tl;dr: How to control your Substack overload and reclaim your inbox
These are difficult times, and staying up to speed is a full-time endeavour. Ironically, the explosion of newsletters from individuals has made this harder rather than easier,
I have found myself swamped by newsletters, despite efforts to bring some order to them (more of those efforts in a later post.) Newsletters can be a useful way of getting information — the email lands in your inbox, right where you are, you don’t need to go out and find it, and, at least in theory, the person writing the newsletter has taken time and effort to deliver something useful to you and at speed.
But it doesn’t scale for either of us. The person writing the newsletter can’t outsource the writing to someone else, except for a few guest columns from time to time. Unless they’re already rich they’re always going to be wanting to convince you to convert to a paid option, And if you’re going to pay $5 a month, why not subscribe to a full newspaper?
But for us the problem isn’t just financial. It’s that there are just so many good (often very good) newsletters that even if we only take the free stuff, we’re still committing ourselves to hours of reading per day or a quickly bloated inbox of unread messages.
The solution: an old fix
For me the solution has been to dust off an old technology: RSS. I first wrote about RSS in 2001, which gives you some idea of how old it is, how old I am, and how much a failure it has been. The story of RSS’ failure is for another time, but the remarkable thing is not only that it’s not dead, but that a) there are some beautiful apps and services still out there for you and b) the newsletter industry does support (if that’s the right word) the RSS protocol, even if reluctantly. The simple truth is that RSS powered everything we now hold dear: twitter/x, facebook, podcasts and yes, newsletters. It’s the guts of the commercial web, and the people who developed it haven’t made a cent from it.
RSS simply takes content, wraps it up and creates a URL. If you save that URL to an RSS reader (for example, it could be a browser like Vivaldi) and the reader will receive all future content sent via that URL. No sign-up, no personal data given. RSS was the future, until more commercially minded souls used it for their plumbing, but removed features that didn’t suit their goals.
Most visible in this are substack-like platforms. Sure, they’ve helped create an industry of smart people who can make a modest living from writing for an audience. Most important is that modest living bit. RSS never really offered a seamless way for writers to monetise their work, and that was a major drawback the likes of Substack have solved. But they solved it by leveraging an even older technology — email — that RSS was trying to get us away from. Back in the late 1990s it was clear that email was vulnerable to spam and malware. (The first phishing emails were sighted in about 2001, but email had already become a favoured vector for trojans and viruses.)
But the bigger problem was that mailboxes were getting bloated, as personal emails, work emails, spam and newsletters all clogged up the works. RSS promised to take the newsletters out of the mailbox by creating a channel for the rising world of blogs to reach their readers, respecting their privacy and their sanity. It worked well for nearly a decade, until social media usurped blogs by making interactions between users the key selling point, rather than the content itself.
Simple, almost
So, where does this go? When my efforts to get my email inbox to zero failed, I decided to quit. Instead I’ve spent the past day or so adding all the newsletters I subscribe to via Substack, Medium, Ghost etc, adding their RSS feed to my reader, and then unsubscribing from the newsletters (unless they’re paid ones.) It’s still a work in progress, but I think it might be the only way to cope with the scaling issues of Substack et al.
It’s better with RSS
Why is RSS better than email? Lots of ways:
- first, privacy. You don’t have to give any of your details to anyone — the platform, the company/individual producing the newsletter, or anyone in between. There’s no tracking, spam, data sharing, and it’s fully autonomous;
- you can organise your newsletter subscriptions as you want, within folders or tags supported by whatever RSS reader you end up using. You can do this in your email app, but it’s not as intuitive;
- things don’t get all mixed up. I’ve talked before about email bloat, and the pain of missing important emails. Keeping your information sources and your email separate is a real plus;
- space junk: RSS feeds are stored in the cloud or your computer, but not at your cost. Nowadays email is not free, unless you religiously delete stuff.
- The format of content RSS feeds is more bare bones, but there are some RSS readers that use this simplicity to create very elegant interfaces. All the annoying ephemera added to most email newsletters is stripped, leaving only text and images in – usually – a readable and pleasant format. My favourite is Unread, available for macOS and iOS, which is free, but has a premium subscription of $5 per month, which covers Mac, iPhone and iPad. Another app which focuses on elegance; Reeder.
- getting out is easy. Substack and others have made it progressively harder to unsubscribe from a newsletter, and don’t get me started on trying to cancel a paid subscription. More on this below. In an RSS reader, it’s easy.
- you can easily navigate through past posts from one particular newsletter. Doing the same on the likes of Substack can only be done by a cumbersome keyword search in your email app, on the platform’s app or on the web.
- Slightly nerdy, this one, but RSS readers tend to make it much easier to save stuff to somewhere else. Yes, you can always print an email to PDF, but all the bells and whistles in the email tend to male it a clunky experience. Exporting a post from an RSS reader tends to be more straightforward, and the result more elegant and simple.
Downsides? A few
Disadvantages? Sure, there are some:
- If you don’t get that much email, and don’t subscribe to many newsletters, it makes sense to keep everything in the same place;
- RSS won’t (usually) work with paid subscriptions. Better to keep that in email and the app;
- RSS feeds of newsletters aren’t always identical. I’ve noticed some stuff doesn’t make it through to the RSS feed, but this doesn’t happen much;
- you will miss some features that Substack and others are adding to their platforms: hangouts, notes, that kind of thing. But I’ve not used these much, except for paid subscriptions.
- we commonly monitor email more readily than other apps so we’ll likely see newsletters as they land because we have our notifications set that way. Which is good — except when you subscribe to a lot of them, or you want to save alerts for the scary email from the boss or HR;
- it is a bit more complex to set up. I’ll explain this in more detail in another post, but I do recognise that not everyone is interested in making the extra steps to make this work;
- with RSS the creator of the newsletter doesn’t get the same benefit of metrics to see who is subscribing, and who is ‘engaging with’ (what we used to call ‘reading’) their content. As a creator using all platforms I definitely think this is helpful, but not everyone is going to use RSS, and so I think on balance writers will get enough of a sense of how they’re being received from email subscribers not to be adversely affected.
- you might find yourself moving one bottleneck from one place to another rather than removing it. (I was wrestling with much the same problem nearly 20 years ago: Email Wins Over RSS? and What’s RSS to You?) But as RSS makes it really easy to unsubscribe, so thinning the herd every so often is not too painful.
Still, it’s been a good start and for my sanity it was probably overdue. The world is spinning very fast, and the last thing we need is to get overwhelmed with the information sources we actually trust.