Nuzzel is No More

Technical

Thank you for being a loyal Nuzzel newsletter curator. But all good things must come to an end: On Thursday, April 15, Nuzzel’s newsletter feature is shutting down.

So much has changed on the web ecosystem since Nuzzel first launched newsletters. There’s now a wide variety of other newsletter services and we recommend Revue as having the closest functionality to Nuzzel newsletters. Other good alternatives include Mailchimp and Substack.

Nuzzel

I started using Nuzzel because it came up as a recommendation on TWiT several years ago. It occurred to me that I could solve my whole how to share things across social platforms problem by posting the individual items to my Nuzzel newsfeed and then linking that to the social platforms. However, as the years have progressed I find myself caring less and less about social on the internet, to the point where I go a whole week between logging on platforms less populated than Facebook, and sometimes go several days without logging onto Facebook itself.

With so much falling apart in the world these days, spending time on the internet chatting about anything seems like a supreme waste of time, especially in light of the findings concerning the persuadability of people on subjects that they consider crucial to their personal makeup. Things like religion and politics and other things that really make a difference if you can change minds. The kinds of things I find it worthwhile to spend time talking about.

I’ve cut way back on my podcast consumption as well. I haven’t listened to any TWiT content since before Caudito Trump took office. I’ve culled most of the podcasts that just can’t bring themselves to be more than a chat show from my feeds, focusing in on science and skepticism and world news and moving away from social issues inside the United States. I simply can’t take the emotional strain of knowing we need to change and routinely failing to see change happening any time soon. I need a change of venue, and I don’t see that happening any time soon either.

Nuzzel remains how I see news shared by others, especially journalists working on stories of their own. It is my aggregator of choice and has served as my personal news aggregator by allowing me to put together the news items I want to share. However, Nuzzel will be turning off the newsletter tomorrow. I have to say, I thought this would happen sooner. They kept it going longer than I expected, and I have been toying with stopping the newsletter myself because it just doesn’t seem to be where I am anymore.

No more newsletters for me now, thanks. I think I’ll stick to writing on the blog and sharing it to the social networks that show up as referrers in my WordPress site stats. The one-liners that I’ve put on interesting news articles are now officially a thing of the past. Might I suggest heading over to This is True to subscribe to Randy Cassingham’s worthy newsletter? He’s definitely better at the newsletter thing than I will ever be. Tell him I sent you. He’ll say “who?” But that will make me laugh and I need a good laugh these days.

Postscript

The Newsletter function worked until the end of April, contrary to what the Nuzzel webpage and app said would happen. Everything worked until May fifth when the website itself went offline.

I installed Nuzzel based on a recommendation from a guest on This Week in Tech, after I noticed that Google news had started offering me news notifications without my asking for them. Nuzzel compiled news from friends on Twitter, giving me links to news that my friends were interested in and so consequently I might be interested in and helpfully told me how many of my friends or friends of friends had shared this or that article. What Nuzzel didn’t presume to tell me was what I’m interested in.

Google news notifications come with a justification under them that isn’t your friends are reading this or this headline is breaking which are explicable reasons for interrupting my stream of consciousness with something that might be more pressing. Like the other 900 pound gorilla in the room, Facebook, Google presumes to inform me that I will want to watch or read this other thing because I should be interested in it, thereby attempting to manipulate my behavior by algorithm rather than allowing me to modify my own behavior through introspection.

I used Nuzzel to cull the clutter that threatens to drown all of us in information in the internet age. On Twitter I pointedly followed journalists and authors and then I let Nuzzel loose on that dataset so it could tell me what most of these writers and authors were talking about. Dollars to donuts, what they are recommending is probably the news that is most worth paying attention to, and the process worked for as long as Nuzzel was in existence, for everything that wasn’t specifically local news.

Nuzzel’s enterprise spin-off newslit.co still exists, and why shouldn’t it? It is a paid for service that does what Nuzzel did and a few extra things, but they get paid for doing that work.

Rest in peace Nuzzel. Another useful site brought low due to an inability to monetize its useful functions. Hopefully someone was taking notes and figured out how to make the useful parts profitable next time.

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