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Tilderinos, what email newsletters are you subscribed to?
I know we have had a few Tildes discussions about places that we go to for more traditional media websites, but I think email newsletters are a nice way of getting some topical news and links to your inbox every day/week and I am curious what, if any, my fellow tildoes are subscribed to.
EFF and Humble Bundle are the only two mail newsletters I'm subscribed to. EFF just started mailing me after a donation and I never turned it off, and Humble is just useful to know because of their timed bundles. Every single other email "newsletter" I ever had was spam
mostly as a novelty, one of my burner email accounts is signed up to most of the newsletters that proliferate in the activist left, like the newsletters of Flippable and Swingleft and Indivisible, etc, so technically a lot. but as far as the ones that i actually actively read, there are only a few and they're all political because that's just my thing (and because i use twitter and bookmarks for everything else):
What a Day is often a fun read, but I’m a huge fan of Crooked Media. Probably not for everyone though.
I've been listening to them since the "keepin' it 1600" days. I used to like them a lot more than I do now (minus the fact that they missed 2016 by a mile).
The live shows are unbearable. They seem to have veered away from substance based on their own experience in the white house (which is what I loved about them) and are more and more about Trump jokes, and low bar circle-jerking. There is nothing unique about their show anymore. It's the same stuff you can find in /r/politics.
That’s fine, but there’s a lot more to Crooked Media than just Pod Save America (which I also listen to and enjoy). I really liked Favreau’s The Wilderness. It was an informative look at what happened in 2016, what people got horribly wrong, and what people can do right moving forward. I would like to see them do more of that.
For me, PSA is an entertaining recap of political events every few days (and I admittedly don’t listen to every episode). I’ve been trying to distance myself from politics a bit for my own sanity. It’s definitely not an unbiased source of news, but it is a source of a news and I enjoy listening to it. What I like most, actually, are the interviews they do. I get to hear a lot of people that I might not otherwise hear from.
we're getting on a bit of a tangent here, but i've found myself liking Hysteria and Majority 54 more than the mainline podcast stuff Crooked puts out, personally. i think that's more because i just don't see a need to listen to PSA or PSTW between the newsletters i'm subscribed to, the news websites i read, and people like sam seder, though.
it occurs to me that i should probably highlight what that burner account looks like, since i brought it up, so here's a sampling:
it has received 13 emails today, and usually averages about 20 a day. the american left has a lot of god damn newsletters, as it happens. i think i'm signed up to like 25 of them on this account.
Nice, I did not realize that Daily Kos had an elections newsletter, I am definitely going to sign up for that one. I have heard only good things about their political coverage.
It also looks like the What a Day newsletter you linked is part of the Pod Save America podcast group, which I also am a huge fan of.
Only Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" newsletter (linked to today's). I'll skim through some of the more-intense financial stuff if I'm not particularly interested in it, but I like his casual writing style a lot and he has great insight into topics like finance, business, and cryptocurrency.
This line from today's is a pretty decent summary:
That sounds pretty neat. I am usually turned off by financial news/information as it can get pretty dry, but I have found folks like the Freakanomics team can find ways to make it more casual / accessible, this sounds like it may be along that track.
I'm subscribed to a bunch of newsletters. There's only been a few that I actually read regularly though:
The Prepared - a newsletter for people that solve real problems in the physical world (maker, manufacturer, construction, and logistics). It's basically an aggregation of news with some comments organized by sections: Planning & Strategy, Making & Manufacturing, Maintenance, Repair & Operations, Distribution & Logistics, Inspection, Testing & Analysis, and Tangents.
Money Stuff - Matt Levine's take on money and financial news. I skim through it every day. Crypto-related stuff in particular grabs my attention.
Makery - Fab Lab-related news. Usually just a few articles that I skim through, but occasionally some of them grab my attention.
Maker Share newsletter - Well-curated list of interesting maker projects from Make:Community (Make Magazine).
Hackaday - Every couple of weeks I read through every post, but I still enjoy reading through their newsletter as well.
Hackster.io Newsletter - Every couple months I'll read through the old weekly newsletters. They used to be much more engaging. For the past year or so I feel like it's just auto-generated lists and social media aggregation. I would link it, but I can't even find how to sign up for it.
GrowthHackers Weekly Top Posts - I read through the top posts email every week and occasionally read them if they catch my interest.
The Embedded Muse - Much of the content here feels very "old-school" but there's plenty of solid content, some of which is truly great. Very much intended for Embedded programmers.
There's plenty of others, but most of them I don't read or they're very specific to my business (eg: competitor newsletters).
I enjoy Tedium, which is pretty much the exact opposite of topical (or news, for that matter). It's a series of deep-dive pieces on topics that would otherwise get a passing thought at best, but are fascinating either despite or because of that.
Okay, I just found out newsletters were a big thing today (maybe you're asking this from this thread on HN?) and I had no idea. I like the idea but don't like cluttering up my inbox with a lot of mass-emails.
So far, I've found Kill the Newsletter to fix that problem, so there's that. But what do newsletters give us that RSS doesn't?
(Sorry that this is off-topic, but it's a meta-question I would like some discussion on. If it needs to be removed and a new discussion created, I'm amenable to that.)
Take a look at an Android application called Stoop.
It's a newsletter aggregator which provides its own e-mail address and includes easy subscribe/unsubscribe functions.
That's not to say it's not also aggregating data for the real mail account you sign in with, but that's what disposable mailboxes are for.
I think I'm up to around 50 different newsletters in there...
Just wanted to point out that it looks like Stoop is available for iOS as well.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check it out (if it'll never download from the Play store...)!
to be honest the answer is probably not a lot, so i think it's basically just a personal preference call. in my current situation i like newsletters over RSS because i don't get a lot of other emails, most places have newsletters available to me, it's more convenient to read since i also can see my emails from my phone, and i don't really like any of the feed-reader options that currently exist.
You know, you make a good point especially about feed reader options. I'm actually not using one right now, but I like the idea of them... I'm about to try newsletters and see if I prefer them.
If you are on Android, Flym is a nice, open source one. Personally I use Elfeed on Emacs because I script it in various ways to help quickly digest the useful stuff from 120-odd feeds I am following.
I actually don't participate on HackerNews, so I was not aware of that thread. I have been thinking about posting this one for a week or two now and just found the time for it today.
I am actually not super tech-savy I guess so I don't use RSS feeds or really know how they work, so I usually just stick to visiting sites I am interested in directly or relying on things like newsletters or Twitter to find stuff I am interested in.
I think you are fine and certainly on topic here. Thanks for raising your questions!
And thank you for answering them! It must have been a piece of Internet synchronicity then, the closeness of these discussions. Thanks for posting, now I can try putting them in a newsletter app and see if that does what I want.
Here are the ones I am subscribed to:
Overnight Energy & Environment from The Hill – It’s a nice daily round-up of the latest energy and environmental news from a federal perspective.
Today’s stories included:
Daily Pnut – Great daily overview of international and U.S. news, interesting quotes, and a huge selection of links and articles to great in-depth topics.
Today’s highlights included:
Right Richter by Will Sommer of the Daily Beast – Weekly Wednesday overview of various right wing media stories.
This week’s stories were:
The Nancy Pelosi fancy water hoax - A week after the State of the Union, a significant percent of the pro-Trump internet has become convinced that Nancy Pelosi was drinking out of some baroque water contraption during the speech, rather than out of a humble glass.
Steve Bannon wants to make Trump’s Wall out of hemp
George Papadopoulos courts QAnon conspiracy theory on Twitter
Will Sommer reviews a movie made by pro-Trump YouTube personalities “The Dip Run”*
http://hackernewsletter.com/: Best of hackernews (posts) without the worst of hackernews (the comments). I like the links come to me with threads already dead, so I don't feel an urge to participate. HN is still the best source of tech news.
http://www.pointer.io/: A developer newsletter that I don't really read, but that does have good links in it.
I used to subscribe to quite some news newsletters from multiple newspapers, but I found that it overwhelms me like that. So I unsubscribed from them all and started using RSS to follow them where I use Elfeed on Emacs and an elaborate auto-tagging and auto-scoring to cut through the big volume of news and only deal with relevant stuff.
I subscribe to freecodecamp's newsletter in the hopes of coming across a helpful article. Thus far, the links I've been receiving are completely useless (I barely know basic JavaScript, stop sending me articles about machine learning and NodeJS!) but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Dense Discovery – mostly oriented towards the tech industry workers. Every description of it I've written so far is boring, so see for yourself.
TL;DR – gives 3-6 links about the important events in tech and related fields (SpaceX and Tesla come up, as well as privacy legislation and such things) daily.
HeyDesigner – gives some of the most interesting design news, either daily or weekly (you choose when you subscribe).
The Macstories.net member newsletter and the OED word of the day, that's it. I prefer to keep the email I get to a minimum, probably as a reaction to when I was subscribed to several large technical mailing lists and was receiving at least a hundred messages per day.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Please, for the love of God, no.
The first sounds like “tumblreinas” and the second couldn't sound more like “dildos” even if you tried.
Nothing wrong with “Tildes' users”. Not that you need to address the users when you're already asking them and not anybody else. Kind of redundant.
Hidey-ho, Tilderino!
I unironically say tildery doodley in my head every time I read it and smile a little. Its just such a fun goofy name and i like its juxstaposituon to tildes more serious discussion.
Weve actually had several discussions here on potential demonyms for the site. I believe from our last demographics survey most people specified they would prefer not to have one, but plenty of others were considering various options including tilders, tilderinos, tildoes, and waves.