
Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network” - bitsweet
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/08/inside-the-collection-of-industry-newsletters-continues-to-bet-on-email-the-largest-social-network/
======
pmlnr
"[...] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved it.
Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it revolutionary, was that
you could instantly deliver a written message to someone even if they weren't
there to receive it. [...] Email is neutral, meaning that anyone can email
anyone else with an email address. If you have a person's email address, your
message will be delivered no matter who you are - whether the recipient is
your oldest friend, your granddaughter, your boss's boss, or Beyoncé. The year
the web was born, this flattening effect was astonishing. Anyone in an
organization could communicate directly and immediately with anyone else,
"regardless of rank" [...]" \- Adrienne LaFrance,
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-
comes-after-email/422625/)

I'd like to add one more very important aspect: you don't need to register
with any or with yet another service, which will eventually fade into oblivion
within a few years - or which will become so ignorant to privacy, like
Facebook, that you end up deleting their apps and accounts.

Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed,
walled garden.

(BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build
services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon
is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones)

~~~
gramakri
> Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised,
> closed, walled garden.

What stops email going the way of XMPP?

~~~
alexmat
What happened to XMPP? Not trying to be snarky, I still use it. Is there an
issue I should be aware of?

~~~
cbhl
The big companies gave up on it. Google, Facebook, etc.

Everyone wants their product to be the new hotness. See the copying of
stickers, voice messages, and payments from Chinese/Japanese messaging
products. Or how Skype became a Snapchat clone.

~~~
falcolas
Companies giving up on open standards in favor of their own walled gardens
does not really provide a meaningful commentary on the open standards
themselves.

XMPP itself is a bit of a mess, but it's a standard with a lot of adoption,
which has its own value.

~~~
quanticle
A lot of adoption? How many users does XMPP have? I'm glad that XMPP is open,
but as a standard, it's useless to me if none of my friends are using services
that support it.

~~~
a3_nm
Not sure about the actual statistics, but XMPP is not just a standard for
messaging between people: I think it's also intended as a backend technology
for communication behind automated services. So even though there may not be
many humans using XMPP as a messaging application, there may be many people
who "use it" without noticing (as in, use a website, etc., which relies on
XMPP somewhere).

~~~
notyourwork
I don't have experience with xmpp protocol but how is it better than an http
or soap for example?

~~~
SamWhited
XMPP Core is a protocol at (roughly) the same level as HTTP: it provides basic
semantics for sending and getting data, and you can build your own application
level protocols on top of it. XMPP IM is an application level protocol built
on top of it that does something specific (instant messaging). It could have
been built on HTTP as well, but they were designed to work well together.

If we're comparing XMPP core to HTTP, the difference is that XMPP core is
async and stateful (like instant messaging sessions) and HTTP is synchronous
and stateless (great for fetching documents).

------
azurezyq
Maybe in US this holds, but things may be different in different places.

I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as
part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before
the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority
internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are
only for official communications there, and I don't think official
communications can be treated as "social networks".

I'm wondering if the same thing is happening in other developing countries
where people first touched facebook/whatsapp before even knowing E-mail
exists.

~~~
huhweirdyhat
When you lease an apartment, do you get the details via
WhatsApp/WeChat/TodaysChatApp or email? How about receipts, bank statements,
anything where deliverability actually matters?

Email is infrastructure; people invest in it. If the only people investing in
these chat apps are themselves people, these apps could be ghost towns in
years.

In some sense you're right; in another sense, it still seems like email is
likely to outlive walled gardens because there's no long-term reason to use
them.

In particular, unless there's a decent way to ensure that nobody can take my
received messages away from me, i'm unlikely to adopt it for anything but
chatting with friends.

~~~
pinwale
In China, you will probably do all of the above in WeChat rather than email.
Whenever I need to conduct business with someone in China, it's always over
WeChat rather than email.

One of the Chinese court systems actually sends notifications through their
WeChat account. I believe there are even pilot programs where you can initiate
court cases through WeChat as well.

~~~
ryandrake
As a non-Chinese, this seems... problematic to say the least. What if you
don't have WeChat, or prefer not to use it? Are there standards-based
alternatives offered? Off-line alternatives, maybe?

------
brongondwana
The most important thing about email is that you get your own, immutable copy
of every message. You can keep your copy and know that it will be exactly the
same when you look at it next week, it won't have been silently (or even not
silently) "corrected".

It's both a blessing and a curse, as anybody who's accidentally emailed the
wrong people or hit send before finishing editing knows, but it's the most
powerful thing about email (and SMS or even fax for that matter!) - you get
your own copy.

~~~
pmlnr
That is only one important aspect. It's also provider-independent (as long as
you own the domain, that is true) and is, by nature, decentralised. (Like
really decentralised, even by redundancy provaded by MX record priority in
DNS.)

~~~
emilyfm
Unfortunately very few people have their own domain for email (although they
should!).

When companies have kindly sent me their entire customer list (by using CC in
place of BCC) I see there are very few domains in it outside of the major free
email providers, and those that remain are mostly for their work or small
business. A personal or family domain is very rare.

~~~
alkonaut
I have my own domain, and I really should be using me@myowndomain but I don't.
I use gmail. One reason is that so many people and services already know the
gmail one so it's hard to change, but the biggest reason is that I don't trust
myself nor the place where I registered for my domain to actually maintain the
domain name registry and email delivery for say 10 or 20 years without any
maintenance. The value of these behemoth services is that they are more or
less guaranteed to be more stable than anything you can configure yourself.
They are too big to fail. Even just pointing my me@myowndomain to gmail
doesn't help here. It just adds a new weakest link to the chain.

~~~
emilyfm
I've had domains registered for over 20 years already, much longer than gmail
has existed.

You can renew a domain for ten years in advance and easily transfer between
registrars (and email providers, I use Fastmail), so it's a lot more reliable
for the (very) long term than a third-party service.

------
RandomInteger4
This is tangential, but needs to be stated:

What I've learned from email newletters is that Microsoft Outlook needs to die
a swift and horrible death.

There is absolutely no good reason why we should have to create email
newsletters that require tables for layout.

~~~
jameslk
I'm surprised we haven't seen the mIRC's of email yet (or maybe there have but
that just didn't work?). mIRC was a popular client for IRC on Windows. It
extended IRC with features such as color and formatting in your messages,
which was beyond the protocol. A feature like that worked just fine because
the color codes were mostly invisible to those who weren't using a client that
supported them. In this way, mIRC and other clients could move the protocol
forward via graceful degradation without having to wait for a new IRC
specification update.

I can imagine the same thing being done to email, where modern features could
be built on top of email, which just gracefully degrade if those features
aren't available in the client (e.g. something similar to inline source maps,
which can decorate parts of the email for clients that support it, but are
otherwise out of view for clients that don't). If the feature is useful
enough, other clients will adopt them, pushing the protocol forward.

~~~
moreira
That can be done easily enough with @media queries, I suppose. It's possible
to send a table-less, fully responsive, modern HTML email that is invisible
for less-modern clients. It doesn't require anything special and is possible
today.

The problem is that people who send email need it to look a certain way, and
leaving older clients behind, just like you'd have done in IRC/mIRC, is not an
option. So having the option to use modern features doesn't change anything,
at least for email.

~~~
Spivak
> The problem is that people who send email need it to look a certain way

I think it's fair to say that actual _people_ don't need any of this. It's
businesses and advertisers that would be the overwhelming consumer of these
abilities.

------
gsich
Email is like the one and only vendor/device/programming language independent
way of communication.

~~~
paxy
If you want to send plain text, yes. There is a lot of variation among clients
when it comes to formatting and layout however.

But then by those constraints you can also count HTTP or SSH or Telnet or any
other protocol at that layer.

~~~
Spivak
Nobody outside of business and advertising cares how annoying it is to write
carefully formatted HTML emails.

For any end user, email is the universal communication mechanism.

~~~
paxy
For text based communication SMS absolutely dwarfs email.

~~~
huhweirdyhat
In what respect? I don't think i've ever gotten an important SMS outside of
personal communications, let alone the 50+ emails I get a day that are
considered "important" in some way.

------
duck
A shameless plug, but if you like HN and email, my side-project,
[http://www.hackernewsletter.com/](http://www.hackernewsletter.com/), might be
worth a look. Rolling past 50k subscribers this month.

~~~
ethnic_throw
> All links are curated by hand from Hacker News.

My fear is that I have a different taste than you. How do you curate it?

~~~
duck
That is 100% fair, but not an easy question to answer!

I curate by hand using a custom tool that helps me search/filter articles and
basically find a mix of things I like along with things that subscribers tend
to click on. I tend to avoid "click-bait" type articles with little substance
and try to get a good mix of things that were popular with things that should
of stayed on the home page more. I've been doing this for seven years now, so
I feel like I have something that works... but ultimately you'll have to see
if it fits what you're looking for. :)

A recent issue just so you can see an example:
[http://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/360](http://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/360)

~~~
MattSayar
I've been subscribed for a while, and I think this approach works great!
There's plenty of links and sections to click on.

------
hiisukun
I enjoy email, but get frustrated when conversations get long. Here is my
favourite quote about email, which explains the issue lovingly:

    
    
      -- 
      A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. 
      Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? 
      A: Top-posting. 
      Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in email?

~~~
bobbles
Run into this sort of problem all the time using Jira service desk, internal
view of a ticket is new comments add to the bottom, customer view of the same
ticket is that comments add to the top.

Results in everyone using 'please see below' or 'above' and everyone being
confused

------
email4ever
So glad to see the pro-email comments! People seem so down on email, I made
buttons for those of us who still like it:
[http://giantcatco.bigcartel.com/](http://giantcatco.bigcartel.com/)

------
justboxing
> For others, it might mean one original article blurred out in a newsletter.
> (Inside’s newsletter CMS is built to handle toggling between paid-for and
> free content.)

Anyone know of an open source or paid Newsletter Management CMS? I'm working
on a content site like inside, for a very small sports niche, and am thinking
of making it a daily newsletter with paid subscriptions, instead of a regular
website driven by WordPress or some other CMS, with ads, which would be super
annoying and not monetize well these days.

~~~
frankdenbow
Check out [https://www.getrevue.co/](https://www.getrevue.co/)

------
robertlagrant
This is an interesting alternative to having a newspaper website: a newspaper
via email.

Not the first, I'm sure, but possibly the best organised.

~~~
killerdhmo
A... news letter, if you will?

------
Chirael
Besides search-ability, one thing I love about email is that I know the sender
isn't going to be notified when I read it. Contrast that with FB where I know
the sender will see a little "read" notification, and then I have pressure to
respond, etc.

------
askvictor
Google's Inbox is basically an email client reimagined as a social network
feed. They might have cocked up g+ (and whatever is was before that), but this
one they've done pretty well (as long as you don't think of it as just another
email client).

------
andreasgonewild
If you're more into the social part of networking than newsletters and don't
mind a bit of privacy, Snackis might be worth a look:

[https://github.com/andreas-gone-wild/snackis](https://github.com/andreas-
gone-wild/snackis)

------
bkanber
I was intrigued, so I just looked at the "Inside Premium" plan -- $10/mo for
one newsletter?? You can get a digital subscription to Washington Post and NYT
for basically half that!

~~~
jasonmcalacanis
NYT and Netflix are an exceptional value at $10 a month, but those are large
scale consumer content. In the B2B content space, any content that saves folks
a couple of hours a week is worth a LOT of money.

in this case, $10-25 a month is nothing... really, it's like zero dollars in
the context of a business executive making six figures.

~~~
bkanber
I'm a business executive making six figures ;)

Still not sure I'd pay for it out of pocket (but who knows!), but I missed the
B2B angle on the first read and was reacting to the price point as a news
consumer. IMO neither the article nor the premium page does a great job of
showing me that kind of value -- the only allusions to B2B value I saw were
"research reports" in the article and "let us be your research team" on the
page. But I suppose that's because you're still figuring out what premium
should be.

Hope you figure it out and wishing you success here. I love me some email.

~~~
ronack
I'm a longtime subscriber to Launch Ticker (their tech/startup newsletter). It
lets me very quickly be kept abreast of fundraising and M&A activity relevant
to my startup. Saves me about 30 minutes a day of visiting several popular
tech news sites, so well worth $10/month to me.

------
jasonwilk
Sorry to be negative but 300k subs for an email newsletter is not a lot.

~~~
ronack
300k PAID subs is kind of a lot.

~~~
somberi
I re-read the article and it does not explicitly say that the 300K are paid
subscribers.

------
petarb
Been a subscriber to a few of their newsletters for a some months now and have
to say the content is great. Can't wait to see what else the Inside team rolls
out.

------
aidenn0
e-mail seems to be dying fast. I have several friends (all under 30) who are
only reachable via facebook or SMS; e-mail is an afterthought.

~~~
UnpossibleJim
Even in a professional setting?

~~~
aidenn0
Define "professional;" inter-office communication, e-mail still wins.

Independent contractors I've hired all prefer text.

The gym I'm a member of uses a facebook group rather than e-mail for
communcating things like changes to the regular hours or special events.

