cross-post: https://lemmy.ml/post/209401

I usually use a feed reader to gather news, but some news sites use newsletters instead of distributing feeds. As a user, is there any advantage to receive news using newsletters over feeds?

  • erpicht
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    32 years ago

    As far as the advantages of a newsletter over a feed, nothing comes to mind. At least not from the perspective of the average RSS user. It does help the distributor of the newsletter gauge interest in some capacity, but as @Echedenyan mentions in the cross-post, this also provides the distributor with a bit of personal information and the ability to send additional emails for advertising.

    On a personal note, I find newsletters somewhat bothersome, since they quickly fill up mine inbox and only distract from the emails I need to read and respond to. In the end, these newsletters pile up unread and are eventually purged, since I don’t think to check my mail in my free time. One’s workflow with email will determine if newsletters are more convenient than a feed.

  • @kevincox
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    32 years ago

    I run an RSS-to-email service so I wrote a comparison on our blog a while ago. It is interesting in this case because it is very 1-to-1 since it all ends up in your email.

    https://blog.feedmail.org/2022/02/feedmail-vs-first-party-newsletters.html

    Of course if you don’t like getting your news by email then you can add more points to the RSS column because it is more flexible for most users. Although some feed readers support generating email addresses that you can subscribe with so that you can see email newsletters alongside your feeds instead of in your email client.

    At the end of the day RSS and Email are just different delivery mechanisms for the same content but differences in the mechanism cause small changes in the experience and differences between the availability of software for various use cases can also impact which delivery mechanism suits your workflow better.