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, interrupting your reading
Please add it 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 they will 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 dereference, unsubscribe, and here is where the problem begins.
There are so many sites that simply have broken unsubscribe pages, it’s a link that workers have no need to visit and rarely gets 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, or if not, I have to completely block your email address, which might be a problem if I want other updates or is simply too tedious.
In my opinion email is meant for short communication between parties, it’s not a good format for reading long information.
Why RSS is better
RSS completely avoids all those problems.
It does not ask you to send your data; you gather the data whenever you want, and your e-mail is kept private, there’s no need to trust the site.
Unsubscribe is always on your side; just remove the URL from your client and you’re done.
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, 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 be limited, while email is mostly free.
Conclusion
If you care about privacy, RSS is the way to go.
It seems to be decreasing with social platforms removing support, browsers not having dynamic bookmarks anymore and it’s sad that the tech that respects users the most is dying.