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Comment by hans_mueller | Hacker News Reader

I am curious about the advantages of a newsletter over a blog featuring an RSS feed that you can subscribe to. The concept of getting mailed regularly seems so 1.0 and overcomplicated.

But my question is serious - I also maintain a data science blog and I'd like to evaluate offering a newsletter version of it.

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I generally use newsletters as a filter. There is often way too much information to subscribe to in an RSS feed. Whereas if it is a curated newsletter then it makes for much better digestion. There is also the benefit of it not changing during time. I know if I've read it or if I've only come so far through it. It allows me to digest it at my own pace. I also separate out all my newsletters / to read articles into a specific folder in email. So it's not too unlike an RSS feed

My guess is that a lot of us here on HN probably use a feed reader (I use Feedly). But that's because we're outliers with a technical persuassion. Most people don't have the first idea about rss, but _everyone_ uses email.

I'd suggest there are 2 advantages to starting a newsletter:

1. You can plug your rss feed into the newsletter and broadcast your new articles via email for those who don't use rss.

2. You can email other updates, news, surveys etc that you don't publish on-site.

Email also opens up the discussion because your subscribers can respond any time. It's like the original social network.

I rely on newsletters instead of RSS because newsletters will sometimes send articles from publications I am not subscribed to, but if I subscribed to them, I would get too many unwanted articles.

Even if I decided to build up an RSS reading list again, I would rely on good newsletters to tell me about new sources.

Well for me personally, it offers the advantage that it's available. I don't have an RSS reader and I don't intend to get one. I am trying hard enough to maintain a low information diet as it is, but there are a few newsletters that I allow myself.

http://feedly.com/ is comfortable to use.

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