Just read this article by diygod titled Saying No to Newsletters. I don't fully agree with some of the points made, but as someone without a wallet, I can't leave comments. So, I'll take this opportunity to write a blog post instead.
These issues make me feel like newsletters are like a tyrant who is incapable but desperately trying to prove themselves. They fail to meet the expectations of publishers and excessively infringe on the choices and efficiency of users.
No technology is trying to prove itself. Those who try to prove themselves are always behind the technology.
In comparison, RSS is more concise and efficient. Subscriptions can be managed centrally, and the processes of categorizing, bookmarking, subscribing, and unsubscribing are very simple. On the other hand, newsletters mix various emails together, making them very scattered and difficult to manage. It's hard to know what content you have subscribed to and when it will suddenly appear. Moreover, the content formats are also varied, making it very messy to view and read. So, you can't even bookmark an article, let alone convenient third-party integration.
Newsletters are difficult to effectively categorize and filter, and they are mixed with all normal emails, requiring manual organization. This can easily lead to information overload and spam email problems.
RSS, on the other hand, allows for easy categorization and filtering. For unimportant content, you can mark all as read with just one click, completely stress-free.
Most of the email clients or web-based email management pages I have used have automatic categorization and one-click read functionality.
Although RSS updates are not real-time, they are generally in hours, similar to self-built services like RSSHub, which can even update every minute. In contrast, newsletters have update cycles in days or even weeks or months, which is clearly much slower.
There is an obvious concept confusion. In the above paragraph, RSS updates == time RSS actively pulls new content, but newsletter updates == time the newsletter sender updates. These two are not the same, and even if RSS pulls updates every five minutes, it won't matter if the RSS provider doesn't update. On the other hand, newsletters generally push new articles to readers immediately, isn't that more timely?
The openness of RSS is reflected in the fact that it does not require users to provide personal information, thus ensuring better privacy and security. However, newsletters require at least an email address, which increases the risk of data leakage or abuse. Moreover, emails may contain malicious links or attachments.
Emails may contain malicious links or attachments, but does that mean the data returned by RSS has no risks?
Conclusion#
Overall, RSS and newsletters are actually different technical solutions on the same content distribution track. RSS is more inclined towards bulletin board-style content distribution for the public, while newsletters are more inclined towards providing timely content push services to specific groups. Both solutions have their pros and cons. RSS represents pull, while newsletters represent push. It's really strange to discuss them in a general way.
Here are some unsupported opinions I'm putting forward:
- Newsletters generally have higher open rates than RSS.
- Newsletters, on average, have better quality.
- Newsletters have an advantage over RSS in the paid domain.