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Karen Carlson's avatar

I have a really stupid question (yes, there are stupid questions, and I'll prove it right now).

What's the difference between a newsletter on Substack and a blog on, say, Wordpress? Besides that nobody blogs any more (says the person who's been blogging one to three times a week for the past 14 years). I know there are paid subscriptions, but I've never run into a substack I wanted to read that required me to pay. Is there a functional difference? Or is it just cooler to have a newsletter?

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Robert Long Foreman's avatar

The newsletters get sent directly to the email inboxes of those who sign up for them. That's the main difference, as I see it. I would like to just have a blog, and there is still one on my website. I think newsletters have gotten more popular because people mostly just go to two or three websites and that's it. If I write something on my blog, I can count on few people ever seeing it. It's really strange how narrow our experience of the internet has become. I used to have a half-dozen blogs I would check regularly at any given time, and that's just gone out of fashion, I guess.

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Karen Carlson's avatar

I have a lot of email subscribers thru Wordpress, the free version no less. I follow almost all the blogs I follow on Feedly. Or at least I potentially follow them; most of the time I just scroll thru and click "mark as read" which is too bad.

I appreciate your analysis of the bad sentence. So often, people talk about 'this is a great sentence' or '... a bad paragraph' and never explain what makes them great or bad. I like it so much I'm going to link to it on my next blog post, comparing your helpfulness ("One of the writers I follow around like a puppy...) to John Gardner's. Of course, no one reads my posts, and less than no one clicks through links, but it's still going to be there.

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James Foreman's avatar

“Slut bible” still makes me laugh.

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