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There's a zero percent chance I will subscribe to a newsletter willingly even if I love your articles. I try very hard to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of my i

There's a zero percent chance I will subscribe to a newsletter willingly even if I love your articles. I try very hard to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of my inbox tuned because otherwise important things get lost in the deluge. I don't want your articles pushed to me on your timeframe, I want to consume them in my own time and for that an RSS reader is perfectly adequate.

eviks 3y ago
That's an easy issue to fix: just move all these subscriptions to a separate mail tag/folder (skipping inbox), and read them whenever you like
Taywee 3y ago
There's a sizeable portion of the population for whom RSS would be perfect, but they don't know it exists, and if you tried to get them into it, would be baffled by the complete lack of interface (remember when Firefox would show an RSS icon near the URL when a site had an RSS link in the header?) A newsletter is useless to you, but a lot of people like them. I agree that popups aren't the way to push it, though. A simple newsletter link in the header of the site is more than good enough. I don't care how good the "conversion" rate is, I don't like harassing people who are just visiting my site for the first time.
- hoseja 3y ago
  RSS feels intentionally sabotaged.
Semaphor 3y ago
My switch between RSS and E-Mail is if I (mostly) want to read everything. RSS means I’ll see every single article. But for some (mainly backblaze, actually), I don’t. I want to read some, so I’m subscribed to their newsletter that gives me a summary of all recent posts every once in a while.
criddell 3y ago
If the pop up listed two options - email subscribe or rss subscribe - I don’t think I would be nearly as irritated and would probably use the rss option a lot.
JohnFen 3y ago
> There's a zero percent chance I will subscribe to a newsletter willingly even if I love your articles. Same. Mostly because of tracking. According to what's been getting published in various internet marketing sites, one of the primary reasons why newsletters have become so popular for sites to do isn't about the newsletter -- it's about getting the email address (that's also a reason why more and more sites are requiring an account even when it doesn't make technical sense). That's a decent identifier that allows you to be tracked across sites.
- qwertox 3y ago
  > Same. Mostly because of tracking. Then there are the rare cases where you do subscribe, but every link in the email is a tracking link. Because they need to know when and from where you clicked on that link. SMH.

eviks 3y ago

That's an easy issue to fix: just move all these subscriptions to a separate mail tag/folder (skipping inbox), and read them whenever you like

Taywee 3y ago

There's a sizeable portion of the population for whom RSS would be perfect, but they don't know it exists, and if you tried to get them into it, would be baffled by the complete lack of interface (remember when Firefox would show an RSS icon near the URL when a site had an RSS link in the header?) A newsletter is useless to you, but a lot of people like them. I agree that popups aren't the way to push it, though. A simple newsletter link in the header of the site is more than good enough. I don't care how good the "conversion" rate is, I don't like harassing people who are just visiting my site for the first time.

hoseja 3y ago
RSS feels intentionally sabotaged.

Semaphor 3y ago

My switch between RSS and E-Mail is if I (mostly) want to read everything. RSS means I’ll see every single article. But for some (mainly backblaze, actually), I don’t. I want to read some, so I’m subscribed to their newsletter that gives me a summary of all recent posts every once in a while.

criddell 3y ago

If the pop up listed two options - email subscribe or rss subscribe - I don’t think I would be nearly as irritated and would probably use the rss option a lot.

JohnFen 3y ago

> There's a zero percent chance I will subscribe to a newsletter willingly even if I love your articles. Same. Mostly because of tracking. According to what's been getting published in various internet marketing sites, one of the primary reasons why newsletters have become so popular for sites to do isn't about the newsletter -- it's about getting the email address (that's also a reason why more and more sites are requiring an account even when it doesn't make technical sense). That's a decent identifier that allows you to be tracked across sites.

qwertox 3y ago
> Same. Mostly because of tracking. Then there are the rare cases where you do subscribe, but every link in the email is a tracking link. Because they need to know when and from where you clicked on that link. SMH.