It’s simple: blogs aren’t promotions. Blogs subscribed to shouldn’t be messed with. The flow of information by email is an extraordinary opportunity, and when a choke point messes with that to make a profit, things break.
Apparently, even as prominent a blogger as Seth Godin feels the pain of algorithms when it comes to content. In this case, algorithms used for categorizing email.
I was planning to write a post about how to stay updated with my posts here as I have consciously chosen not to share them on social media ever since I started this new blog. Basically an introduction to RSS for those who never heard of it and my praises for Feedly as my de facto choice of an RSS client. When Julia Evans posted about how she generates an automatic email newsletter from her blog’s RSS feed, I considered doing something similar but as Seth’s experience shows, more often than not, that doesn’t work. I have personally observed among friends and colleagues how messy their email inboxes tend to be with most email never getting read. I think I don’t really need to depend on email but just make more effort in educating people about RSS.