Meta: The Alphabetworkers email list is migrating to Substack

[Alphabet workers news]

Greetings to Alphabetworks list subscribers! Effective next week, I'm going to experiment with what will hopefully be a permanent change, which is to migrate this list to the Substack newsletter publishing platform. This wasn't part of my original plan when I launched the list back in February 2020, and isn't part of a stealth move to eventually monetize the list, but rather is motivated by my concerns about the reliability and behavior of the Google Groups platform. Issues have included:

- Upcoming major changes to the GUI, blandly dubbed "new Google Groups", that violate decades of UI conventions, break cut-and-paste, and limit the edit window size. The overhaul has a strong smell of Google's "promo-driven development" culture, which means that it's likely to introduce large amounts of change for the sake of change, rather than change based on customer feature demand.

- A pending force-feeding of the changes means that the classic UI soon won't be available at all.

- URLs to point people to previous posts are ugly, and tend to look like this:  https://groups.google.com/g/alphabetworkers/c/T9AtPKx8acg

By comparison, URLs to Substack posts can use actual words, facilitated by the fact that the list gets its own subdomain. So for example: alphabetworkers.substack.com/p/coming-soon

- There was a disturbing incident this week in which Groups, on its own, decided to delete one of my posts. Naturally, to increase my level of paranoia, the post happened to be about class action litigation against Google. Below is what the mystery deletion looked like from my side of the GUI -- note the use of passive-aggressive voice "This message has been deleted". Oh really? By whom? For what reason? Not for any reason that I'm allowed to know, apparently.

I certainly didn't delete my own post, but something did, or claims that it did. My post did go out to at least some subscribers, but it's entirely missing from the list archives. What I do know is that I'm not going to use an email list service that randomly decides to delete my content and then uses passive voice to not even explain why.

So starting on August 17, look for the emails from the Alphabetworkers list to come via Substack. I've already migrated the full subscriber list, so in theory nobody should miss anything unless for some reason you're filtering out messages from substack.com. And of course, with any new platform come teething pains as I learn about the various configuration knobs, and whether Substack's editing tool is fully WYSIWYG.

Thanks for reading!

Bruce