My co-host and I are delving into the meta-content this week, talking about the podcast itself. Our biggest question is about mailing lists. We're uncertain whether we should have one. There are definite advantages for the content creator, but privacy issues for the listener.
There are many other options to be informed of podcasts, such as subscriptions on patreon, Spotify, or following the RSS feed. But the same is not true of non-podcasts, such as blog articles. For those, Twitter still works, but content can be lost.
What's your opinion of mailing lists?
We also talk a lot about the audio of the show. There's a lot behind a podcast and we haven't found the perfect solution yet. You'll note something sounds off with my voice this time.
Let Us Know
Check out my book and the complete show notes.
And let us know, do you like mailing lists, and what's important on a podcast to you?
Top comments (7)
I hate mailing lists! I mostly use email for important communication, and all kinds of email subscriptions make it using like that more annoying than I'd like it to be.
Fortunately, these days not many people use mailing lists that much, so I hardly ever encounter useful info sources that rely solely on them.
Which ways do you prefer to be informed of content that you might like?
I prefer social networks feeds for that. They're super easy to ignore when I don't need them, and posts I missed aren't hard to find.
But I guess that would only work fine for people like me who follow only a few accounts, I suspect that when number of subscriptions grows bigger, they become harder to manage.
How annoyed are you by people that post the same content multiple times on their feed?
I do that a lot on Twitter, spread throughout time periods of the day, over a week, to compensate for Twitter's algorithm. But if you don't follow many people, you'll likely see the duplicates.
I think I wouldn't enjoy that. Then again, I've never seen anyone actually doing that.
It might be because I'm not a Twitter user. Are people commonly working around Twitter algorithms like that?
If you haven't noticed it then perhaps it isn't so bad.
Yes, people do this frequently. It's not always obvious. I'll attempt to mitigate duplication by retweeting different tweets of my articles, or slightly varied content. I also keep a list of when I tweeted what, so it's spaced over time. There's services that do this automatically, but I don't use them.
As a human, I strongly dislike mailing lists. I have a hard enough time keeping up with non-mass emails.
As a podcaster, I love running contests over the mailing list because its convenient and the responses I get are highly entertaining!