Aha, so glad you liked that piece! I totally agree with you about newsletters -- they're a lot wilder and more interesting than much of what circulates in feeds. I think it's partly because newsletter writers are opt-in, which means that unlike posts that are desperately fighting for attention in newsfeeds, each issue of a newsletter does not need to lean into clickbaity headlines and content. The reader has already opted to have it sent to their inbox!
I first noticed this a couple of years ago when I was writing a column for Wired about the (back then, gestational) rise of newsletters. In the classic building-on-ideas-from-others that you note (and particate in!) in your piece here (https://www.wired.com/2016/05/rise-of-the-newsletter/), I was building on an observation of Simon Owens, which I'd read in one of his newsletters. I called up Owens to talk about it, and quoted him thusly in the piece:
"Being opt-in has another benefit: It allows newsletters to stay weird. Social media publishing increasingly relies on clickbaity headlines. Every utterance has been ruthlessly A/B tested for shareability. But newsletter writers already have your attention, so they're free to be literary and inventive—using allusive subject lines
that nobody would click on were it on Facebook,
as marketing consultant and writer Simon Owens says. 'They're throwing every rule out the window.
Inside, they're just as eclectic: a mashup of links, ruminations, pictures, and GIFs more like the zines of the 1980s, as Owens puts it."
So, newsletters are literarily cool because they're infrastructurally cool, too. Email -- and inboxes -- have positive incentives that, in good-faith (i.e. non-spam) situations, work really well to engender nifty, creative content: The audience member is incentivized to look at a newsletter (they've opted to allow it into their inner sanctum, their inbox) so the writer/creator is incentivized to make sure the newsletter is really good -- they don't want to waste this rare chance to have someone's full attention.
On top of that, email is one of the last really thriving open and interoperable spaces on the Internet! All email providers accept email from every other email provider; no-one "owns" the tech, so no-one can force everyone to pay attention to certain emails more than others.
