An email digest aggregates information about a specific topic or theme and distributes it via email in an accessible format on a regular basis. Subset's 0.2 product makes it super easy to produce them. First, you set an email digest production mode (e.g., send out 7 things every 7 days at 0900). Second, you save the interesting things you find via a form. Then, when your threshold is met (e.g., you find 7 things), an email digest is automatically generated, and the sent items are posted to your web page (like this one for the official Subset digest).
This is cool and all but it raises a question: why did we pick email digests as the first of the many save-share-search patterns to solve? Aside from our own experience* receiving and producing digests, we have a simple belief. Like math, recurrent neural networks, big data and protocols, email digests are unreasonably effective. There's a massive asymmetry between the time, energy and expense required to produce them, and the value added for the producer, the recipients and the cultural landscape at large. And that was before Subset came along and made this asymmetry even more pronounced.
Before we enumerate the reasons for the unreasonable effectiveness of email digests, however, let's specify why they perhaps won't work for you or an entity you're associated with. Take a moment and consider these behaviours:
You recently and regularly find things and send them to people with a contextualising note
You have hundreds of open browser tabs across devices that you're hesitant to shut down
You favourite/like/bookmark incessantly whilst traversing social media feeds
You spend non-trivial energy exploring things/concepts/domains because they're interesting
For people exhibiting those behaviours, email digests are an easy and organic pattern of production that can be adopted with minimal marginal cost and sustained over time. Our estimate is that 10% of people fit that profile. Which means that 90% of people will find email digests less easy to maintain and fundamentally mis-aligned with their default mode of attention. That doesn't mean they're not valuable—and that doesn't mean that people's attentional makeup can't shift and change over time. It just means that adopting and sustaining email digests as a practice will be harder for a larger group of people in comparison to a smaller group with a natural aptitude.
This is the main contraindication for email digest production. Here are a few others (most of which are mitigated if you're amongst that 10% described above):
Digest-orientated consumption is a little more effortful than basic consumption
Like long-term adherence for any behaviour, sustained digest production is hard
Implicit standards concerning quality and relevance of the things included must be upheld
If, as a person or entity, there's no growth, the digest produced will stagnate and feel stale
The value added for the recipients remains somewhat intangible to the producer
Digest production can become an excuse for avoiding deeper, constructive episodes of synthesis
Digests are not an effective method for driving a narrow outcome or promoting a specific action
Despite this, we're bullish on the unreasonable effectiveness of email digests. So, with the disclaimer done, allow us to explain why.
Concerning value that accrues to the producer
Email digests compound into a moated resource: An email digest is more than just the literal, accumulated information. It's the time put into its generation. It's the taste and discernment involved in curating it. It's the trust earned by sustaining it and the people that have received, responded to, and leveraged it. It's the vibe that the thing as a whole exudes. That cannot be easily imitated or surpassed.
They shape and improve the producer's ability to pay attention: An email digest shapes how one pays attention. It acts as an attentional brace, guiding the flows of one's perception. Even if the digest's scope is everything the producer is interested in, the act of production looming in the future refactors the present. It compels attentiveness in a compassionate, non-coercive way. And because attention, like energy, is curiously non-zero sum, the more you use it, the more you have to deploy and the better your ability to use it becomes. Once that loop begins to hum, then one's improved attentional capacity flows over to other aspects of one's life.
They make staying in touch and top-of-mind almost effortless: In both a personal and professional context, staying in touch and being top-of-mind is hard. The assumption is that you always need to have something to say (or to have something meaningful to shill). Email digests subvert that assumption. No big event or happening is required to send them. No novel insight or profound creation is necessary. You can just share interesting things you've found elsewhere.
They impart a halo effect: Email digest producers benefit from a halo effect. They develop an aura of interestingness, reliability, expertise and influence, almost by accident. They're interesting because they're engaged with diverse things and exhibit taste when curating. They're reliable because they've consistently produced and synthesised over time. They're experts because they've had a steady focus on a particular area or domain. And they're influential because their digest is going to multiple people and impacting them.
The accumulation of accidental integrity: An email digest is something that a person deliberately produces in an attempt to provide value to others. Interestingly, the successful outcome is a recipient not paying attention to the producer. In the best case, minimal attention is paid to the producer and maximal attention is given to the things they share. This has a curious upside. Because the producer is generating value without simultaneously trying to monopolise attention received, an aura of high character and integrity is created. The producer presents as assured, sophisticated and content; willing to use the attention they attract for the good of others.
A vehicle for soft power and subtle influence: Directing people's attention here, not there is influence. It's soft power. With an email digest you're orchestrating the attention of others. Even with a handful of recipients that is a salient act. The shape of your attention, as translated into a digest, informs the attention of others and kicks off a cascade biased towards your own worldview and interests.
Concerning email digest consumption and the value derived by recipients
A high signal output: For the recipient, an email digest is an exercise in arbitrage. The digest producer has spent time and effort engaging with various things and synthesising them into an easily consumable form. The recipient then gets access to the information that matters—and some insight into why—without needing to do the work to segregate it from what doesn't matter. And as we move from dumb to smart sharing, digests will contain even more signal for the recipients.
Designed for easy consumption: The format of a digest is straightforward. It's a single container with a limited number of items. For each item there's a name or title, some contextualising information, and a link to explore further. This format, as well as being easy to produce, is easy to consume. A recipient can survey the container and its contents, identify relevant items, and quickly decide to engage or not.
Concerning email digest production and sustainability over time
Email is a strong, sovereign channel and a proven asset: Email is one of the last bastions of platform-agnostic communication. It's reliable, direct, and personal. It allows for easy reciprocity and respects the preferences of both recipients and senders. Plus, it's a durable and transferable asset.
Minimal marginal cost for creation: The sort of person most likely to benefit from an email digest is already paying attention to things. Usually many things; people with strong interests in one area often have strong interests in many. The common argument is to parlay that strong attention into creator-hood. However, the pivot to creator-hood requires a step change in energy expenditure, a fundamental alteration in attentional patterns, and a paradigm shift from process and experience-focused activity to outcome-driven activity. Email digests, however, don't change the experience paradigm, preserve existing attention patterns and require only a marginal increase in energy expended. Just a few seconds more per interesting thing is the cost of producing a digest and gaining exposure to the massive upside.
Flexible in scope: An email digest can form at any scope. At their most expansive, an email digest is a near 1:1 representation of the topography of the producer's attention. "Here's everything that interested me above a certain threshold." At their most narrow, a digest can be tightly clustered around a single niche, concept or domain and include no deviation from that scope.
Amenable to automation and absence: Imagine a queue for a tunnel. Things line up, pass through and go out the other side. This is how a digest is produced. Someone explores, engages and evaluates found things. Some of those things are selected and prepared for digests. Those digests are released at a regular cadence. The output rate is limited but the processing of inputs is not. A digest of one thing per day doesn't mean reading one thing per day. It can mean reading seven things on Monday for a digest the following Sunday. It can mean doing a few weeks reading in advance and then going off grid in Malaysia for a month. You can batch process to sustain a drip feed far into the future.
Producible in dead time: The atomic elements of digests—an interesting thing with some contextualising information—are produced via something that looks more like consumption than creation. You don't need to clear out a four hour maker block in your schedule to produce a meaningful increment. Instead, you can make use of the arbitrary slices of time that arise in one's day that are often perceived as dead time. Like waiting for someone who's gonna be five minutes late to a meeting, or standing in a queue. Or you can turn a short reprieve—perhaps the ten minutes to enjoy a coffee alone—into a pleasurable and productive experience. Basically, anytime you'd engage in aimless consumption can be upgraded to a time of thoughtful interaction.
Easy to scale: Email digests can scale easily and rapidly. The difference between producing a digest for 1 vs 10 vs 100 vs 1,000 recipients is minuscule. Even approaching 10,000, 100,000 or 1 million recipients, the fundamentals remain the same: find interesting things, save them with some context, and share them.
Concerning the less tangible forms of value that emerge
An engine for serendipity: Sure, one can optimise an email digest for open rates and clicks. But what makes email digests truly effective is the serendipity they drive. When something's included in a digest, the producer is signalling that X is sufficiently interesting. As a result, there'll be instances of recipients responding to that signal of interest. Sometimes it'll be agreement. Sometimes it'll be disagreement. Sometimes it'll be recommendations to other similar things, or queries about the context you provided. Those serendipitous counter-responses are one of the most valuable outcomes of email digests because they lead to unexpected relationships and opportunities. And, like all of life's most valuable things, their occurrence cannot be gamed.
The info accumulated can be used to augment emerging technologies: The proliferation of LLMs and machine agents is catalysing a global scramble for high quality user data. Fortunately, steadily accumulating a contextualised, meaningful assemblage of found things will turn out to be one way to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to embedding interactions with machine agents in your day-to-day digital life.
A sanctuary amidst a stormy sea: Most people's lives are laced with chaos and uncertainty. An email digest is not a salve for trauma, nor is it a solution for systemic dysfunction. But it can be a ray of light in a difficult time, or a component that enables a higher quality decision. Sometimes, email digests are a small but critical slice of sanity and stability.
An archaeological record of development: Sustained over time, a digest presents an interrogable archaeological record. Take an individual. It's likely that, over a span of years, they will evolve as a person. An email digest cannot represent that shifting totally, but it does capture subtle changes in how those shifts come about. It embodies the shape of someone's attention over time and thus provides insight into the self behind that attention. The same can be said for an entity or organisation: a digest mapped to it becomes a proxy for its evolution through time and space and culture.
There's so much upside in producing a digest and doing it over time. And we've made the asymmetry between the downside and the upside even more pronounced. In our 0.2 product, you set a production mode (time-based, volume-based, time x volume) and then you add things, as you find them, via a form. The digest creation, the scheduling, the distribution, the subscriptions? That's done for you. Even better, all the things you send out are posted to an interactive web page that others can explore and use to sign up to your digest.
The numerous benefits described above? The unreasonable effectiveness of email digests? It's right there for you, your team, your org, your friend group, your community to tap. Naturally, the simplest way to do it is using Subset—just send us a message at hello@subset.network and we'll get you up and running. But if you want to go rogue and use an existing email service or newsletter app (or even vanilla Gmail) then please, please do. One more email digest in the world, more people paying closer attention to the things they find and sharing them with others? That's still a win for us.
*Miki's digest is Create Intelligently. Some of his favourite digests: Nothing Here, Sentiers, Dense Discovery and Heterodox Economics. Matt's digest is the Magnificent Seven. Some of his favourite digests: Web Curios, Ryan Holiday's Reading List, Wandering Weights, Tailscale's monthly newsletter, and Austin Kleon's weekly newsletter.
