Tedium

For a number of years, a lot of people have said that “newsletters are the new blogs” — and to a certain extent that’s true. During TinyLetter’s heyday, it was often easier for someone to create a newsletter and send it to people that wanted to read it than it is to setup a website and deal with what the entails (which sadly, in 2019 is more complicated than it was in 2006).

But setting up a newsletter isn’t without its own costs and considerations. What platform do you use, how much does it cost to send emails (something that’s hard to ascertain if you don’t know how many subscribers you have), checking formatting for various mail clients and services, avoiding being marked as a spammer, etc. And that’s before you get into the aspect of creating the newsletter — which again, TinyLetter aside, is often difficult because most newsletter services are geared towards marketing/customer acquisition, rather than something akin to a blog.

And if you want to charge for your newsletter, that’s another challenge. You have to figure out a payment processor, a membership signup system, deal with account issues, etc.

For the Ben Thompsons’s of the world who were early/pioneered the game of paid subscription newsletters, the investment costs of infrastructure and technology is probably worth it. But for many others, it’s not.

So Substack has the potential to be that defacto place/platform. I see it as trying to be the Blogger or WordPress.com for content-based newsletters,…

>Can you imagine not having anywhere to buy food and having to drive 3 hours just to get it?<

That's a very real and serious problem for low-income and fixed-income consumers...many of whom are forced to shop wherever they reasonably can...

There are many "food deserts"--areas where it's difficult to buy affordable good quality food--in the U.S., especially in sparsely populated urban and rural areas...

It's true that if the need (demand) is great enough in an area a retailer of some sort will probably eventually open shop to fill the void...waiting for that to happen can be very painful for the poorest consumers...

The best hope for communities abandoned by Wal Mart may turn out to be franchises related to the "dollar store" concept...

How Dollar Stores Were Planted in the South and Bloomed...

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-dollar-stores-were-planted-in-the-south-and-bloomed-around-the-us

Dollar Stores: Big Business, Rock-Bottom Prices...

http://tedium.co/2016/01/19/dollar-stores-analysis/

For an article so certain about ethics, it ironically undercuts its own ethos: https://tedium.co/what-is-tedium/

> If you like strange and unusual descriptions of common things, explained in extreme depth, the Tedium newsletter is a great place to look for those, because it’s what we specialize in. Rather than focusing on viral things, we instead write about things that would never go viral on their own, that need context and storytelling around them to highlight their importance. Sometimes, the best stories haven’t been properly contexualized. There’s room for someone to do that, and that’s where we come in.

I don't think their mission statement covers ongoing internet dramas & cancel campaigns. Rather, this article feels like mission creep, lacking novel insight. For me, the only new info I caught is the author's intimation that the founder of Framework laptops should be canceled.

Here are some of my favorite non-programming ones:

* https://californiasunday.com - super interesting articles, beautiful design and photography

* https://inside.com/readthisthing - 1 interesting piece of journalism per day

* https://tedium.co - weird deep dives on random topics. This week was on adhesive licking stamps

* https://stratechery.com - high quality essays on tech

* https://nytimes.com/newsletters/morning-briefing - daily summary of news. NYT has it's biases but the daily briefing is useful for picking up on stories quickly and deciding what's worth reading more about.

Lastly, I have a small newsletter of my own where I send out a weekly-ish plaintext email with interesting articles, essays, and links that I've found. You can check it out at https://tinyletter.com/levthedev. I'd love feedback on the format/content.

If the PowerPC to Intel transition was any indication, they'll do just fine. Most consumers won't care, or will want to wait until Apple works out the kinks.

To put it a different way: the initial sales of the ARM-based chips won't be as strong as you think they might be, or as wide spread.

Having both Intel and ARM based systems in the market will even out the sales.

History is repeating itself, it's worth reviewing the previous transitions before making assumptions.

- https://everymac.com/mac-answers/macintel-faq/why-did-apple-switch-to-intel.html

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%27s_transition_to_Intel_processors

- https://tedium.co/2020/06/16/apple-powerpc-intel-transition-history/

- https://mashable.com/2016/06/29/intel-macs-at-10/

Newsletter author here. I run two actually—Tedium (https://tedium.co/) and MidRange (https://midrange.tedium.co).

Yes, they work. Beyond the ROI benefits already mentioned by other folks, it’s seen as an “owned” platform, something that you control, versus social media, where the platform is operated by someone else. You can make changes and adapt more efficiently to subscriber needs than somewhere like social media, where platforms are reshaping things that can affect your ROI without your input.

For that reason alone, I can understand why newsletters matter to a lot of media outlets and e-commerce folks alike.