What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?

What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts? ... People read those kinds of emails? I always curse myself for finding a way to get them sent to myself, and file them away somewhere until I can figure out how to turn them off.

My blog used to be RSS only, because I thought email subscriptions were a plot of "content creators" and not something readers actually wanted... until one of my readers told me he really recommended adding email as an option. I did, and a surprising number of people subscribed since then.

For a decade or~so I subscribe to newsletters and had skip inbox rules that archived them in a folder about the subject. Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them. Not sure if that means it works or not.

> Eventually I never really looked at the folders but it never bothered me as I don't really see them

Most people don't read most newsletters. Some people read some.

This Saturday I sent an email. It has since been opened by 26% of my subscribers, that's 4,600 people. 780 people clicked on a link.

I tweeted the same email as a link and got pretty good engagement! 20 likes, 2 retweets – that's decent for me these days. It was seen 1400 times. 78 people clicked on a link.

I have roughly the same number of followers as I do email subscribers.

Hahaha it could well be that people are merely hoarding newsletter emails. I hope readers derive _some_ value from the emails, but since I'm not doing it to drive up "engagement metrics" I don't really mind.

There was a time when google toolbar had a search gmail button. I would use it to open gmail using whatever query was inthere. It happened quite often that it found newsletters matching the query. It takes quite a bit of hoarding to accomplish.

Perhaps it is even a better solution than website that vanish eventually. I might one day make a newsletter with links like:

    example.com?re=you@yourwebsite.com&article=1234
Then mail you the requested article. With RE: and the same title they will even be threaded.

> What if I want people to read me without needing a subscription or email disclosure?

Medium is where you can post and get a bit of what substack offers while giving you the ability to make your post freely available via the web.

> What's the email for anyway? So that you can get sent notifications of new posts?

On substack, you get the whole newsletter in the email. you dont need to go to a website. I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.

> I use https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ to put them in my rss though.

Every Substack has an RSS at /feed.rss.

Pick Medium, it's great ... if you want a paywall to turn away half your visitors!

The author has the option to enable that or not.

And (judging by the number of Medium articles I've been turned away from) 95% of all authors leave it on.

Sure, but my comment was being given directly to a user who asked for a platform that allowed X, Y and Z. I was providing them with an answer that met their stated criteria. I don’t see how other people’s configuration is of any concern.

My RSS reader accepts email newsletters so I subscribe using that and funnel them all into feedbin

...I use email notifications. I follow very few people (fewer than 10), so I'm always happy when an email pops up letting me know they've written something.

I don't pay attention to my RSS reader, and barely use social media. For whatever reason, email works for me.