Ask HN: Why do you subscribe to newsletters? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do you subscribe to newsletters?

The popular startup wisdom dictates that newsletters are only growing stronger, with more people opting out, and new companies built around them. As someone who unsubscribed from 90% of the newsletters, I can't relate, but I'd love to understand what drives people to sign up, and what value you are getting.

If you could share your personal experience with newsletters, and what makes them good (and bad), I'd love to know your point of view. Thank you!

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I subscribe to Exponential View, Farnam Street, and Stratechery, and a few others. I don't read them every time (maybe 25%) but value the content and also finding myself searching old editions for specific companies or issues I'm trying to learn about. The good ones are consistently good. The bad ones are lots of noise to signal and hit or miss. The good ones inspired me to write this one, which I do to help me learn about systems: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/

Curious, how did you get to contribute to TC? Did you reach out to them with one of your posts, or did they find it interesting and ask to repost?

They asked me to write that one on mosquito eradication after seeing some of my tweets. I hope you liked it. I wrote a follow up to the mosquito post recently.

Yes, it was good. It's rare to see articles that go even one-step in depth, so this was a good change! Good luck with your writing.

Thanks! Just found your Smashnotes project and signed up.

> what drives people to sign up, and what value you are getting

It might only be me, but this question is silly.

I'm getting the news, updates from a project or company I'm interested in.

Thoughtworks' tech radar is a great example of a project I love getting regular updates from: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar

Newsletters are not spam, it's a deliberate, on-topic tune-in.

I agree. In fact, I am a paying subscriber to both Stratechery and Sinocism. There are somethings where I want to be updated regularly and I will pay attention.

Those are good examples, thank you. I've seen Stratechery and Exponent mentioned on HN quite a few times. Curious, do you care if this analysis is "correct," or are you happy to get the newsletter even if his is just an opinion that will potentially help you think about a topic in a new way?

Got ya. That makes a lot of sense. I was a subscriber to a few newsletter that were advertised as niche, on topic, but found to be getting an aggregate of news/ideas that could be easily found anywhere else. I'd get 3 pages of 'insights' that could be summarized in a sentence. Maybe it was just a choice of newsletters on my part!

news sources for niche subjects don't really exist, and it helps separate the signal from the noise.

Got it. Do you have an example of what is a good niche newsletter? Are we talking about ~30k subscribers, or more like 300 subscribers?

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