Why newsletters are not ideal

I don't like newsletters, and why I prefer RSS

Problems

You enter a site, and the first thing you see is a popup asking for your email, that’s plain rude, or even worse, you start reading the article, and it pops up asking and interrupting your reading.

Please add the banner at the end of the article; if your article is good, I might give it a try.

Let’s say that I agree and write my email; now I have to trust that the site won’t be hacked, or directly sell my email to a third party.

I might get your new information in a neat and nice email, but again, it’s your choice to send spam, and let’s say you do, this could happen with RSS, but there’s a main difference, that’s unsubscribing, and here is where the problem begins.

There are so many sites that have broken unsubscribe pages, it’s a link that devs don’t usually visit and rarely gets any maintenance, so if it does not work now, I have to contact the company directly, and if I’m lucky, it will be sorted out, if not, I have to completely block your email address, which might be a problem if I want other updates.

Why RSS is better

RSS completely avoids all those problems.

It does not ask you to send your email; you gather the data whenever you want, and your email is kept private, there’s no need to trust the site with privacy.

Unsubscribe is always on your side; just remove the URL from your client and you’re done, no need to contact anyone, no need to trust the site to do it for you.

RSS can be tailored; some sites separate their feeds by category, so you can choose what you want to read, yes there are some newsletters with preferences that require an account again more work for both, but with RSS, you just choose a URL and be done with it.

Advantages of newsletters

Being fair, probably all people on the internet have an email, which makes it easier to reach, and most people don’t know what RSS is, so it’s easier to explain to someone to subscribe to a newsletter than to an RSS feed.

There are more email providers giving completely free service than RSS readers, the moment you want to sync between devices, you have to pay for a service, or self-host, while email is mostly free.

Conclusion

RSS declined with social platforms removing support, especially when Google Reader decided to close, and when browsers removed integrated support for it (yes Firefox I’m looking at you).

If you care about privacy, RSS is the way to go, and it’s sad that the tech that respects users the most is dying.

I’m extending this section now with other articles that promote RSS: - I’ve been advocating for RSS support, and you should too - I Ditched the Algorithm for RSS—and You Should Too