Is Social Media Losing Ground To Email Newsletters?

'My favorite new social network doesn't incessantly spam me with notifications,' brags New York Times technology writer Mike Isaac. 'When I post, I'm not bombarded with @mentions from bots and trolls. And after I use it, I don't worry about ads following me around the web.
'That's because my new social network is an email newsletter.'

Every week or so, I blast it out to a few thousand people who have signed up to read my musings. Some of them email back, occasionally leading to a thoughtful conversation. It's still early in the experiment, but I think I love it. The newsletter is not a new phenomenon. But there is a growing interest among those who are disenchanted with social media in what writer Craig Mod has called 'the world's oldest networked publishing platform.' For us, the inbox is becoming a more attractive medium than the news feed...
For me, the change has happened slowly, but the reasons for it were unmistakable. Every time I was on Twitter, I felt worse. I worried about being too connected to my phone, too wrapped up in the latest Twitter dunks... Now, when I feel the urge to tweet an idea that I think is worth expounding on, I save it for my newsletter... It's much more fun than mediating political fights between relatives on my Facebook page or decoding the latest Twitter dustup...
'You don't have to fight an algorithm to reach your audience,' Casey Newton, a journalist who writes The Interface, a daily newsletter for technology news site The Verge, told me. 'With newsletters, we can rebuild all of the direct connections to people we lost when the social web came along.'
The article suggests a broader movement away from Facebook's worldview to more private ways of sharing, like Slack. 'We felt this growing sense of despair in traditional social media,' says the CEO of Substack, makers of a newsletter-writing software. 'Twitter, Facebook, etc. -- they've all incentivized certain negative patterns.'

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