A catch-all email address + filtering works for me.
- monksy 8y ago
  I don't subscribe to newsletters because I have no trust in how much it's going to send to me, weither or not they'll be worth having, and I value my privacy. Instead, I use RSS daily. Whether it's for the blogs or it's with podcasts.
- guybedo 8y ago
  if you don't want to give your email address or fill your inbox with newsletters, you can get them in your RSS feeds. I just added this feature a few weeks ago to the RSS reader i built (https://aktu.io/about https://aktu.io/about). Right now there's a few hundreds newsletters you can subscribe to, i'm adding new ones every day, and suggestions i welcome :-) You can subscribe to a newsletter as you would add a RSS feed, it's gonna showup in your folders, no need to give your email address.
- eppsilon 8y ago
  Feedbin [1] (a RSS service like Google Reader) lets you subscribe to newsletters and have the emails show up in your reader like regular posts. 1. https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsletters-in-feedbin/ https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl...
codydh 8y ago
Some feed readers offer a private email address that you can subscribe to newsletters with, and see them alongside your other RSS feeds. My reader of choice (Feedbin) does this. It's one way to at least centralize them all in a place outside your email inbox.
guybedo 8y ago
I see newsletters as a first level of curation/aggregation that helps managing the daily deluge of content/information. I've built a database of newsletters, there's 500+ indexed and categorised so far. I'm adding news ones daily, and would love some suggestions so i can grow this database. I haven't build a standalone website to browse the db yet, but you can check out the newsletters and subscribe as RSS feeds with the rss reader i built (https://aktu.io/about https://aktu.io/about)
arbuge 8y ago
One thing to keep in mind when starting a newsletter: publish it somewhere so that content is also visible to other people who aren't subscribed to your newsletter. Unless of course you explicitly only want it to be visible to subscribers. One easy way to do is by subscribing publish@publicemails.com to your newsletter. (Disclosure: I created https://publicemails.com https://publicemails.com, where this service is provided).
anonu 8y ago
I'm some sense, Email is the first social network. And decentralized as the author points out... It would follow that if you want to leverage this platform you need to make better tools to enhance email writing and reading experience. That interface hasn't changed much over the decades.
shortformblog 8y ago
As a newsletter guy myself (see https://tedium.co/ https://tedium.co/), one that focuses less on link lists and more on longer-form storytelling, I look at email as a vessel that helps lessen the effect of the platform on the creative outlet. It's one of many, but still a vessel. If you read my content in your inbox, great! If you want it on the web, it's there, too. In your feed (https://feed.tedium.co/ https://feed.tedium.co/)? You can have it there, too. I'll even syndicate it. My only limitation is that it's something that I can control the distribution of, not Facebook or Twitter or Medium. Maybe I'll share the content on those platforms, but I won't let it be my primary vessel. I think, ultimately, this is the benefit I see of the newsletter mechanism—it's the ability to control your destiny as a writer and distributor. We simply do not allow for enough of that in this platform-driven era. So let's minimize the platforms. After an era in which platforms have had so much control, it's great to see writers figure out that there are ways around all that. Kudos to Craig, Tim Carmody, and other writers that have been willing to put this kind of work into their business models.
pwthornton 8y ago
You know what we could use -- bare with me here -- a newsletter that is a collection of the best content from newsletters you might like. A lot of these newsletters are very good (many are not as well). But the volume is just so high. Same thing with news outlets. There is a huge supply of good content. But there isn't enough intelligent bundling to make it all work anymore. I recently paid for a Medium account, and the reason I did was that Medium is really good at giving you targeted content from a wide variety of sources.

209 points by cmod 8y ago

Somewhat related: Create an email filter that moves any email with the word “unsubscribe” into its own folder out of the inbox. It’s an amazing signal for separating direct and bulk mail.

pizza 8y ago
Thank you for this, I just unsubscribed from like 10 mailing lists within the last 5 minutes.
berberous 8y ago
similarly, you can use gmails + operator: for example, whenever you sign-up for a newsletter, you can use username+news@gmail.com, and then filter anything to that address to its own folder.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
andrewstuart2 8y ago
Careful, though. I added this rule to my inbox (automatically marking them read, though) years ago and just a month or two ago figured out why I was _never_ aware I had pull requests or issues on GitHub, among quite a few other things I was constantly missing.
- georgebarnett 8y ago
  Yes, good catch! I haven’t really noticed this since I have a habit of clicking unsubscribe on anything that does actually show up and so my bulk folder is usually empty.
nicky0 8y ago
I've done the same, it works brilliantly. I also added an exception not to move emails from senders in my Address Book. That way I can whitelist senders just by adding to address book.

revx 8y ago

I started a meme newsletter for my friends. I publish it occasionally - not on any schedule, and with whatever content and style I feel like. It's like publishing a small, private website from time to time. And it's completely decentralized, and responses come back straight to me, so there's no fighting in the comments. I almost never post on social media anymore.

johnchristopher 8y ago
Are you using tools like mailchimp or plain old e-mail ? Templates ? Fancy graphics ?
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  The Thunderbird add-on that lets you compose directly in HTML is fun for this kind of thing. You can also abuse those signature-maker site HTML signatures into full emails, tightly composed. I also think PDF newsletters are cool if you're doing anything people might like to store. I have been trialing Textmaker 2018 for this in Linux and it will do most desktop publishing stuff like linked text frames really easily, plus export to HTML, pdf, and epub.
- revx 8y ago
  I use mailchimp but probably could get away with plain old email (I have about 45 subscribers). I just use the HTML editor that mailchimp provides and write some inline CSS. It's all "handcrafted" which is what I want. Hope this helps :) I will say that their free tier (I think it's 10k emails per month?) is way more than enough for my use case. I'm not affiliated with mailchimp.
TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
> I publish ... it's completely decentralized What do you mean by decentralized in this context?
- cyphar 8y ago
  I think they're saying they have a mailing list set up for communication between friends, and it's "decentralised" in the same way email is (rather, it's federated).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

telesilla 8y ago

This is handy right now: I've been looking for a good newsletter service for a non-profit I volunteer for. Any recommendations?

scraplab 8y ago
I’ve not tried it, but this looks good: https://buttondown.email/ https://buttondown.email/
samdung 8y ago
Try https://sess.email/ https://sess.email/

mevile 8y ago

There's a whole slew of content being created in all forms, from newsletters, blog posts, books, podcasts, music, video games, video on demand and live video. A lot of it is actually really high-quality content. We're being inundated with too much good stuff. I see all these newsletters in my inbox I don't have time to read that I want to. Tv shows, youtube videos I want to watch but don't have time for. I'm listening to a podcast when I cook while I have a game on and a book in my bag. It's like a really good problem to have tbh, but there's a problem with managing this. This week there was a post about how to pick a good non-fiction book. Figuring out what the best content for me for the time I have is the problem. It's a problem we all have right now. Also that was a really well written post, a love letter to newsletters. I really enjoyed it.

trevyn 8y ago
>Figuring out what the best content for me for the time I have is the problem. And, of course, sometimes the best choice is no content at all. I do wonder how increasing quantity and quality of content will effect markets and create new opportunities. Maybe Ev Williams is right and it’s about curation. Maybe something deeper.
- bookofjoe 8y ago
  "The best response is no response."—Dr. Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics"(1960)
nefitty 8y ago
It gets frustrating to feel like every moment another decision needs to be made. Driving to the store: what will I listen to? Free time: video games, tv, reading or what? At work: music or podcasts or radio as background noise? I am not sure if decision fatigue is real, but working from that assumption, too much of my energy is used up on ultimately inconsequential things like this...
- pathseeker 8y ago
  >I am not sure if decision fatigue is real, but working from that assumption, too much of my energy is used up on ultimately inconsequential things like this... I think it is and have largely given up on trying to plan entertainment for trivial things like driving to the store. I either just sit in silence and enjoy it or let someone else in the car pick radio if they want it.

robin_reala 8y ago

I don’t mind newsletters, but I still prefer the anonymity of RSS. For every dedicated author as per the linked article there are ten company backed newsletters that will take your email address and use it as an advertising target on a specific subject. Illegal, but of course it happens.

vertis 8y ago
I get so much of this. I actually have a couple of newsletters that I enjoy, but every tech product I sign up for has a newsletter attached that I haven't asked for. I found https://leavemealone.xyz https://leavemealone.xyz just before the end of last year and unsubscribed from 238 newsletters. It's made by a couple of IndieMakers. My inbox is much cleaner now, some might say even boring. Though are they are starting to creep back in as I go about my internet life.
- megakid 8y ago
  Thanks for the leavemealone link!
cmod 8y ago
I've tried to split the difference. All my newslettering is also published on my site, with attendant RSS feeds. The thing about the newsletter I love, as I explained in the essay, is the quality of conversation is so much higher than anything I've found outside of the inbox. (Hacker News excepted; this place deserves its own love letter.)
- robin_reala 8y ago
  Obviously having both is the best of both worlds! (by the way, thanks for the content, I’ve subscribed. Walking the mountain paths of Japan is an underrated pastime for sure, had an amazing time at Yoshino and Hakuba last time I was there)
  - cmod 8y ago
    Yoshino is a gem. I'm running a retreat there later this year with Jan Chipchase.

temp1928384 8y ago

The rise of Slack has made me love and appreciate email even more. I love that one of the oldest internet technologies is actually decentralized and thriving...makes me bullish that something out of the crypto space will one day work.

anonu 8y ago
That's a bit of a leap... Email and crypto are decentralized... Sure.... But in very different ways with very different goals.

the_librarian 8y ago

This may sound strange, but I am subscribed to no newsletters. In fact, I had no idea such specific, elegant newsletters even existed. I may add to the rainstorm, whether that's bad or good...I don't actually know. In any case, I'm working on site that is to hopefully serve as a hub for 2d game developers to share their scripts and thoughts freely, gaining access to "the restricted sections" of the site as they contribute (and yes, this is inspired by Pagemaster.) and as such, the site will become a library over time. People can take a penny, leave nothing, or give a roll of pennies and never take any pennies. People should have as much or as little access as they wish. The best thing about this idea I think is when users sign up for their "library cards" they will actually receive something that functions like one in digital form. (I may try to look into making physical cards which I have designed already! but I still have to work out the logistics of that..., haha.) When they have cards, they will instead of "chcking out books", be able to create the books that they want, similar to wikipedia's pdf/book system. (Everything hosted on site will be open source too, to be used for whatever purposes including commercial.) And here's where the ourobouros comes back to bite, I swear this isn't a tangent. I think a newsletter would be a better place to start for me to prototype this idea. WEven though the site is under construction already. It will be in that state for a long time too, as this is my first time developing web content, instead of games! But I could do this. Thanks for sharing! (I don't self promote in posts, but if you are interested, just see my profile.) Really enjoying the content of this website and am glad to have found it.

groestl 8y ago
You might want to edit your post and remove all the newlines, it's got a very weird formatting (at first I thought it was a poem).
- the_librarian 8y ago
  I'm sorry, again. (I'm doing better than yesterday, yikes, look at that one!) I though doing a line break in between every line would make it better, and it did, but man it definitely looks like a poem. I will do my best to get this right! Apologies, seriously. So few rules on the formatting is throwing me off.

llbowers 8y ago

Any recommendations for newsletters pertaining to typical Hacker News interests, e.g. programming, start-up business, cybersecurity, technology, gaming, etc.?

jeremy8883 8y ago
For JavaScript, https://javascriptweekly.com https://javascriptweekly.com is pretty good.
- ascorbic 8y ago
  I subscribe to several of their newsletters, and they're all good: https://cooperpress.com/publications/ https://cooperpress.com/publications/
  - petercooper 8y ago
    Thanks for recommending us, folks. If it helps, they're mostly edited by HN readers too(!) (me in most, but not all, cases).
andyjohnson0 8y ago
It's a bit more general-readership, but I find Kevin Kelley's Recomendo [1] newsletter useful. It's lightweight and doesn't require much time to read. Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings [2] newsletter is arts/literature oriented, well produced, and full of insights - but often quite long. [1] http://recomendo.com/ http://recomendo.com/ [2] https://www.brainpickings.org/ https://www.brainpickings.org/
- peatfreak 8y ago
  > Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings [2] newsletter is arts/literature oriented, well produced, and full of insights - but often quite long. I love Brain Picking, although unfortunately I feel that her articles have a certain sort of "sameness" to them. I love long-form reading. Personally I feel that encouraging long-form reading is important. I disagree that reducing the attention of time required to read is the answer.

rgoulter 8y ago

Why the obnoxious "sign up for my newsletter" popup? The best reason I can think of is it gets more people to sign up to the newsletter. (Who are these people, that would sign up for a newsletter b/c something interrupted them reading the blogpost, but wouldn't sign up on their own?). A popup is nice for the people who would sign up for a newsletter anyway, but a PITA for anyone else who cares to read the blogpost's content, right?

a_imho 8y ago
There really should be a adnauseam for newsletters to discourage this practice.
robin_reala 8y ago
Because it turns out that there are design patterns that are simultaneously user-hostile for the overall set of readers, yet convert enough people to make the hit worthwhile to the owner. See also: undirected AB testing, designing for anxiety, etc etc.
cmod 8y ago
I've struggled with this popup (keeping it or nixing it; I'm the owner of the site). Sadly, it's insanely effective at converting folks (thousand of subscriptions over the last few months; high retention as I track those subs separately). It shouldn't trigger while reading unless you leave the window. And also won't trigger until you're at the bottom of the screen. And if you dismiss it once, you should never see it again with that browser on the site. That said, it is annoying, especially on a page about newsletters. So I just modified my templates to take a variable to turn it off on a page-by-page basis (using Hugo to generate the site). Won't appear for this post anymore.
- rgoulter 8y ago
  Thanks. :-) I didn't know it was such a big difference.
- stordoff 8y ago
  > It shouldn't trigger while reading unless you leave the window One thing I've noticed is that they often appear (can't speak to this one specifically) if you alt-tab to another window to note something. That can be almost annoying as appearing while you are reading.

AJRF 8y ago

Anyone know of a service that will summarize a batch of different news letters for you? Say you subscribe to 30 newsletters, but a lot of them contain fluff, legal & disclaimer, ads, etc - but you only want a summary of the good content sent to you on say a Sunday. I would imagine the interface being a list of newsletters, with a drop down to say how much of the content you would like, an option for what time and what day you wish to recieve the summary and then the actual email to just be the summary with a single link to the full newsletter underneath. Does something like this exist? My google-fu is returning nothing.

kumarvvr 8y ago

I love the python and postgresql weekly newsletters. Concise, very targeted info, no anxiety of privacy issues, etc. I dont directly click on links though, just DDG search of the library or article. And, I usually can access the email from my office inbox, so there's that.

mxstbr 8y ago

I am so glad Craig mentions https://buttondown.email https://buttondown.email. It is such a great service, and Justin (the creator of Buttondown) is engaged and friendly with his users. I use Buttondown for my newsletter and would highly recommend it!

revx 8y ago
Oh, that's super cool. I write my newsletter emails in markdown, change them to HTML, and then publish them on mailchimp (which is a bit overkill for my 45 subscribers). Definitely going to check this out!
exolymph 8y ago
I use Buttondown also. It is not full-featured compared to MailChimp — I wouldn't use it for serious marketing or ecommerce — but it's beautifully streamlined for the purpose of maintaining a simple newsletter.

perseusprime11 8y ago

Along with raining podcasts. How do we fix this? Go back to Web?

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

“In truth, it’s a newsletter about the design of walking.“ Oh my God, we don’t need this.

eswat 8y ago

> Email is definitely not ideal, but it is: decentralized, reliable, and not going anywhere – and more and more, those feel like quasi-magical properties. But wouldn’t a website hosted on a platform you control also serve this purpose? Even with the services mentioned in the essay you have a third-party looking over where you data is and have to rely on them if you ever want to retrieve your data back. I guess you’d also have to add a method for facilitating contact though (uh… email?)

theNJR 8y ago
It’s mostly a distribution problem. Depending on what you write about, your audience may not use rss. How do you get them to come back to something they enjoy reading, amongst a sea of clutter? They no longer get notified through social. As Craig says, email let’s you own your audience. The use of the word “own” is slightly problematic but accurate enough.

ilikehurdles 8y ago

Newsletters feel like a step (or more like a plunge) back from subscribing to websites via RSS feeds. And yet this seems to be the direction that technology is moving in. I’ve chosen not to subscribe to certain blogs simply because I don’t want to place my email address in more hands who have no incentive to care about my privacy.

dddddaviddddd 8y ago
A catch-all email address + filtering works for me.
monksy 8y ago
I don't subscribe to newsletters because I have no trust in how much it's going to send to me, weither or not they'll be worth having, and I value my privacy. Instead, I use RSS daily. Whether it's for the blogs or it's with podcasts.
guybedo 8y ago
if you don't want to give your email address or fill your inbox with newsletters, you can get them in your RSS feeds. I just added this feature a few weeks ago to the RSS reader i built (https://aktu.io/about https://aktu.io/about). Right now there's a few hundreds newsletters you can subscribe to, i'm adding new ones every day, and suggestions i welcome :-) You can subscribe to a newsletter as you would add a RSS feed, it's gonna showup in your folders, no need to give your email address.
eppsilon 8y ago
Feedbin [1] (a RSS service like Google Reader) lets you subscribe to newsletters and have the emails show up in your reader like regular posts. 1. https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsletters-in-feedbin/ https://feedbin.com/blog/2016/02/03/subscribe-to-email-newsl...

codydh 8y ago

Some feed readers offer a private email address that you can subscribe to newsletters with, and see them alongside your other RSS feeds. My reader of choice (Feedbin) does this. It's one way to at least centralize them all in a place outside your email inbox.

guybedo 8y ago

I see newsletters as a first level of curation/aggregation that helps managing the daily deluge of content/information. I've built a database of newsletters, there's 500+ indexed and categorised so far. I'm adding news ones daily, and would love some suggestions so i can grow this database. I haven't build a standalone website to browse the db yet, but you can check out the newsletters and subscribe as RSS feeds with the rss reader i built (https://aktu.io/about https://aktu.io/about)

arbuge 8y ago

One thing to keep in mind when starting a newsletter: publish it somewhere so that content is also visible to other people who aren't subscribed to your newsletter. Unless of course you explicitly only want it to be visible to subscribers. One easy way to do is by subscribing publish@publicemails.com to your newsletter. (Disclosure: I created https://publicemails.com https://publicemails.com, where this service is provided).

anonu 8y ago

I'm some sense, Email is the first social network. And decentralized as the author points out... It would follow that if you want to leverage this platform you need to make better tools to enhance email writing and reading experience. That interface hasn't changed much over the decades.

shortformblog 8y ago

As a newsletter guy myself (see https://tedium.co/ https://tedium.co/), one that focuses less on link lists and more on longer-form storytelling, I look at email as a vessel that helps lessen the effect of the platform on the creative outlet. It's one of many, but still a vessel. If you read my content in your inbox, great! If you want it on the web, it's there, too. In your feed (https://feed.tedium.co/ https://feed.tedium.co/)? You can have it there, too. I'll even syndicate it. My only limitation is that it's something that I can control the distribution of, not Facebook or Twitter or Medium. Maybe I'll share the content on those platforms, but I won't let it be my primary vessel. I think, ultimately, this is the benefit I see of the newsletter mechanism—it's the ability to control your destiny as a writer and distributor. We simply do not allow for enough of that in this platform-driven era. So let's minimize the platforms. After an era in which platforms have had so much control, it's great to see writers figure out that there are ways around all that. Kudos to Craig, Tim Carmody, and other writers that have been willing to put this kind of work into their business models.

pwthornton 8y ago

You know what we could use -- bare with me here -- a newsletter that is a collection of the best content from newsletters you might like. A lot of these newsletters are very good (many are not as well). But the volume is just so high. Same thing with news outlets. There is a huge supply of good content. But there isn't enough intelligent bundling to make it all work anymore. I recently paid for a Medium account, and the reason I did was that Medium is really good at giving you targeted content from a wide variety of sources.