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Comment by andersco | Hacker News Reader

Is a newsletter not the same thing as a blog? If so, is this really a new trend? And if not, how is a newsletter in this context different from a blog?

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I see there are already a ton of replies about push vs pull but the other (non-technical) aspect of a newsletter is the expected cadence of publishing. Some blogs have long gaps between posts and others have multiple posts per day. Newsletters typically define a daily or weekly schedule and stick to it. Sure, a blog could do the same thing, but they generally don’t. It sometimes feels like the difference between Last Week Tonight and a constant feed of breaking news clips.

Yes, looking at the technical differences is missing the point.

Newsletters tend to have a regular schedule, are easier for consumers to get started with (everyone uses email already), and have revenue models that can make it sustainable for the creator.

It's often paid content and it's pushed to you I suppose.

Push vs. pull is the main difference. They probably also tend to be more focused although, of course, there's no reason that a blog can't be.

"Push vs. pull is the main difference." Good point but can't blog posts be pushed to you by RSS feed.

RSS is still pull. Your feed reader pulls a manifest of stories and iterates over that to pull the stories.

Whichever servers you contact to do not initiate the connection, you do.

Isn't subscribing to newsletter and subscribing to RSS blog feed the same? Content is being pulled and and then pushed to you to consume it.

I mean, "push" has become more of a marketing term than a technical one. If we're talking marketing, sure, call it whatever you like.

But the technical distinction between the two holds. If you subscribe to an RSS feed and then never launch your reader again, nothing happens. If you subscribe to a newsletter and never check your inbox, your inbox still fills up.

I really don't see the difference you're trying to make. The RSS reader would also "fill up" in the sense that if you open it all the items would be marked unread just like in the inbox. Personally I use my inbox as my RSS reader by using a service that forwards RSS feeds to my inbox.

Everything is just a feed, email, RSS clients, social media, messaging apps, notifications channels. It's just a matter of managing which ones you make a habit of visiting and being notified about.

No, that is not what happens.

The local RSS reader you never launch is not executing. It does nothing - does not pull content. Nothing happens - no bits are transferred over the wire, nothing is written to disk until you initiate the pulls by launching the app.

Email servers operate continuously, so that when some publisher sends ("pushes") an email, that is delivered to your inbox, which will eventually fill up your quota (or the disk).

You can blur the distinction of what happens from the user's perspective all you like, and that's why I mentioned marketing phrasing. But it does not change what is actually happening.

That totally depends on the RSS client. Many, maybe most clients will poll the RSS feed periodically and cache items for you.

No, that's completely beside the point. I don't know how to make it any clearer.

The technical distinction between the push and pull is about who initiates the connection to transfer content.

For further reference, I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_technology .

Did you know that email clients have to poll their email server periodically and download their messages?

Actually, under the IMAP protocol a client will make a connection and keep it open while the server pushes notifications about emails that have been pushed to the server, at which point the client will make the decision whether to transfer the mails to the client (or delete etc).

There's also the newer variant, PUSH IMAP. I think that one speaks for itself.

None of that is polling.

A primer: http://www.newbietechtips.com/2013/07/pop-vs-imap-and-push-m...

Alright yea, technically, but push vs polling is a just a low level implementation detail for how to power a a feed.

So now I'm curious; it is pretty obvious your only goal is arguing for the sake of arguing; why are you doing this? What's in it for you?

I don't use RSS but I assume web based RSS reader executes automatically.

One is push and one is pull.

I think the focus on the technical difference of push vs. pull ignores the way that a push vs. pull mindset affects the content. A newsletter author expects the same audience (more or less) for each post, and so can build up a common shared context with the audience (as, e.g., Matt Levine does with recurring themes like "should index funds be illegal"). With blogs you generally write such that someone who landed from a search engine can dive right in.

A newsletter subscriber list is incredibly higher in value than most blog visitor traffic.

They have chosen to subscribe, you can contact them. You don't know your RSS subscriber count. It is a more highly engaged group, easier to build a relationship with.

And the number of people using RSS compared to using email who would consider a newsletter subscription is tiny.

They might as well narrate and broadcast their newsletter/blogs, and call them pods.

One of the newsletters everyone points to when discussing this trend, Ben Thompson's Stratechery, now includes an audio podcast version of each day's written post read by Ben.

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