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by marcosdumay 1817 days ago
> RSS doesn't solve the same problem because that's a "pull" mechanism instead of "push" like email.

I don't think that matters. Having somebody add your RSS to their reading addresses has basically the same effect as having they give you their email and not add you to their spam list.

Email is not exactly push anymore, it stays on a server waiting for the user to go there look. Any of them can, and usually do, automatically pull data on a schedule and alert the user when there's something new. The biggest difference I can see is that you and the user do not have to deal with the spam-handling problems. If the newsletter is spam, that's a big win for the publisher, but if it's not, it's a loss.
1 comments
jasode 1817 days ago
>Having somebody add your RSS to their reading addresses has basically the same effect as having they give you their email and not add you to their spam list.

I mentioned "RSS" under the bullet point of publisher motivations and RSS being "pull" matters from the publisher's perspective because they want the email addresses.

With RSS, the publisher's server logs can see users' ip addresses (when client RSS readers scan the URL) but not users' email address.

Consider a real-life example of a publisher's perspective to make this distinction clear and to understand economic limitations of RSS:

E.g. Tim Ferris has a blog website.

- https://tim.blog/ <-- main url

- https://tim.blog/feed/ <-- RSS url for the blog

- https://tim.blog/comments/feed/ <-- RSS url for blog comments

- https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/ <-- newsletter URL requires email signup

- (no newsletter RSS url) <-- newsletter has no RSS option

... and Tim Ferris will not allow a RSS url for the newsletter because building his email mailing list is the _purpose_ of his newsletter. He's willing to allow RSS readers to access the main blog but not the newsletter. This selective access is not inconsistent and it makes perfect sense if one understands the publishers' motivations.

Luckily for publishers like Tim Ferris, many users prefer their newsletters in their email inbox which aligns with publisher's preference to send them there.

(Yes to be pedantic, some hackers can fake out email newsletters by using Feedbin's email+RSS bridge mentioned in other comments but that's not relevant here because publishers don't care about the small minority doing that.)

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