Mark Manson, on how his newsletter is different from his blog:
each Monday, three of my ideas go out to around half a million people. And each week, anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand of you reply with your thoughts, disagreements, and suggestions. There’s an accountability and immediacy to the relationship that I have not felt since my early days as a blogger.
In the early months, I still treated it similar to how I treated my website: I wrote up declarative, advice-driven content with a kind of finality to it and posted it, thinking that was that.
… [but] by incorporating feedback, disagreements, and follow-up topics, the newsletter morphs into a kind of slow-moving conversation, where I can revisit topics and update prior beliefs with new information.
That baked-in feedback mechanism and willingness to evolve and improve upon itself is something that’s sorely lacking from public discourse at the moment. It’s not present in the media in any significant way. Blogging used to be like that, but blogging hardly exists anymore. And it was never possible on social media
It’s great for Mark that he’s found a medium that has both reach and interactivity. I know first-hand what it is to publish posts, see stats about them being read, but not hear back from those readers.
Blogs are in fact better suited to interactivity than newsletters. With a newsletter, your reply goes only to the writer. With a comment on a blog, you’re posting to both the writer and everyone else who reads the blog. You’d expect a robust community of loyal readers to be built around blog comments.
However, distribution trumps everything. it’s hard to follow blogs – RSS remains niche, despite the great variety of web and app based RSS readers available. Everyone has an email address, so everyone can follow someone who writes a newsletter. Email is the ultimate publish-subscribe medium.
End note: I’m wondering if chat apps like Telegram will ever replace email for newsletters. It’s hard to match email’s distribution, but orders of magnitude more people use chat apps than RSS readers. Outside of work, people now use chat much more than email. Today, for most of the world, Whatsapp is their main communication channel, and a few people I know use Whatsapp as a distribution list for stuff they publish. I’ve yet to see a community built on Whatsapp though in the manner I have on Telegram. I think it’ll only be a matter of time before you see this happen.