We've changed the URL from https://mailchi.mp/theprepared/the-prepared-4ydgzm58vl to the article that it points to, which seems to have the most information about the story.

I don't think an issue of a newsletter which contains a paragraph about one thing among lots of other things, plus promotional padding, really counts as an article about that thing for HN purposes. It seems more like an attempt to promote the newsletter than to share interesting information about hockey sticks.

IMO this ends up being way more advertorial (for Bauer) and lacks all of the engineering context (urethane inserts! damping! "the dichotomy between nature and human technologies"!). But, understood.

Perhaps; I haven't read that closely. Obviously it's great if you're writing something better about a topic, but there needs to be a specific URL to what you've specifically written about it.

wait, just to be clear - you changed the title and URL without actually reading the thing that I linked to?

I read your newsletter. I didn't read as much of the other article.

Is it really unclear what the issue here is? The issue is that the OP was too promotional. Indeed your account history on HN has been, basically, entirely promotional. That's not really what the site is for. This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

On HN, the idea is for people to submit stories that they ran across and personally found intellectually interesting, not because they have something to promote. It's fine to post your own work occasionally, as long as it's interspersed with interesting posts from other sources. But if you only submit promotionally, it feels like you're not participating as a community member.

To be fair, the stuff you've submitted has been good, certainly not spam. But the newsletter thing was a step too far.

You're looking at The Prepared (theprepared.org/newsletter), a weekly newsletter about manufacturing and other stuff! It's sent via Mailchimp, which automatically creates an archive URL for every email campaign you send.

I've set up MailChimp campaigns several times - traditional sales lists, transactional stuff, software update notifications - and never thought of using it as a hosted/linkable newsletter.

The "view this in your browser" link was always personalized for tracking, not semantic, IIRC. It did include the actual content of "Hello, {first name} {last name}!" tags, which obviously wouldn't work here for every unique reader.

How long does this stick around? As long as you have a MailChimp account?

I guess I assumed that the URL was unique per-user and would be deleted after 30 days, because the primary use case of Mailchimp seems to be not-quite-spam "We're having a sale!" bulk campaigns.

A lot of people use substack now because it's easier, but I still use mailchimp for my newsletter.

I guess I just like being different.

"View this in your browser" or "click here if you're having trouble viewing this message" type links seem to be very common on this mailing list type stuff, so I think it's a fairly standard feature.

Most marketing email service providers provide something like this. If you've seen a link at the top of an email that says "view this in your web browser" you're probably looking at a link to a page hosted and generated by the ESP.