An email digest aggregates information about a specific topic or theme and distributes it via email in an accessible format on a regular basis. It's an unreasonably effective method of curation and sharing, and our 0.2 product makes it ridiculously easy to practice it. However, it's only one of the many possible sharing patterns.
An email digest—like Matt's Magnificent Seven—represented as a simple pattern looks like this: send seven things from across to web to all subscribers via email every Sunday at 0700. Additional patterns can be constructed using combinations of sources, tempos, frequencies, content characteristics, distribution channels, and contact segments. This makes for a massive space of possible sharing patterns for every individual, group and organisation.
Below, we've presented a small selection and identified some of the higher level themes we've noticed whilst exploring and facilitating sharing patterns. The samples are drawn from our own sharing practices, as well as those we've discovered from others—be they friends, family, peers, colleagues, early Subset users, or participants in our product discovery initiatives. We've generalised and anonymised them to make them a little easier to comprehend. So let's check them out...
Eleven sharing patterns
Share ten things re: the creative life via a weekly email to a niche audience
Post generative AI long reads to a personal LinkedIn twice a week
Drop golf memes and highlights from Instagram into a WhatsApp group chat
Share grappling techniques and seminars from YouTube to a Warpcast channel
Continually output health and wellness links as X posts
Send potential places or activities to a spouse via email in advance of a trip
Notify a friend of studies that provide evidence for a mutually-held belief
Post themed essays to a specific channel in a company Slack
Follow up a chat with a one-off Discord DM of products that were referenced
Bounce home renovation TikToks to one another from within the app
Send food pics and good local restaurants to a Facebook Messenger group chat
Four pattern commonalities
What did you notice about the above? What commonalities come to the fore when you think about sharing patterns? We've found four.
First, most sharing patterns cross platforms. They involve the transition of something from one walled garden to another. From Instagram to WhatsApp; from Facebook to email; from LinkedIn to Discord.
Second, what's shared is limited in depth. Typically, it's a link plus a little contextualising information. Often—if the shared thing is super consumable—it's just a raw link.
Third, the sharing is usually organic rather than systematic and formal. It's driven by emergent feelings and connections and is usually undertaken in a non-self-conscious, informal, peer-to-peer manner. More deliberate, reasoned patterns exist but they're the minority.
Finally, most sharing patterns are just one thread of a larger communication nexus. The sharer sending memes to their friend via WhatsApp is also sending shortform videos via Snapchat and tagging their friend in Instagram comments.
Sophisticated sharing
Sharing is a foundational behaviour in modern culture, with hidden patterns and subtle dynamics that are only now revealing themselves after a generation of being online. Contemporary sharing tends to be cross-platform, depth-limited, informal and P2P in nature, and multi-threaded.
There are likely other fundamental elements of sharing still waiting to be discovered and leveraged. And as we work to bring the existing cultural technology stack up to speed, we intend to lay the foundations for those discoveries. To enable faster, flexible, more sophisticated patterns of sharing without the excess of energy and expense that's currently required
In the meantime, consider your own sharing patterns: what do you share, with whom, and why? How do you go from, "Hmmm, interesting," to, "Hey, I saw this and thought of you"?
