Subscriptions

What are subscriptions?

Subscriptions are a versatile and widely utilized feature that enable users to establish an ongoing connection with a source of content in order to receive future content (feeds) from that source. Though social media is a clear example of this bundle of features, this pattern of interaction occurs in parts of the internet we don't typically think of as social. Feeds of content are often associated with individual content creators, but that's just one possibility among many. A few examples of the subscription/feed dynamic:

• Podcast players allow users to subscribe to podcast channels.
• Real estate systems allow users to "save their searches", notifying them when novel content matches their preferences.
  
• Media streaming platforms allow users to follow artists, to be notified when they release new music / videos.
  
• RSS feeds allow users to aggregate posts from their favorite sites, including blogs and news media.
  
• essage boards often feature the ability to subscribe to new messages on the board, or to subscribe to responses to specific threads.
  

• RSS feeds allow users to aggregate posts from their favorite sites, including blogs and news media.

Though these are diverse sets of functionality, they all have a basic idea in common: a user taking a proactive action (subscription) that acts as a persistent request to receive new content from a well-defined source (feed).

Why are subscriptions useful to the internet?

Subscriptions offer a convenient way for users to receive relevant and timely content through a unified interface for consumption. This provides users explicit mechanisms for marking content as of interest to them, and gives them the power to spend more time consuming content, and less time discovering it.

What about sorting?

Though subscriptions may appear to be a neutral interface through which a platform gives full control to users, in reality, their impact is often heavily influenced by sorting - the algorithms that platforms use to decide which content to show the user first.

• Is a newsletter from a real-estate search service showing listings by the most expensive, most recent, or most heavily viewed?
• Is a podcast app showing you episodes by which ones you're most likely to listen to, or which ones they have a paid partnership with?
• Do you see posts on social media in chronological order, or by likelihood that you'll interact with them?

In the finer details of sorting we see all of the same problems that we see arise with Recommendation, since in both cases, the prerogatives of the platform are given primacy over the prerogatives of the user. Because of the similarities between those harms, we can join those together, and cover them under that topic.