Meta: 7k

Although I try to keep navel-gazing to a minimum, I’m happy to report that this publication has crossed 7,000 email subscribers (plus an unknown number of RSS weirdos). I write to challenge myself and I try to stay clear of current events, so I’m delighted that so many of you still find this publication worth your time.

But another reason I wanted to write this post is that it increasingly feels like a party at the end of the internet.

In the olden days, a nerdy site like this would have three sources of traffic: web search, hobby forums, and the aggregators of tech news. It goes without saying that organic web search traffic has been under siege from SEO spam for decades; it’s now a lost cause because of spammers’ ability to generate LLM content on any topic nearly for free. But the final blow comes from Google itself: the company is now in the business of stopping its users from visiting other websites; with pre-digested answers to all of life’s questions, there’s just no reason to leave.

As for independent forums, most of them have been subsumed by Reddit and Stack Exchange; both have grown insular and hostile to external links. Finally, when it comes to aggregators, the leading source of traffic to this blog used to be Hacker News, but I had no truly “breakout” HN stories for about a year. I don’t think this is because of a shift in focus, tone, or quality for this blog. It’s just that HN itself has shifted gears; the site is dominated by AI press releases and op-eds, and now has fewer readers who cherish learning and experimentation in any other domain.

All this makes Substack more valuable than before: as the old internet withers away, it’s one of the few non-algorithmic yet low-friction ways to share long-form content with like-minded folks. But ultimately, what I’m doing is probably just archaic. Long-term writing on the internet is like publishing poems in dactylic hexameter; it might be fun, but it’s not your ticket to TikTok fame.

If dactylic hexameter is your thing, here are several older articles that never made it to the top of HN, but that I think are interesting. I treat them as living documents, too, so they have changed quite a bit since their original publication:

Your feedback helps. I’m happy to answer questions, offer dubious life advice, and otherwise rearrange deck chairs while the orchestra still plays.