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Comment by zahlman | Hacker News Reader

What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?

What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.

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My blog used to be RSS only, because I thought email subscriptions were a plot of "content creators" and not something readers actually wanted... until one of my readers told me he really recommended adding email as an option. I did, and a surprising number of people subscribed since then.

Yes, I have found out the hard way that an entire generation or two of internet users has lost the ability to visit a website to see what's there. They rely on having notifications or emails come in so that they can react to things rather than proactively go seek them out. I tend to eschew push the forms of communication, for the same reason my mobile isn't covered in a colorful grid of apps: I want to actively be choosing what I do rather than having a set of options put in front of me that I get to pick from.

But that's all just a rant. Your core point is completely correct. If you want readers, you have to cater to this 'push' mentality, I think.

Ok, so if you want to read https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/, which is now publishing less than once a month, you prefer to refresh the website once a week hoping there's an article to read?

That's unimaginable to me. Most of the writers I read publish infrequently. Email is great. I don't have to be on any social media. Articles come in and I can read them at my leisure.

I deployed my own RSS reader to handle sites that update infrequently. That's still ultimately a pull, I just have an agent doing the pulling, and then I visit the site for my reader.

For a decade or~so I subscribe to newsletters and had skip inbox rules that archived them in a folder about the subject. Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them. Not sure if that means it works or not.

> Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them

Most people don't read most newsletters. Some people read some.

This Saturday I sent an email. It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people. 780 people clicked on a link.

I tweeted the same email as a link and got pretty good engagement! 20 likes, 2 retweets – that's decent for me these days. It was seen 1400 times. 78 people clicked on a link.

I have roughly the same number of followers as I do email subscribers.

> It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people

Sadly, open rates are no longer a useful metric in the absolute, at all. Some email providers will block all tracking pixels (so those people look like they never open anything, unless they click the link) and others will proxy all images, so they fire all tracking pixels systematically (so these people look to you as if they open every single email).

The only use you can make of open rates today is relative: "was the open rate higher or lower this month than last month?"

But it's extremely unlikely that your actual open rate (and list of who actually opened) is anywhere close to what the stats show. The only thing that still makes sense is click rates.

Hahaha it could well be that people are merely hoarding newsletter emails. I hope readers derive _some_ value from the emails, but since I'm not doing it to drive up "engagement metrics" I don't really mind.

There was a time when google toolbar had a search gmail button. I would use it to open gmail using whatever query was inthere. It happened quite often that it found newsletters matching the query. It takes quite a bit of hoarding to accomplish.

Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:

    example.com?re=you@yourwebsite.com&article=1234

Then mail you the requested article. With RE: and the same title they will even be threaded.

My RSS reader accepts email newsletters so I subscribe using that and funnel them all into feedbin

> What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?

Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web.

> What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts?

On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.

> I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.

Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.

Pick Medium, it's great ... if you want a paywall to turn away half your visitors!

The author has the option to enable that or not.

And (judging by the number of Medium articles I've been turned away from) 95% of all authors leave it on.

Sure, but my comment was being given directly to a user who asked for a platform that allowed X, Y and Z. I was providing them with an answer that met their stated criteria. I don’t see how other people’s configuration is of any concern.

...I use email notifications. I follow very few people (fewer than 10), so I'm always happy when an email pops up letting me know they've written something.

I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.

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