When you subscribe to a paid newsletter, you’re not paying to access more content. That feels like homework. Imagine scrolling through a library of 150 articles trying to figure out if there’s something that can solve your problems.

We carry three subconscious questions:

"Can I actually get through all this?"

"Will this work for me specifically?"

"Do... See more

And you have to wrestle with the paywall and its very unfortunate trade-off. You want to share your work with the widest audience possible. But to any publication that’s too small for ads, free readers are simply not that valuable. For these reasons, I’ve always struggled with the paywall. Asking people to pay for writing is not a great way to make... See more

The real issue is not that writers are greedy or that readers are cheap, but that we’re all trapped in a system where cultural production has been so devalued that $5/month feels simultaneously like an insultingly small amount to pay someone for their labor and completely unsustainable when you’re already being asked to subscribe to twenty other

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Many argue that having this kind of information behind a paywall is bad for society, and even the institutions who pay these large subscriptions are getting sick of them.

If you write a bad post it won’t get shared and no one will see it. If you write a great post and it goes viral, everyone on the internet thinks you’re a genius. Since content is shared organically, your best work gets way more exposure than your worst. The incentive in these situations is to ramp up variance and do the most interesting writing you... See more