There is a lot of high-quality news delivered as email to inboxes. But inboxes are hardly the nicest place to read the news. So I’ve been wondering if there is potential for a newsletter reader that looks like a personal newspaper or a digital magazine, rather than a typical inbox. But I don’t think most people would use such a product, because newsletters sit too comfortably in existing inbox feeds.
It’s convenient to integrate with feeds that are already used. So the few feeds with our attention expand, like inboxes have become a place for general news. It doesn’t matter that there could be nicer products outside the feed. What matters is which feeds users direct their attention toward.
One such feed is Twitter, now X. Much of what constituted Twitter before it was acquired has been replaced. It raises the question - why acquire it in the first place? It wasn’t for the brand because that has been replaced. It wasn’t for the software because much of that has been open-sourced for anyone to use. It wasn’t for the employees because most of them were fired. No, Twitter’s most valuable resource, along with the network of user connections, is the attention users direct to their feed. It’s one of the few feeds users are in, and you can do things with a feed like that.
TikTok is another such feed. It started as an app where users remixed each other’s music and dance clips. Now it fills all kinds of purposes. It was a feed that users were in and it broadened from there. Just like email, TikTok has evolved into a feed that many get their view of what’s going on in the world from. It matters little what these feeds do in the beginning. What matters is what they absorb as they grow.