Yury Molodtsov

The State of Media 2026

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

In 2026, first-time founders don’t want to get on TechCrunch. They want TBPN.

The Decline in Numbers

News publications are down on traffic and laying off people because readers’ habits are changing and there’s harsh competition. This might sound new, but people were saying this in 2009. What’s different now?

Most media publications are fighting to stay relevant while struggling to contain costs, which directly shapes their editorial policies. Practically all of them have put up paywalls to compensate for falling ad revenue, which means most people just can’t read what they publish easily. Just recently, both X and Threads were filled with stories from people who were saying they no longer read The Verge because of its paywall.

Growtika reviewed the traffic to the largest news media websites. Most major tech publications like Wired, CNET and Tom’s Guide lost 58% of their monthly visits since their peaks. This is only organic search traffic — nobody else has other figures. It might be a long-standing industry trend that publications started compensating long ago through apps, email newsletters and other methods. But it’s undeniable they’re losing relevance to new visitors. And social media has been dead as a traffic source for many years, even before Elon bought Twitter.

The numbers are even more dramatic at the individual level: Digital Trends lost 97%, The Verge lost 85%, ZDNet lost 90%. I want to stress that this is an external estimate of the search traffic alone and news publications could be adjusting their strategy and focusing on managed channels like newsletters (more on that later). We have data from the Reuters Institute that says Google’s organic search traffic to 2,500+ publisher sites went down by 33% between Nov 2024 and Nov 2025 and publishers expect an additional 43% decline over the next three years. Only 38% of media leaders say they’re confident about journalism’s prospects in 2026, down from 60% in 2022.

Josh Constine, formerly of TechCrunch, diagnosed the industry: tech blogs collapsed by under-rewarding star writers, chasing social over owned audiences, paywalling bland content, and adopting a relentlessly pessimistic tone. Meanwhile, digital ad revenue concentration among the top 10 tech companies reached 80.8%. Infinite personalized feeds are a far better ad medium than a news website, so this is where the money goes.

What’s Different This Time

The main problem for the media is that there are exactly two scenarios for information consumption in 2026.

First: specific requests. You go to a chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and get your answer there. In 2020, I wrote that the product that will dethrone Google Search won’t be a search engine — instead of links, it will simply provide you with answers. LLMs are exactly that. Even when they show sources, few people go in there. Several of our clients are now getting up to 50% of their leads from ChatGPT while their search visits are falling — but what they care about is sales. This doesn’t work for the media, which are getting far fewer visits from people they can monetize.

Even when you Google things today, what you see at the top of the page is an AI Overview. They’re known to be laughably wrong sometimes because the LLM they use is small and cheap to run, but they will only improve — just look at AI Mode as a reference, which is built by the same people. The steepest traffic decline in H2 2025 correlates directly with AI Overviews expanding to more queries. The media isn’t just losing to new competitors but also to its biggest existing traffic source. The fact that they’re this bad and still killing traffic is even scarier.

Second: curiosity. You have hobbies and interests, and you’re a professional in some specific area. Then you go directly to the sources. You have YouTube and TikTok, which are extremely engaging, and most professional media organizations struggle to get views there. If you’re in growth or product management, you subscribe to Lenny Rachitsky because the interviews he produces are much deeper and more interesting for you than anything the legacy media can produce. There are people like him for most industries. And most importantly, he and his fellow creators have a vastly different cost structure and either operate alone or with extremely lean teams while earning comparable advertising and subscription revenue.

There’s a third mode of passive consumption we have to acknowledge: scrolling through short-form videos, but for our purposes, it’s the extension of the second one. The best bits from interviews and product videos get clipped and shared as short-form videos on Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Social, along with search and aggregators, is now the primary online source of news. And although we still ultimately consume content from news outlets, we do not do so directly. Which is understandable, since reading their websites directly is often an atrocious experience, especially without an ad blocker.

The Rise of the Alternative Media Ecosystem

A giant alternative media ecosystem emerged, comprising newsletters, Substacks, and podcasts. This isn’t new per se but we’re at the point where many of them have larger audiences and more clout than most online news media outlets.

This is why founders want to go on TBPN. It’s the clout and recognition that were previously only accessible through the media. Plus, it’s a unique opportunity to control the message, which is why Travis Kalanick’s Atoms gave an exclusive to TBPN even though they could have gone anywhere. This enabled a great interview that became a single source of truth for other publications that reported on the quotes. And this is a complete inversion of how it worked five years ago. Then you’d pitch the WSJ exclusive, and podcasters would discuss it afterward.

There’s a range of top-tier individual authors like Lenny Rachinsky, Gergely Orosz, Eric Newcomer, Alex Konrad, all of whom started as one-person blogs and many have grown into mini-media companies with multiple writers and other staff members. But unlike the publications they left, these have radically lower cost structures yet deeper audience loyalty. And this is a very profitable combination. The IAB says U.S. creator ad spend hit $37B in 2025, growing 4x faster than total media, and WPP’s mid-2025 analysis found that creator-generated content ad revenue surpassed professional media for the first time.

Nothing exemplifies that better than The Free Press, which started in 2021 as Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter “Common Sense,” launched after her resignation from the New York Times. It quickly grew into one of Substack’s top paid publications, raised outside capital, and was ultimately acquired by CBS News for $150 million.

In total, Substack now has more than 50 creators who are making millions of dollars per year on the platform. They boast 500,000 creators, more than 5 million paid subscribers, and have about $45 million in annual recurring revenue. Their domain got more traffic than The Wall Street Journal and CBS News in June 2025.

Another new format that went mainstream in the past year is live video. TBPN, a daily live show on technology hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, reaches 50k unique live viewers across platforms. Their podcast version is #2 in the US Technology chart. They were profiled by NYT/Vanity Fair/New Yorker/The Information, sold out ad inventory for the year and signed with CAA. They basically invented the format that is now being adopted by alternatives from both traditional media like The Information’s TITV and creators in other regions and verticals such as ETN. The best part of the live TV format for comms is that it expands the medium for brands and companies: there’s a place to get both in the traditional press and on the same day’s live show.

Podcasts are valuable since 56% of weekly podcast listeners say podcast hosts are the type of influencer who matters most to them, nearly triple the share who say the same about social media influencers, and 67% of global podcast listeners have made a purchase because of a podcaster. This is what brings these authors power.

But here’s the kicker. Getting on these newsletters and podcasts is often far harder than TechCrunch. The creators are naturally more selective because their audience trust is their entire business model (and apart from TBPN, they produce much less content than a news reporter). A bad guest damages them more than a bad article damages TechCrunch.

How Legacy Media Is Adapting

To compensate for losing star talent and to rebuild their direct connection with the audience, media publications are now growing writers internally and launching their own newsletters. The Verge with Notepad, Optimizer, Installer and others. Business Insider, in addition to being the owner of Morning Brew, recently launched their own lists Vibe Mode, Work Shift, Side Hustles, etc. 76% of media leaders plan to encourage staff to behave more like creators in 2026; half want to partner with creators to distribute content.

Publications always had star writers who attracted the most readers, but it wasn’t as transparent then. Now, authors can get a good benchmark on their actual star power and potential income if they break away. I’ve been told that Substack’s guaranteed offers and examples of authors are being widely used in media salary negotiations. Single writers now get so much power that they can partner with entire news organizations on their own — like Joanna Stern launching her newsletter in partnership with NBC News.

And by launching newsletters, media outlets also partially get around the atrocious website experience problem: reading their emails is a much better experience.

One potential direction the media is looking at is partnering with AI labs to license their ongoing content. Meta secured a multi‑year licensing agreement paying News Corp up to about $50 million annually to train its models and power Meta AI responses, and also partnering with CNN, Fox News, People Inc., and USA Today Co . OpenAI has expanded its network to nearly 160 news outlets, including News Corp, The Atlantic, Vox Media, Condé Nast, Hearst, Prisa Media, and Axios, typically combining content licensing with access to OpenAI tools for newsroom product development. Google has a pilot program with the Associated Press. Perplexity signed revenue‑sharing or licensing deals with TIME, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, and a long tail of digital outlets. But it’s unclear if these payments would be sufficient, and while ChatGPT leads are growing, it’s not enough to offset the search declines.

Squeezing the Middle

Each wave of disruption squeezes the middle. The top survives on institutional authority — the NYT, the FT, the WSJ aren’t going anywhere, they can charge premium subscription prices and amortize their fixed costs most effectively. The bottom has radical cost efficiency: most of their costs are their own salaries (or profits).

The middle has neither advantage, as they have large editorial teams, office space, and infrastructure, but they don’t have the brand gravity and are stuck paying legacy costs while competing for an audience that’s leaving in both directions.

Yet the middle is where most tech media lives, specifically the kind of outlets that used to cover products and launches by startups from Seed to Series B. TechCrunch, The Verge, Wired, Business Insider — these are the publications the tech industry grew up reading, and they’re the ones most exposed right now.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Before the Internet, every city had a few major news publications. They were excited about serving not just their city but everyone on the internet. But this also meant competing with everyone on the Internet and turns out most people would rather read The New York Times, which turned them into a juggernaut with $800 million in digital subscription revenue alone.

Local media have also been reimagined through newsletters and influencer accounts with radically smaller cost structures. People still care about places where they live, but the supply side has changed. 6AM City, The Mill, and Inbox Scoop are good examples of modern, newsletter-first local media companies. 6AM City reaches millions across 30+ US markets with hyper-local daily emails and has over $10M in annual revenue.

With AI, we will see this supply-side transformation on a far larger scale.

Internet killed local papers → survivors consolidated → social media killed mid-tier blogs → survivors consolidated → AI is now killing the mid-tier publications that survived social.

The Trust Economy

There are now two kinds of credible media: institutional trust and personal trust. The only publications that will hold attention will be those that can build trusted relationships with their audience.

But here’s the thing — it’s far easier to build a parasocial relationship with a personality rather than a faceless news organization. And by promoting a specific face, the media always risks those people leaving to launch their own Substack or a YouTube channel.

It’s not like the media publications lost all relevance. Of course, they didn’t. There’s a reason some of the largest startups like Cursor announce their funding rounds on Forbes and The New York Times, and not just post on X. There’s brand value in there, recognition among enterprise buyers, and another source of truth you leave for your next campaigns.

What changes is the composition of the media space. There are now two kinds of credible media: institutional trust (NYT, Forbes, FT) that you tap for the stamp of legitimacy, especially for enterprise and investor audiences, and personal trust (Lenny Rachitsky, Eric Newcomer, TBPN) for depth, audience access, and authenticity. Brands and companies need both, but for different things.

Let’s get back to the Atoms launch we discussed earlier. If TBPN is good enough for an exclusive launch for Travis Kalanick, are you sure traditional media would deliver the best results for your brand? As a founder or a comms professional, you need to be open to a wider spectrum of possibilities.

Trust is the only durable currency. Especially right now, when AI-generated slop content is flooding every channel and raising the noise floor. This environment is making both creators and the media even more powerful.

What This Means for Comms

The era where comms meant “news media relations” is over. Most comms agencies still primarily do media pitching. The ones that survive will be the ones that can produce content, manage creator relationships, run a founder’s LinkedIn, and also pitch journalists when that makes sense.

The goal is the same as it ever was — tell your story to the world, and “we got a TechCrunch article” is no longer sufficient. What did that article drive? We live in a world where a top-tier podcast appearance might generate a more qualified pipeline than a Bloomberg feature. When one of our clients went on Joe Rogan’s Experience a few years ago, people started recognizing him in airports.

When we work on a major funding announcement these days, we still care about where it lands, of course. We plan for an extensive, exclusive profile in a top-tier outlet and pitch secondary targets afterward. But we dedicate as much attention to building out the messaging, preparing graphics and content, blogs, X and LinkedIn posts, securing a live show for the same day, as well as various newsletters and podcasts we can tap into in the next few weeks to build a strong, sustaining presence.

The question is: what should you do when you’re an early-stage company with little to show? Maybe you raised $1-2M in Seed funding, but you don’t come from the team that was building Claude Code, you don’t have many customers yet, and you have no celebrity investors or some other crazy story to share. What then? You could try local publications, such as Built in SF or Tech.eu, but honestly, the answer might be to focus on your own channels. Launch a newsletter, keep sharing the exciting updates on the company and your product, and interact with key experts and influencers in the space. I have a guide for this.

Comms people now need to think like content strategists, not just media relations specialists. You need to produce, not just pitch. You need to understand distribution and communities, not just publications. You need to be a master of everything.

Founders’ Guide to Comms

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:00:00 +0000

If you’re a founder, neglecting public communications is a drag on your business. It’s not something you should focus on primarily (that’s what rage baiters do), but you should use this channel just like any other, because it will help you find customers, win candidates, secure partnerships and raise funding.

Now, what are comms? We used to call this public relations when it was mostly about print and TV media, even when they’ve moved online. New categories have emerged with the rise of social media and influencers, and now individual authors are building full-scale media outlets on platforms like Substack and YouTube. To me, comms is all of this. WSJ reported that the industry is trying to rebrand this combined approach as “storytelling” but I don’t agree much; it’s still just comms.

I get many requests from founders who make the same mistake: “we launched our product a while ago, how can we get it on TechCrunch or Bloomberg? Unfortunately, “here’s my great company” isn’t a story. You need to share something new, either a fact or a piece of knowledge, something that wasn’t known yesterday. This mostly applies to the news media but they’re just the most gated and demanding. You’d be wise to apply the same criteria to what you post on X or LinkedIn.

If you have already launched your startup publicly, you can’t just come to the media and ask them to tell the same story. And while you can technically post it on X or LinkedIn, it’s unlikely to go viral.

Let’s go over this exact scenario: you launched a while ago, didn’t have much publicity, and want to switch it up now. What do you do? First, we will figure out how to give it another shot. Then, what you should do afterward.

Restart

First, you must come up with a newsworthy event. It could be a major feature launch, a unique partnership with a larger brand, a unique report on the industry you prepared, or something else. That’s why launch and funding announcements work so well; there’s a clear before and after. Look at your roadmap, think about what kind of data you have access to or can gather.

But this is a hook. Now you need the arc. What is actually your story? What are you building and why is it important? Why is it objectively good for humanity? With some products, this comes naturally. The best case is when you have the “enemy”, the Goliath that you, the David, want to kill, because it’s archaic, expensive, or harmful. Arc/Dia wants to replace Chrome. Perplexity wants to replace Google. Linear wants to replace Jira. Sometimes, it can be the faceless industry you’re fightning, slow and inefficient.

Ultimately, you need people to root for you. Lulu Cheng Meservey said that people root for you when they think you deserve more than you’ve got. For this to happen, they must find what you’re building to be objectively good and important. However, while people like rooting for the underdog, nobody wants to root for the loser. You can’t be the loser. You must have something to show for. Not just a radically better product, because this is often subjective — all founders say their product is the best one.

There are exactly two ways to “prove” this. First is hard data, like “our AI coding agent makes 30% fewer mistakes than Claude Code”. Second is anecdotes, like “this guy on Twitter used our product to create a viral app with 2M users”. The best is if you can combine all of this.

We are building a SaaS that makes customer data instantly queryable for non-technical teams. Our product is 10x faster than traditional BI tools and is already used by teams at Notion, Figma, and Linear.

What if you have none of this? Look deeper into the product, talk to you team, figure out what you can actually gather if you start tracking: improvements, time spent, PMF scores, etc. Still nothing? Then you don’t have a story and probably don’t have a good product yet. Focus on the fundamentals before you proceed with comms.

Tactics for Pitching

You’ve identified an upcoming interesting feature in your roadmap that you want to announce. How?

First, draft a one-page document about the announcement. Combine your overall story with this feature and show how they’re connected. Add all the validation you currently have, including traction figures, growth rates, and customer names. If you want an example, I believe Stripe has the best corporate communications: no buzzwords, straight to the point, validated by numbers where necessary. Find a similar announcement from them and write one for your company. We can call this document a “press release”. If you have any stakeholders for this announcement, such as co-founders, partners, or investors, this is the ideal moment to get their approval.

It’s time for pitching! In 2026 and beyond, you have a rich array of options, including news media, newsletters and podcasts. The first option is the classic one, with publications like TechCrunch, Axios, Forbes, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Sifted, and many others. Use search, find articles similar to the story you have, and study their authors. For instance, TechCrunch has around four people covering AI now. If you’re building in this space, these are the people to target.

When you see someone relevant, pitch them and offer your story as an exclusive. You pitch authors similarly to how you pitch investors. Here’s an example of a pitch that landed our client on TechCrunch.

But don’t disregard the alternatives. TBPN, Alex Konrad’s Upstarts or Eric Newcomer’s Newcomer are probably more influential than most of the classic outlets for select audiences. In fact, more people would likely read about you there. Few outlets disclose the readers of individual stories, but Forbes still does, and it can be as low as a few thousand (see here). Meanwhile, most other founders and executives I talk to listen religiously to Lenny’s Podcast. New media are extremely powerful, even if brands haven’t reached mainstream awareness yet.

Chances are, you might be a bit too small for them as well. New media authors are picky: they have to be, as they tend to produce fewer stories than a TechCrunch authors would do per week. I recommend you trying them anyway, because the profiles they produce are often longer and have more details, like Konrad’s story on Granola. Even big orgs that could have gotten a top-tier media now go to newsletters instead, like this $190M fund announcement from Root Ventures.

But there are many more options out there. Look beyond top-3, find the authors who are also rising and grow with them. I’ve gathered almost 100 relevant and often underrated new media platforms that I will share in the next email blast, so subscribe if you want to get access.

Whether to go with a traditinal media outlet or a new one depends on your goals. With the former you get a logo you can put on your website and a link you can share with a wide array of customers and less sophisticated investors. Meanwhile, new media can often provide you with a much larger and detailed profile and people in this business often value them just as much or even more.

When an author takes an interest in your pitch, share the full release and offer to jump on a call or have a meeting. Continue selling until the very end and ask them to confirm if they’re planning to cover you.

Now, it’s time to take that press release and create a blog post and social media posts. A blog post is a more reader-facing version of the same document. Again, Stripe has both press releases and blog posts for each announcement; use them as a reference.

As for social media, for most projects, it’s just LinkedIn and X (many live just fine without the latter). Repurpose the ideas from the press release to write native posts for them. Even more human, conversational, a longer post for LinkedIn, and a thread for X. Don’t use the native article formats; few people bother to read them. Here’s a great example of such a thread.

Social media is valuable because you will be able to capture and onboard any incoming interested people while also sharing your ideas in your own voice.

Continuing Activities

You probably don’t have an announcement every two weeks. Maybe not even every month. So what’s important is to spend the rest building up your presence.

Write down 15-20 reporters, newsletter authors and podcasters covering the same area you’re in and follow them everywhere. Respond if you have interesting context to add to their thoughts and stories. The best option is not to pitch yourself into a podcast, but be invited instead because you look like someone who has interesting things to day.

If you’re in the same city, you can ask them for a coffee and offer to share anything about the tech industry without pushing your own startup too much. This is how you build relationships that can be converted into coverage later.

Your best long-term option is to “go direct” and “build in public”. It doesn’t mean you should ignore the media, on the contrary, your goal is to build up a profile that makes you unavoidable for them. Because when lightning strucks, they can be extremely valuable.

Lovable built their entire social media strategy on posting photos from the office and bragging about the speed at which they delivered features. But doing this from a corporate account is much harder. People want to follow people, and the current X’s algorithm discourages underperformance by a lot.

Your best bet is running comms for the company from your personal account. I often recommend early-stage founders to avoid using a corporate account at all initially, just create it to take the name.

At the end of each day, look at what you and your team built and find something to post. You can post this every day on X and 2-3 times a week on LinkedIn (I wouldn’t recommend more there). Here are some examples of founders who do this best (by no means an exhaustive list):

What unites them is they are always running founder-led comms. They speak as operators, not as brand accounts, and teach and share knowledge while selling their product in the meantime. They feel like fighers in the ring and not random white-collar workers, so bystanders root and cheer as if it was their own company. These founders pre-announce features, educate about their product and the industry, share screenshots or vides and charts with metrics, post exciting user stories, hype up employees, and are always running customer support (here’s a great guide for this).

Great founders aren’t posting solely about their company. They also show their personal interests and their human side, because this is what helps other content resonate. That’s why people want to follow them. Tobi Lutke posted about vibe-coding a viewer app for his MRI and got 7 million views. Now we know a bit more about him and he only looks cooler. But when Shopify has an actually big announcement, he posts relentlessly about it.

Founders have a lot on their plate. Many are working days, nights and weekends. Comms are rarely a priority — you have lots of stuff to do, so you can always postpone and post it tomorrow, right? Or maybe you feel it’s pure vanity irrelevant to the business. But the founders above didn’t suddenly get more free time than you. They just realized that 15 minutes dedicated to posting daily is marketing, so they look for ideas and get all the benefits in the end.

The Broken Promises of Substack

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:35:00 +0000

Earlier in July, Substack announced a $100M funding round, bringing its valuation to $1.1 billion.

Substack has built an entirely new media ecosystem by enabling reporters and influencers to monetize their audience longing for long-term writing. People share links and discuss pieces from Eric Newcomer’s Newcomer, Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, Richard Rushfield’s The Ankler, Gergely Orosz’s The Pragmatic Engineer, Lenny Rachitsky’s Lenny’s Newsletter, Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boring and thousands of other blogs. Many of these projects have grown into mini-media companies with staff, essentially rebuilding the publications their founders once left.

Substack now has more than 50 creators who are making millions of dollars per year on the platforms. In total, they boast 500,000 creators, more than 5 million paid subscribers, and have about $45 million in annual recurring revenue. Their domain got more traffic than than The Wall Street Journal and CBS News in June 2025.

But building this ecosystem at scale has forced Substack to abandon some of its original promises.

Portability of Audience

Substack’s original pitch was independence. Writers owned their mailing lists, controlled their billing via Stripe, and could leave at any time.

Chris Best, Substack’s co-founder, said on the interview with The Verge in Dec 2020:

Another way we do that is we mean it when we say we’re helping writers go independent, and they own their content and they own their contact point with their audience, which means that you can leave. If you’re a writer and you build up your following and your subscriber base on Substack, you can take it away. <…> Start a blog, an email newsletter, have people subscribe directly to somebody you trust. You own your content, you own your audience.

This changed in March 2022, when Substack introduced its app that consolidates subscriptions in one place rather than dispersing them separately via email. Unlike the usual email subscribers, the followers who signed up through the app can’t be exported, creating a powerful lock-in. For many writers, it could be up to a third of their audience. Ben Thompson, whose Stratechery newsletter directly inspired Substack, wrote then that Substack has gone from being a “Faceless Publisher” behind the scenes to trying to put “the Substack brand front-and-center,” building up its app as a destination on the backs of writers.

Just a few days ago, Substack also launched in-app payments for all writers on iOS. It is true, that they can only launch it for everyone or noone, but this creates yet another lock-in. Unlike with Stripe, you can’t export your paid iOS subscribers.

No Algorithms

Substack positioned itself as the anti-platform. No algorithmic feeds, just direct connections between readers and writers.

On the same interview, Chris said:

If you don’t like the stuff that you’re seeing there, you have this really good remedy, which is [to] hit the unsubscribe button. A lot of the worst problems that content moderation addresses on other platforms is the spread of content that is bad, because basically your algorithmic feed is serving as an editor, whether you think of it that way or not.

Back in 2021, Chris wrote on his own substack:

For writers, this means being able to control their relationships with their audience instead of being mediated by fickle corporations whose algorithms decide what gets the most attention.

But in 2023, Substack launched Substack Notes, it Twitter replacement, which uses an engagement-driven algorithm that prioritizes likes, replies, and reposts to boost visibility. More recently, it expanded even more in the social network aspect, launching vertical videos and a $20M “creator accelerator fund” to attract TikTokers.

No Ads

Originally, Substack positioned heavily against ads. Here’s a comment made by one of their employees in 2022:

We aren’t in the attention economy here. No ads. We only make money when writers make money and decide to turn on paid subscriptions.

Then, in 2025 Hamish McKenzie, another co-founder of Substack, told DigiDay:

“For us, advertising is an interesting business. Maybe some way off in the distant future.”

Content Moderation

Substack’s founders long argued that they solved moderation by design. But as soon as Substack built recommendations, it inherited the same problems as every social network.

That interview Chris gave to Nilay Patel is an extremel useful benchmark to track changes in their thinking and approach:

A lot of the worst problems that content moderation addresses on other platforms is the spread of content that is bad, because basically your algorithmic feed is serving as an editor, whether you think of it that way or not. And I’m getting bad crap in my Facebook feed because some uncle of mine liked it or because it’s getting engagement. That problem doesn’t exist on Substack in the same way. I think we can and should do discovery, and it’s just important for us to do it in a way that takes advantage of the model that we have, and of the fundamental promise of Substack. <…> Because the whole value of Substack is the direct relationship between readers and writers. If we did discovery in some cheap way that might be like, what would work best on YouTube, it would be easy for us to blindly violate that and kill the thing that makes Substack good.

In July 2025, Substack sent a push alert to some users promoting a Nazi blog called “NatSocToday”, which featured a swastika logo and content pushing Holocaust denial. This is the direct result of Substack engaging with recommendations in order to help authors grow their newsletters. If you write on Substack, you might get more subscribers, but your brand will be used to promote other authors as well, even if you might disagree with them.

Substack has stumbled into Nazi-related controversy before (not a phrase you’d want to hear about yourself!). In 2024, criticism of its content-moderation policies prompted publications like Platformer to leave. In my view, that case was a bit overblown and I generally agree with the Pirate Wires’s explainer. Ultimately, Substack had to remove a number of authors involved in this.

What is the appropriate layer of the Internet stack for moderation and censorship is an important question, the one Substack’s founders like to discuss a lot, but it’s a different question here. The only reason for this latest accident is Substack giving recommendations in the first place.

In practice, Substack now functions much like any other social network. But unlike Facebook or Twitter, simply hosting an author on Substack carries a kind of implicit endorsement. That aura makes its laissez-faire moderation stance harder to defend: the company insists on First Amendment absolutism, yet its recommendation systems inevitably entangle it in the politics of promotion.

My goal here is not to attack Substack but highlight the compromises they made while implementing their original vision. It’s the endless dilemma for social products and as we see subscriptions alone don’t ultimately solve it.

Carcinization is a process where various crustaceans repeatedly evolve into crabs. There must be a similar “law” that all content platforms evolve into algorithm-driven social networks with powerful recommendation engines — or perish.

Earlier this month, Ghost, an open-source publishing platform, reported that publishers earned over $100M in subscription through their platform. Impressive, but it took them 12 years to get here and their entire model for paid communities was introduced in 2019 directly inspired by the growth of Substack.

So why do authors still go on Substack?

Because they see the value in this. On August 21, 2025, Mika Solana announced Pirate Wires are integrating back with Substack in an email:

I do recommend downloading the Substack app if you don’t already have it. The app will grant you a lot of new Pirate Wires content. All of our writers will be pretty active on Notes (social posts on Substack) moving forward, and I’ll be going live myself (a kind of video chat, sometimes solo, sometimes with my team, sometimes with other popular writers on Substack) on and off all week. I’ll also be posting my little heart out.

I’ve learned a lot about media these past few years. I grew my subscriber base with Substack in the early days as a single writer, and I grew my subscriber base without Substack, on my own, with a full team. The latter was more difficult, as I knew it would be, but I traded the Substack audience for complete creative control of my company.

It was a no brainer decision. Substack tools are incredible. Their CMS alone would be a compelling reason to build with them, but their entire publishing backend is beautiful, and their growth network is unlike anything else in the business. I’ve watched people leave Substack in a huff and immediately die (couldn’t be me). I’ve watched people grow on Substack and somehow not understand the degree to which the Substack growth engine was the reason. And now that I can reenter on precisely my own terms? It’s a new era for the Pirate Nation, tbh.

Alternatives

Substack’s greatest risk has always been writers leaving. A 10% fee (plus Stripe’s usual fee) in exchange for someone handling all the tech, subscription and mailing blasts sounds great at first, but as authors grow big and get to a couple of hundred thousands a year in income, they start looking more and more at this annoying little line in their P/L.

With Pirate Wires, Solana treated Substack as the as a launchpad before spinning out. Some other writers left citing the company’s moderation policy, like Casey Newton with Platformer, or because they couldn’t turn it into a reliable income stream. Every, originally known as The Everything Bundle, evolved into a full-fledged media company that needed its own technology.

For most authors, Substack is still the best bet.

Now, setting up your own blog is easy; I covered the options before. You could even run a free static website, but the two main hurdles are newsletters and paid subscription. As the world largely abandoned RSS (the “pull” model), email newsletters have become the most reliable way to connect to your readers directly, but it’s the “push” model that requires far more work. Sending and delivering mass email reliably is difficult and you will probably have to pay someone else to do so. Subscriptions push the complexity to yet another level.

Substack is still a very good option because you, as an author, don’t have to pay anything (except for your own domain name). What if you want more control though? At the end of it, all Substacks look like Substack, which has been another point of critisism.

Substack’s brand has become an asset for writers. They practically turned substack in a new noun (which heavily annoys many people). And it helps conversions, because readers already know what Substack it, how to subscribe and why they might want to pay for it. The funnel is also highly optimized for moving visitors to free subscribers and then paid subscribers flow. The trade-off is uniformity: every substack looks like every other substack, which can make individual blogs feel less distinct.

Substack has two very direct alternatives in the form of Beehiiv and Ghost. Beehiiv was built by the technical people from Morning Brew and provides vast customization capabilities with custom websites, custom newsletters, analytics, and API access. In return, you have to pay subscription for access to advanced features, but it provides a lot even at the free tier so you can pay $0 until you hit 2,500 subscribers.

The beauty of Ghost is that it’s a free open-source software that you can deploy yourself. But there’s the catch with actually sending newsletters, which is still challenging. If you care about it, the best option is to go for their platform offering, which immediately starts at $18 a month. But the starter tier doesn’t even support custom themes or over 1000 subscribers, so it’s more like $35 for the “Publisher” tier. Good for publishers, a bit pricey for regular bloggers.

Another less known is Buttondown, which I’m using to send out fresh posts from my blog. It’s a bit more geeky and basic, but has some nice features, including paid subscriptions, and until you get to 1000 subscribers it costs $9 a month.

If you are an aspiring writer aiming to build a large audience and sell content online, all of these might work, but Substack might be the easiest option to start because of its zero price and awareness. Still, even a couple of paid subscribers will nullify the costs of any other platform for you. That’s why Substack remains sticky: the entry cost is zero, the growth engine is real, the aura of legitimacy is powerful. But they will lock you in. If you build a large thriving newsletter on Substack, it’s a great thing in itself, but it will be quite hard for you leave. Both Beehiiv and Ghost are much more independent alternatives.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you will be successful. Most blogs on Substack earn nothing. Most blogs on the entire web earn nothing. But if you aren’t sure or don’t want to commit for all eternity, Substack and Beehiiv are probably the easiest place to start for non-technical people. Because email is how most people consume text content these days.

Substack promised independence, but has evolved into another platform playing the same game as everyone else. The crab always becomes a crab.

IMAX is a Superbrand

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 15:30:00 +0000

How many companies building cinema projectors do you know?

I bet you know at least one, and it’s called IMAX. You’ve heard the name when you watched “Dune“, “Avatar“, or something from Christopher Nolan. If you paid more to get an IMAX experience, they weren’t too shy to add a dedicated intro promoting themselves — quite obnoxious if you ask me.

Do you get how weird it is? I mean, do you know any other projectors? Yet IMAX has become entangled with the film industry and a sign of prestige. There are 1,772 IMAX theaters across 90 countries. A huge scandal played out when Tom Cruise couldn’t secure extended IMAX viewings for his previous Mission Impossible film.

Lately, I’ve become exceedingly interested in companies with brands so powerful that they break common laws. This is my first post in this new series, and I have a few others in the pipeline.

Companies are egoists by nature. They don’t want to share the spotlight, and they don’t want any other brand alongside their own. So when they do, it’s a beautiful exception worth exploring.

Like other Superbrands, IMAX has conquered its dominant place by inventing and controlling a unique technology that enabled the industry to go beyond what was possible. It became a symbol of quality, which meant partners benefited by advertising their films as IMAX.

In this story, I want to answer several questions:

What is IMAX
How did it emerge
And what enabled it to secure this supreme position

What is IMAX

IMAX is a cinema format that combines specialized cameras, a specific post-production pipeline and purpose-built cinemas to deliver a superior viewing experience.

The standard film format was 35mm. In addition to doubling it and using 70mm, IMAX also changed the orientation. Instead of feeding the film vertically like in standard projectors, IMAX runs the film sideways (horizontally) and makes each frame much taller.

In regular 70mm film, a frame is usually 5 perforations tall and runs vertically through the projector. But with IMAX’s 70mm, each frame is 15 perforations wide (the official name is 15/70). This lets each frame stretch across more of the film’s width, making it about 10 times bigger in area than standard 35mm film. While top digital cameras can reach the 8K resolution, IMAX film achieves roughly 16K.

(And while I’m already scared of confusing you, it’s important to remember that 70mm is the projection film, while IMAX is actually shot on 65mm film, as 5mm is used for the soundtrack)

This is what gives IMAX its square-ish 1.43:1 ratio — when you get to a cinema, you see a much taller screen that can occupy your entire area of vision.

You can find many comparisons of shots in famous movies at IMAX and other carriers. Every other format is cut and pales in comparison. You simply cannot experience the original IMAX cut at home. Even if the movie was shot with IMAX 15/70 cameras (like Dunkirk or Oppenheimer), you’re most likely seeing 1.78:1 or 2.20:1 (closer, still cropped) or even just 2.39:1 (Cinemascope ratio), with IMAX framing lost entirely.

Great, so it’s just a larger film? Not so easy.

The movie industry has been trying to switch from the traditional 35mm to a larger format for decades. Fox introduced Fox Grandeur in 1929, and Walt Disney came up with the Fantasound system for the original “Fantasia” film in 1940. In 1953, CinemaScope was introduced, which brought the now commonly ratio of 2.35:1 (later expanded 2.39:1), much wider than the previously used 1.37:1. It used special anamorphic lenses that compress a wide image onto standard 35mm film, then expand it during projection. All these technologies were targeting the 35mm, and they still tried to keep it. The Techniscope film format was invented and became popular precisely because it used half as much 35mm film for the same number of shots, even at loss of quality.

The Origin Story

In 1967, the International and Universal Exposition was held in Montreal. Two people came there with the same dream of making movies bigger. Making the picture bigger, to be exact.

There, Graeme Ferguson presented his film “Man and the Polar Regions” while Roman Kroitor showcased his production “In the Labyrinth”. Both utilized complex multi-projector and multi-screen systems, which were impressive but challenging. Recognizing each other’s experience, they later decided to pool their expertise and were joined by Robert Kerr, a businessman, and William C. Shaw, an engineer, to form Multiscreen Corporation, Ltd. That company would later change its name to IMAX (Image MAXimum).

Soon, they realized that using multiple film reels and projectors was a dead end and instead decided to focus on one big screen and one big film. In three years, they filed a patent for the “Rolling Loop” film transport system, which allowed for the smooth, high-speed movement of large-format film through a projector.

The Rolling Loop is what enabled the use of 70mm film running horizontally, creating much larger and sharper images than conventional vertical 70mm or 35mm film projectors. The first movie IMAX Corporation produced using this new technology was Tiger Child. To do this, IMAX had to create basically every piece of equipment from scratch, including cameras, lenses, lighting, and sound devices to support their 6-story high screen and giant film frames required for it. The first permanent IMAX theater was established in 1971 in Toronto, Canada.

However, IMAX didn’t become a part of Hollywood for decades after. Throughout the 1980s, IMAX was primarily used for science and nature documentaries as the company expanded across science centers, museums, and planetariums. In 1984, NASA even brought IMAX cameras to space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. The audiences were amazed by the picture, but it wasn’t going to conquer cinemas just yet.

IMAX had a chicken-and-egg problem. The 70mm film was expensive, heavy and difficult to operate; the same applied to cameras, which were so loud that you would have to re-record all the actors’ dialogues. And since nobody was shooting movies in IMAX, cinemas weren’t interested in investing in it.

The Fateful Acquisition

In 1994, investment bankers Richard Gelfond and Bradley Wechsler acquired IMAX Corporation, and the same year, they took IMAX public by listing it on the NASDAQ stock exchange. They were fascinated by the technology and believed it could have been used for Hollywood. But first, they had to make it better and figure out how to “sell” it.

One of my best sources for this was the interview that Richard Gelfond, who took the role of the CEO, gave to Harvard Business Review and I will be quoting it extensively. The funniest part is that he and his partner merely wanted to flip the company but he ended up making it his life’s work.

Their first challenge was going around the chicken-and-egg problem.

Studios didn’t want to film a movie in our format (which required bulky, expensive cameras and lots of film) unless thousands of theaters were equipped to show IMAX films. Theater owners wouldn’t convert to IMAX until many more IMAX films were available.

Building IMAX was indeed very expensive. For starters, IMAX used to charge cinema multiplexes $1.2 million for the privilege of using their technology. Meanwhile, studios back then had to send individual prints of the movie to each cinema. While a regular set of 35mm would cost about $1,000, each IMAX print would take $30,000 and require a forklift just to get it over to the projection room.

IMAX had to change basically everything about how it operated and the technology itself to make it work. But in the process, they stumbled upon an extremely profitable model that the company continues to use to this day.

First, they started covering the IMAX installations at cinemas themselves at no up-front charge. But in exchange, they took 20% of the box office on that screen, which proved very wise in the long run, albeit a risky endeavor.

But also, as Richard said:

The huge up-front cost was an obstacle, but not the only one. Very few movies were being offered in the IMAX format.

So, in 2001 they figured out how existing movies could be converted to IMAX, which removed the risks for movie studios. IMAX would even cover the costs of the conversion in return for 12.5% of the box office of the IMAX rerun.

Finally, the shift to digital removed the price barriers of both film and film projection systems: $30,000 in film prints were replaced with $150 reusable hard drives. In 2008, IMAX introduced its first digital projection system, which used dual 2K or 4K projectors, making it easier to install IMAX systems in cinemas. This led to a radical expansion of IMAX theaters globally.

They found a win-win-win scenario that incentivized all the parties to participate:

If it costs $10.50 or $11 to see a new release in a theater, a ticket to the IMAX version will cost about $15 or $16. That means that even if the studio pays us 12.5% and the theater owner pays us 20%, they still wind up with more revenue than if the moviegoer had bought a regular ticket.

The main challenge that they had to work around was that:

The Hollywood movie industry is an interconnected system of studios, directors, and theaters that has evolved over 100 years, and it has a traditional way of doing things.

IMAX had to become a part of that system.

The Industry

In 1998, “Everest”, a documentary film about the struggles involved in climbing the mountain, became the first IMAX film to make it to the box-office top ten. But it was still a documentary and IMAX was trying to enter fiction films.

The turning point was when Disney decided to make “Fantasia 2000”, a sequel to the 1940 movie “Fantasia” and play it exclusively at IMAX theaters. It became the first feature-length animated film to be released in the format across 75 theaters.

Christopher Nolan became the first major director to use IMAX in narrative cinema, shooting parts of “The Dark Knight“ (2008) with IMAX cameras. Although the film only had 28 minutes of IMAX footage, that was enough to turn the tide. Then Brad Bird followed with “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol”, which legitimized IMAX as a format for blockbusters.

Visionary directors like Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, and Denis Villeneuve started integrating IMAX technology into their process. IMAX co-opted the best minds of the industry to become their promoters and ambassadors.

Richard Gelfond:

We used to have to beg studios to make films in the IMAX format, but now a lot of Hollywood people say you can’t really make a blockbuster except in IMAX. As a result, we’ve become much more profitable.

And it’s not surprising. When James Cameron’s “Avatar” was released in IMAX theaters in 2009, it became a sensation. The film heavily relied on 3D and IMAX’s immersive format, which provided a unique cinematic experience. “Avatar” grossed over $2.7 billion, and a lot of it came from IMAX.

Christopher Nolan has become explicitly associated with IMAX. He started with “The Dark Knight”, and continued using it more and more for his future movies, so over 70% of ‘Dunkirk’ was shot in it. For “Oppenheimer”, Nolan even ordered a brand-new film stock to be made because IMAX wasn’t available in black-and-white before (but he really wanted it).

There are still some mountains left unconquered. No feature movie to date has been shot entirely on IMAX film (only digitally) due to technical and logistical challenges. Nolan’s “Odyssey“ will be the first.

Lessons

So, what enabled IMAX to become so dominant? Quality, both real and perceived.

Richard says:

Our commitment to quality and providing a cutting-edge entertainment experience, combined with the differentiation we’re able to create by working closely with these key partners, has enabled us to build IMAX into a globally recognized and sought-after brand.

Imagine the giant screen covering your entire field of view and throbbing sound. IMAX has become synonymous with premium cinema. Directors and studios boast how much of their movie is shot in IMAX because this seems to attract the viewers. But all this time, they’re promoting the company that built the cameras and the projectors.

IMAX enabled higher ticket prices, so even with their cut, studios and theaters make more money. But even more importantly, it helps turn movie releases into events, something that every studio wants to achieve.

Combined with effective marketing, IMAX’s technical features have established it as the go-to brand for high-quality, immersive movie experiences. You can expect a certain quality when going to IMAX (I don’t go to any other theaters anymore).

IMAX’s success is due to its execution. The company took an enormous risk by absorbing all of the primary costs from the cinemas and studios to kickstart this network. They have been rewarded handsomely for this, receiving about 20% of the box office from every IMAX film. IMAX became indispensable to the industry and an integral part of it.

That was a very risky strategy that forced them to incur practically all of the costs. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy and delisting multiple times:

At one point in 2001, our stock traded for 55 cents a share, and some of our bondholders began buying equity and trying to force us into bankruptcy. In 2006, we actively tried to sell the company, but our future was so uncertain that no one was willing to pay a reasonable price.

But they managed to succeed, and the payoff was dramatic.

This is the first post in the series. My next article will be about GORE-TEX, which pushed Nike and Arcteryx to put its brand alongside their own, and the company behind it.

Sources

If you would love to learn more about IMAX, here are the best sources I found while researching materials for this article.

Extras

Editors usually force you to cut stories, and this makes sense. The shorter they are, the better, as long as you deliver your core idea. But I still wanted to clarify a few more complex things and add asterisks to give you a complete picture.

First of all, it’s important to understand the definitions, as it can be a bit murky. There are different flavors of IMAX, namely “Filmed for IMAX” and “Shot with IMAX”, which often used interchangeably in marketing, but they mean different things technically and artistically.

“Filmed for IMAX” means the movie was shot with an expanded aspect ratio (1.90:1) that fills more of the IMAX screen. The “F1” 2025 movie, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a good example. This means the filmmakers used traditional digital cameras and worked closely with the company to optimize the movie visually and sonically for IMAX theaters. Examples include “Dune: Part One”, “The Batman” (2022), “Fast X” (2023).

“Shot with IMAX” means a movie or scene was filmed using special large, high-resolution film or digital cameras built by IMAX itself. Scenes shot this way use a taller aspect ratio (1.43:1 ratio), which fills the entire IMAX screen. Examples would include “Interstellar“, “Dunkirk“, “Oppenheimer“, and many others.

Ads and the Privacy Panic

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 17:14:00 +0000

The launch of Threads, Meta’s alternative to Twitter, has reinvigorated discussions about privacy and data ownership. A number of smaller Mastodon instances have preemptively defederated Threads, people have concerns about Meta launching yet another social app and getting even more data, etc.

Personally, I believe that we’re in the midst of a moral panic our grandkids will be laughing about.

A moral panic is a widespread fear, most often an irrational one, that someone or something is a threat to the values, safety, and interests of a community or society at large.

I often see people confusing different privacy-related things and using weaponized language to convince you something is bad. Just look at the terms thrown around. You need to protect your privacy and fight the surveillance as if these people are living under Stasi or trying to fight the statewide network of spies—the words we choose matter. By framing the problem in the right context, you can position yourself as the winner without even making a move.

‘Facebook sells your data’ sounds bad. ‘Surveillance’ sounds bad. But it doesn’t sell your data, and it’s not surveillance. If you can only articulate why you dislike sometime with rhetoric that isn’t actually true, that tells us something in itself. Benedict Evans

Meta isn’t selling your data. Meta is selling an ability to show precisely-targeted ads to relevant audiences. Some companies want to sell you their product. This list includes everyone from Unilever to a local car shop that needs people who drive Chevrolet and live nearby.

Show Me The Harm

Most of the time, privacy proponents cannot provide evidence of harm experienced by anybody involved. You could come up with some examples. After several US states made abortions nearly illegal, people realized the government could demand Google to share its search and location data to prosecute women using those clinics. It’s true that if Google, Meta, and others didn’t keep this data, this “attack vector” wouldn’t exist. While this situation is extremely unfortunate, we must agree that the actual bad actors here are state governments, not Google. It’s very reasonable for services to keep the history of your searches and location data to provide better recommendations (even if this allows them to target ads better), and they have to follow the local laws (even if they’re barbaric). The reason people blame Google is twofold. Some dislike them, while others trust Google more than their government, which is why they put pressure on the former.

Other than this, all you can likely find is the old anecdote about a parent learning their daughter is pregnant because of targeted ads. This story doesn’t seem to have any solid foundation, though.

Finally, there was Cambridge Analytica. In 2018 everyone was raving about the dataset scientists gathered from Facebook and shared with third parties that basically “allowed either Trump or Russia to change the outcome of the US elections”. Except it didn’t. Because the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office released a lengthy report that found Cambridge Analytica’s work didn’t affect either of the elections. Marketers can promise you a lot, doesn’t necessarily makes it true. Cambridge Analytica used the fact Facebook had a more open API at the time and couldn’t enforce what users would do with the data. Yet when they closed it down, a lot of people were unhappy.

Instagram Isn’t Listening To You

Some have even been convinced Meta’s apps are listening to everything you say via your smartphone’s microphone! How else would they know to show me an ad for a thing I discussed with my friends but never searched for?!

They don’t listen to you, because:

It’s technically-challenging
It’d be trivial to detect
They don’t need to

Because if you talked to your friend offline, you likely were at the same place, which allowed Meta or Google to put you in the same lookalike audience and try showing you the same ad. This is why you might see something your partner is looking for online – because you spent a lot of time at the same location (be careful with your gift research). The modern adtech stack is simultaneously complex and much simpler than you imagine.

Some could say even this concept is creepy. I get that. There’s a difference between an intelligence officer watching my every move and a soulless black-box algorithm that doesn’t care about me and is only trying to optimize ROI for a certain creative. What makes me worried is exactly the governments collecting data they have no legitimate use for from their citizens.

You Aren’t the Product, You Use The Product

You’re not just losing privacy because you sinned. In return, you get access to enormous free services. I’ve long advocated for advertising-funded services because of how egalitarian they are. It’s easy for a middle-aged person born in the US to claim they’d rather pay for everything than watch ads. The only reason I got into tech is that as long as my parents paid for the Internet access (dial-up at first), I had access to all the content out there.

There’s value in targeted advertising. It’s one of the best vehicles for businesses to reach their customers. There’s a reason Apple uses two very different warnings for ATT and its own advertising engine. They try to make it sound like what they’re doing is fundamentally different, but it’s not. Apple believes that anything you do on your iOS device is their “first-party” for them but “third-party” data for Facebook.

It’s “Personalized Ads” for Apple, but scary “Tracking” for everyone else, and Apple turns their option on by default.

Apple ATT alongside the warning for their own ad network

Sometimes I myself prefer the ad-free experience. I pay for the ad-free tier on Netflix. But there are services, like social networks, that only truly work if everyone can use them for free at all times. And you likely underestimate how much services like Instagram or Gmail would cost you in their ad-free version. In 2022, Facebook’s (the “Blue App”) ARPU worldwide was around $39.65 (per annum), but in the US & Canada, some of the most profitable regions for them, it was $206.44. Are you ready to pay $17 per month for Facebook?

But if they make so much money on us, they should pay us!

I’ve seen countless attempts to build startups aiming to do this, both for the conventional web and in crypto. All have failed. Your information doesn’t cost that much by itself (if you don’t believe me, try finding a buyer). It becomes valuable when ingested into black-box algorithms at Google and Meta that operate petabytes of data and know how to extract value from it. Oil isn’t the best metaphor for this, the closer one would be sand when it’s turned into advanced microprocessors by TSMC.

Confusing Private Things and Behavioral Data

To make things even more confusing, people conflate some very different concepts under the same umbrella. Personally, I’m OK with targeted advertising, and I understand what it requires. I’ve bought many things off Instagram ads and specifically permitted it to track my activity.

There are cases where I care much more about the security of my data. I wouldn’t want my home address to be shared with strangers. I don’t want my medical or financial records to be publicly available. Sometimes I get notifications from 1Password about yet another hack of some services that potentially includes basic details on me, such as my name, email, and my password. These rarely include credit card details because not every website keeps them, and the ones that do have to care much more about this due to reason and regulation.

I don’t like such events because they could very easily lead to harm. It’s not about algorithms reviewing my “data” to generate revenue, it’s about humans using it against me to their advantage. Nobody can just bribe Facebook to get your data out. All big platforms care a lot about their data, this is one of the things that actually improved since Google and Facebook started dominating the online advertising market.

Some things are almost borderline. They usually happen because of incidents or miscommunication. In 2010, Google admitted that the cars used by Google Street View projects collected 600Gbs of data from open WiFi networks in Germany. The cars were fitted with antennas that look for WiFi networks and use the data for their location services. I doubt they could have used that payload data, but they should have been more careful.

Another thing that comes to mind is tech companies storing voice command recordings to assess and improve the quality of speech recognition. I’d expect something like this to happen, but they should warn about it in advance and give you an opt-out if you want it.

***

I’m not against privacy, and I understand why people might not want someone to track web pages or apps they use. But it’s important to remember that there’s a trade-off and be prepared for the outcome. While I don’t like most of the GDPR applications, which just make many reasonable things illegal and solidify the monopoly of the largest tech advertising companies, allowing users to export their data or demand their account to be deleted is a good development. Creating a framework that incentivizes companies to safeguard users’ data and punishes them for leaks is also important, although I think we should be reasonable. In their desire to punish the American tech companies, the EU is too trigger-happy to issue fines exceeding what oil companies paid for the largest spills.

How to Start Your Blog

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 17:17:45 +0000

Running your own blog in 2023 is still needlessly complicated, especially if you have any kind of taste. Why have one in the first place? This particular blog is more like a series of essays I wanted to get out. I also have another blog which is more like an online journal of my life. I was never able to have an actual journal on paper or use apps like Day One. But when it’s online, and other people can see it, I get an incentive to share more, even though I still mostly write for myself.

Social apps and networks are obviously the easiest options, but they’re geared toward vastly different things, and I just don’t trust their longevity. Having your own platform enables flexibility and portability, so your content can be kept online practically forever.

There are many options out there, ranging from WordPress and Ghost to static blogs to managed online platforms and Micro.blog. How do you choose between them?

First, here are things I’d like to have in the ideal world:

Modern and minimalist yet functional design
Markdown support to ensure the content is portable
Accessible via mobile
Photo galleries for particular posts and the blog itself
Email subscriptions
Affordable enough, so you don’t care about running it forever
Effortless backups
Connected to your personal domain

Turns out, it’s hard to find all of these things combined. Pricing is important to me at the ideological level. I can afford to pay $10+ a month, but I’m more likely to start wondering if I need to continue unless I suddenly have a very popular blog on my hands.

In fact, none of the options out there seem ideal to me – they range from mediocre to acceptable. Especially if you want anything more than a series of relatively long text-focused posts. Choose the one you like the most and stick with it as long as possible.

WordPress

The most popular CMS in the world, and yet I just can’t stand its admin page. Generally, WordPress can fit most of these requirements, but the paid hosted options are usually slightly more expensive and geared toward professional bloggers and content creators. Well, they’re targeted at businesses that can mentally afford to spend much more.

WordPress even supports Markdown and has countless plugins for photo galleries. The basic tier is €8 unless you pay annually, but it doesn’t include backups – for those, you’d need to pay €25 a month for the Business subscription.

The look of most WordPress blogs is just very dated and immediately recognizable. Of course, there are thousands of themes, but very few were meticulously designed, and building one yourself is no easy challenge. And you’ll need to self-host or pay for the higher tier again.

Webflow

Webflow is fantastic for corporate blogs as it allows managers to adjust not just the content but the website itself quickly. But such blogs aren’t really portable, and the CMS tier is quite expensive, so it’s not a great option. I’d skip it.

Ghost

Ghost is basically the modern WordPress in terms of its prevalence. Ghost is much more simple and straightforward, yet it comes at the cost of customizations. More recently, the platform has shifted its focus toward paid communities and newsletters. While it’s still possible to simply run a personal blog, Ghost’s official catalog has about two or free themes that fit this purpose, and it became even harder to find something suitable with modern updates like dark mode. And it’ll be bugging your readers to subscribe with an annoying button. And you can’t really change any major settings or adjust the website in a major way.

But if this particular look works for you, it could actually be a great option. Ghost is likely to stick around, supports Markdown (in a more convoluted way now). Also, please note that their support on mobile is intermittent at best, they had mobile apps working a few years ago but it doesn’t seem to be solid right now.

Ghost was known for the high price of their managed instance at $25, but recently they introduced a new Starter package at $9 (these prices are for the annual tier). But the Starter package is even more limited in terms of options, such as themes.

Thankfully, just like WordPress, you can run Ghost on your own instance. Most people recommend a $6 DigitalOcean droplet (plus the price of backups).

Hugo and Other Static Blogs

Static site generators (SSG) compile your content and design into static HTML pages that can be easily served online with minimal effort. Hugo is probably the most popular right now, but there are also Jekyll, Gatsby, Hexo, VuePress, and others.

With SSG you usually keep all the content in a GitHub repo and use Vercel, Netlify, or GitHub Pages to compile and serve the website. This isn’t the most consumer-friendly option, and it definitely helps to have developer experience. But this enables effortless backups.

There are a few ways to write content with SSG. The most low level is by writing Markdown directly using any text editor and making commits to GitHub. You could technically even do this on iOS with certain apps. If you also want to upload images for your posts, this immediately gets complicated. People often recommend content management systems that run on a third-party service, let you write posts and publish them, such as NetlifyCMS or Forestry. In my experience, they are quite clunky and certainly not mobile-friendly.

Email subscriptions are hard to set up, although you can use a third-party service like Buttondown or MailChimp to serve emails based on the RSS feed.

FYI, this blog runs on Hugo and Forestry but this only makes sense because I don’t post too often. To me it simply was the most straightforward option which gave me the most control and fantastic portability in case I switch to another platform later.

Micro.blog

Micro.blog is a service for microblogging combined with a social platform. In fact, it runs on managed Hugo instances coupled with an online CMS, mobile and desktop apps, and an ecosystem of other apps and services. You also get access to a social layer of Micro.blog’s users who can leave comments and respond to your posts.

Micro.blog costs at least $5 a month. You can participate in the community for free and broadcast your posts from other platforms through RSS or ActivityPub, but hosting is only available on paid plans. The top $10 plan also gives you email newsletters and digests of your content.

The apps aren’t perfect, and the experience is sometimes a little bit rough, but it’s one of the best options for your online journal. Imagine having your own private Twitter, Instagram, and a long-form blog on a single website. That’s Micro.blog for you.

If something happens to Micro.blog as a project or if you want to leave it, you can always just deploy your blog as a standalone Hugo instance. And it allows you to tweak basically anything in your blog.

My other blog actually runs on Micro.blog because I post more often and quite often use my phone for this. Just like with plain Hugo, I had to intervene in the underlying code quite a few times to make it work nicely for my goals.

Tumblr

Tumblr, a once popular social network, is now also owned by the same company as WordPress. In my opinion, it was always an underrated blog platform, specially tailored to personal online journals.

Tumblr blogs are very customizable – in addition to choosing a theme, you can edit its code directly. And it supports a range of different post categories: long texts, images, quotes, etc. Finally, it’s free and, to my surprise, allows you to connect your own domain. Email newsletters are only available if you serve via a third-party service and RSS.

Any disadvantages? People will know it’s a Tumblr blog.

Substack

Substack positions itself as the newsletter platform, but at the end of the day, you still have a website with posts. The design is basically standardized and very recognizable, and your readers are constantly pushed to subscribe to the point of churn.

Also, there’s the very question of the kind of content people expect on Substack. I’ve seen some people using it for their personal blogs, but they’re certainly in the minority.

Managed Platforms

There are several less popular managed platforms for personal blogging, such as Write.as, Proseful, Blot, Bear, and others.

Most of these are projects led by enthusiasts, so there’s always a good chance they will get tired and have to sunset the platform. This is a risk that you have to always keep in mind and think about backups and export options.

Write.as and Profesul are both simple and stylish blogging platforms. Write.as has a dedicated Snap.as project for photo galleries. Bear promotes itself as the most minimal blog platform. And Blot can look very different but deploys from a Dropbox/Drive folder or a GitHub repo. Unfortunately, in my experience none of these tools are truly polished, you’re facing rough edges all the time.

***

Figure out what features you definitely need and which ones are just nice-to-have. See what is used by the blogs you like and follow. Although you might end up surprised with their technical choices, but it’d still be a good reference of what you might be able to achieve with each option.

Having the right tool certainly helps, but at the end of the day, what matters is what you write there. Focus more on the content and just ensure the process of writing and posting is simple enough.

Why I Dropped Apple Watch for a Mechanical Watch

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 08:29:00 +0000

I’ve always been into watches and for the last 5 years, since Series 2, I’ve been almost exclusively wearing an Apple Watch. Recently I pulled a trigger on a mechanical timepiece I wanted a long time ago and have been enjoying it since. There’s a lot of people who went in the opposite direction but I haven’t seen too many people who got out. In the end, mechanical watch movements are an obsolete technology and a basic quartz watch can challenge Rolex for its accuracy, while an Apple Watch can provide you with unique complications and features, such as notifications, weather, or calendar alerts.

But first, why wear a watch in the first place? We all have precise atomic time on our phones. Well, to me that’s simply not enough, I want to be able to just glance and get a feeling of time. Not sure how you can be punctual without that. Therefore, I need a watch.

Apple Watch has some amazing capabilities for a $400 device. Let’s start with easily-accessible powerful complications with a user-friendly interface like timers, stopwatches, and alarms. And then there are unique complications you won’t find on any other watch: weather, calendar, notifications from your phone. Yet, in the end, I wasn’t compelled.

Below are five reasons one might prefer a classic watch instead.

Distractions

Apple Watch wants too much from me. Unless you proactively disable and mute notifications you’ll be bombarded with every alert you’re getting on the phone and watch-induced requests, like suggestions to stand up, exercise, or marvel at your partner’s fitness achievements. Sometimes you want that but in the evening I just wanted to get rid of it.

Having a “dumb” watch allows me to separate contexts. I can put off my phone and nothing will disturb me, unless it’s something truly urgent – then people will probably call me. You can go and disable all notifications on the watch, but it kinda raises the question of whether you wanted it in the first place.

Design

Apple Watch is by no means terrible, but unless you buy a stainless steel version it still looks like a fitness gadget. I just don’t enjoy looking at it, especially compared to my quartz and mechanical watches. Whether it’s a $50 G-Shock or a $1000 mechanical timepiece, they just have a lot more character in them. And since you’re going to replace it in a couple of years I feel a bit weird paying for that steel and sapphire.

That is also part of the reason you might want a mechanical piece. Most esteemed watch companies, with the exception of the likes of Grand Seiko, are focused on mechanical watches. If you want something truly beautiful and exquisite you likely will go mechanic.

Readability

The same applies to watch faces. Apple Watch is fantastic in the way it allows you to build your own watch using the design you like and the complications you need at the moment.

When I was a kid, I did have issues with reading analog watches – simply because for the first twelve years of my life, I didn’t have them at home. But I’ve learned and now I can read analog watches with a single quick glance. Apple Watch has gotten much better since Series 5, when Apple added an always-on display. Still, I realized I need to spend a few tenths of a second more to grasp it. Unfortunately, Apple’s watch faces just aren’t great. Marco Arment wrote a pretty extensive post 4 years ago and not much changed since then. Designers at Apple clearly know watches and recreated many classic designs like Divers and Chronographs. But they often lose important nuance making it’s quite hard to read the analog time quickly. For instance, all hour markers are usually the same, both hands have the same thickness, and so on. The only good analog watch face is California.

Apple Watch is clearly better as a digital watch, and I believe there’s an opportunity to improve. You either have Infograph Modular with a clock that’s rather small or artsy faces where digits take the entire screen with no place left for complications.

What I want is something like this. On Apple Watch Nike there’s a similar watch face but it’s not pretty, has visual bugs, and one slot is always taken by Nike Running, which I don’t use.

Longevity

To me, my watch is almost like my friend (don’t worry, I have friends). It’s with me all the time. I change my clothes but I wear the same watch. It might very well still be on my wrist in 20 years’ time. And from that we got the most massive disadvantage Apple Watch has – it’s short-lived. Even if you replace the battery on your Watch, in a few years it’d look painfully slow and you’d have to upgrade. It’s a replaceable gadget.

Both mechanical and quartz watches can survive for decades with basic care and maintenance. With mechanical watches, you need to have them serviced and while that can be quite expensive, especially in the case of in-house movements powering complicated watches, it’ll at least work perfectly afterward. Quartz watches are easier, you just need to replace the battery and ensure they won’t leak. Even some of the first quartz watches from the 70s are still running. Although, if something does break inside finding a replacement part might be challenging. With simpler mechanical movements it’s a bit more obvious.

And if you do that, your kids can wear the same watch. Whether you cherish that idea or not is entirely up to you, but I like it. My father had a collection of mechanical watches and I enjoyed looking at them as they were telling me about his life.

Battery Life

Apple Watch needs to be charged every night to operate properly. If you go out late at night you might end up with a dead watch. If you travel, even only for a weekend, you have to bring a dedicated charger.

Quartz watches live between 2 and 10 years on a single battery. There are some fantastic pieces that operate on solar power so you only need to replace the accumulator when it’s just dead – most outlive the 10 years period stated by the manufacturer. Mechanical watches usually live between 40-80 hours, but most of them are automatic, meaning they utilize the kinetic energy of your movement to charge. It’s a fantastic device, both mechanically and philosophically, as it’s literally powered by your own body.

The fact I can trust my watch to continue going however late it is, take it off my wrist, and just put it on in the morning while it’s still running is a blessing.

***

Maybe this isn’t forever. Maybe Apple Watch Series 9 will be able to track my blood pressure and glucose 24/7 and it will become a necessity for sustaining health and I’d switch. And I’m still using Apple Watch for training and sleep tracking (mostly for the silent alarm feature). But for the moment I’m enjoying watches that don’t add anxiety in my life.