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I also think that hiding newsletter sign up forms is bad, because you lose the ability to detect that the site is just a blog spam. Real blogs offer RSS/Atom. O

I also think that hiding newsletter sign up forms is bad, because you lose the ability to detect that the site is just a blog spam. Real blogs offer RSS/Atom. Only those freaks fighting for user engagement dumping zero content articles offer newsletters.

mschuster91 5y ago
> Real blogs offer RSS/Atom. Only those freaks fighting for user engagement dumping zero content articles offer newsletters. The thing is, ever since Google Reader got terminated, the user base of RSS/Atom clients has been steadily dropping down. Firefox IIRC terminated "dynamic bookmarks" years ago, and even back when it existed it didn't support notification. Yes, us nerd crowd knows that RSS exists, but ever tried asking your boss or your teenage kid what "Atom" is? Actual mail newsletters are the only way left other than even more obnoxious browser push nags to get your users notified that you have new content.
- inshadows 5y ago
  Your point is valid. Still, I find that most "blogs" offering newsletters these days are frivolous content dumping ground, and the reason for their existence is likely just building Internet persona or something. EDIT: Lots of such noise (often appearing here on HN) comes from Substack.
  - k1m 5y ago
    > the reason for their existence is likely just building Internet persona or something. Another appeal of newsletters I think is distrust (rightly in my opinion) in corporate algorithms powering people's feeds. I'd love to see more widespread adoption of RSS again, rather than a push to get everyone signed up to a bunch of different email newsletters. Perhaps once people feel overwhelmed with their inbox getting filled with email newsletters, RSS will make a resurgence. I wrote the piece linked here, and it wasn't intended to be an anti-newsletter post. Just against newsletters being pushed on readers in the middle of the article they've started reading, as opposed to a sidebar or at the end of the article. We have web apps that produce stripped-down articles to be read on e-readers or printed out. These newsletter signup requests often blend into the content as just another paragraph of text, which can be a little jarring when you're engrossed in reading. Quite a few of the writers I like are on Substack, and earn money through it. Substack also offers full-text RSS feeds (for publicly-accessible content, not sure what level of RSS support there is for paid content - perhaps that's still email-only). And their Reader has RSS support too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444507 - I hope that's a sign that they'll be doing more with RSS in the future.
- Breza 5y ago
  I still miss Google Reader. I wonder if Google wishes it had kept it running now that their efforts to launch social networks failed and Twitter/Facebook have taken over much of the space that RSS used to occupy. Google could have built such a huge dataset of individual-level reader preferences (not saying that's the best use of RSS, just that there's a business case).
shortformblog 5y ago
Hi, I run a long-form newsletter. I send it out twice a week. I spend many bleary nights putting content together for it, and its pieces occasionally appear here on Hacker News. I do a lot of research for it—and pay lots of money for tools to access that research. I often do interviews. It often brings in contributors. Those contributors are paid. It has an RSS feed as a service to readers. But it was built as a newsletter because I specifically wanted to experiment with that form and felt that I could do interesting things with it. Since I started it six and a half years ago, a couple interesting things have happened in the sector: One, the interest in building a business model around blogs has shifted over to the newsletter space. And two, people who wouldn’t have paid to access a blog now are willing to pay to access a newsletter. I like to keep my content open to a large amount of people, so I rely on newsletter sponsorships as a business model, but my advertising approach is very minimal compared to other publishers. I’m not particularly aggressive with my signup form—I run it at the top of my front page and put a pop-up option at the bottom of the article, and sometimes I implement an occasional interstitial when an article seems like it’s doing very well and I want to catch the user’s eye. But I don’t do as much as I could. It probably could be larger if I did. But this isn’t about me. This is about this comment. Which is to say: This is a really cruel thing to say about newsletters. I know a lot of creators who put hours of work into their newsletters each week on top of full-time gigs, grinding it out with the goal of hoping to do something with that newsletter. It also ignores the business realities of the newsletter space. Trying to build a blog into a business is really tough these days (it was back then too, something I know because I was blogging back then). But newsletters have created a path of opportunity for those who want to build things independently. And while I will never claim that the work they do is perfect, it’s certainly not blog spam. So I request, hey, maybe research the space before you use such a broad brush. Thanks.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

mschuster91 5y ago

> Real blogs offer RSS/Atom. Only those freaks fighting for user engagement dumping zero content articles offer newsletters. The thing is, ever since Google Reader got terminated, the user base of RSS/Atom clients has been steadily dropping down. Firefox IIRC terminated "dynamic bookmarks" years ago, and even back when it existed it didn't support notification. Yes, us nerd crowd knows that RSS exists, but ever tried asking your boss or your teenage kid what "Atom" is? Actual mail newsletters are the only way left other than even more obnoxious browser push nags to get your users notified that you have new content.

inshadows 5y ago
Your point is valid. Still, I find that most "blogs" offering newsletters these days are frivolous content dumping ground, and the reason for their existence is likely just building Internet persona or something. EDIT: Lots of such noise (often appearing here on HN) comes from Substack.
- k1m 5y ago
  > the reason for their existence is likely just building Internet persona or something. Another appeal of newsletters I think is distrust (rightly in my opinion) in corporate algorithms powering people's feeds. I'd love to see more widespread adoption of RSS again, rather than a push to get everyone signed up to a bunch of different email newsletters. Perhaps once people feel overwhelmed with their inbox getting filled with email newsletters, RSS will make a resurgence. I wrote the piece linked here, and it wasn't intended to be an anti-newsletter post. Just against newsletters being pushed on readers in the middle of the article they've started reading, as opposed to a sidebar or at the end of the article. We have web apps that produce stripped-down articles to be read on e-readers or printed out. These newsletter signup requests often blend into the content as just another paragraph of text, which can be a little jarring when you're engrossed in reading. Quite a few of the writers I like are on Substack, and earn money through it. Substack also offers full-text RSS feeds (for publicly-accessible content, not sure what level of RSS support there is for paid content - perhaps that's still email-only). And their Reader has RSS support too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444507 - I hope that's a sign that they'll be doing more with RSS in the future.
Breza 5y ago
I still miss Google Reader. I wonder if Google wishes it had kept it running now that their efforts to launch social networks failed and Twitter/Facebook have taken over much of the space that RSS used to occupy. Google could have built such a huge dataset of individual-level reader preferences (not saying that's the best use of RSS, just that there's a business case).

shortformblog 5y ago

Hi, I run a long-form newsletter. I send it out twice a week. I spend many bleary nights putting content together for it, and its pieces occasionally appear here on Hacker News. I do a lot of research for it—and pay lots of money for tools to access that research. I often do interviews. It often brings in contributors. Those contributors are paid. It has an RSS feed as a service to readers. But it was built as a newsletter because I specifically wanted to experiment with that form and felt that I could do interesting things with it. Since I started it six and a half years ago, a couple interesting things have happened in the sector: One, the interest in building a business model around blogs has shifted over to the newsletter space. And two, people who wouldn’t have paid to access a blog now are willing to pay to access a newsletter. I like to keep my content open to a large amount of people, so I rely on newsletter sponsorships as a business model, but my advertising approach is very minimal compared to other publishers. I’m not particularly aggressive with my signup form—I run it at the top of my front page and put a pop-up option at the bottom of the article, and sometimes I implement an occasional interstitial when an article seems like it’s doing very well and I want to catch the user’s eye. But I don’t do as much as I could. It probably could be larger if I did. But this isn’t about me. This is about this comment. Which is to say: This is a really cruel thing to say about newsletters. I know a lot of creators who put hours of work into their newsletters each week on top of full-time gigs, grinding it out with the goal of hoping to do something with that newsletter. It also ignores the business realities of the newsletter space. Trying to build a blog into a business is really tough these days (it was back then too, something I know because I was blogging back then). But newsletters have created a path of opportunity for those who want to build things independently. And while I will never claim that the work they do is perfect, it’s certainly not blog spam. So I request, hey, maybe research the space before you use such a broad brush. Thanks.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]