Welcome back to the State of the Workflow series on the Cortex podcast. I'm your host Mike Hurley, and this time I'm welcoming Casey Newton to the show. Casey is the writer of the Platformer newsletter, one of my favorite publications focused on technology. Casey focuses on tech platforms and the impacts that they have on our lives. He's also the co-host of the Hard Fork podcast from The New York Times. I've followed Casey's work for years, since before he was writing Platformer, when he was writing at The Verge. I've always liked his fresh style. He's very funny. He has excellent sources, and he breaks big stories as part of Platformer. So, I wanted to see how he does it and how he manages this workload. Casey also thinks a lot about his productivity and his tools and systems, and I reckon it's going to come out in this episode. I also want to ask you to stick around at the end of the show for a very special message about our work this year with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. So now, welcome Casey Newton to Cortex.
So Casey, I want to get started by asking you the important question: What is the most important device for you for getting your work done?
My most important device is my laptop. You know, I know that we now live in a mobile world, but as I reflect on the tools that I use to get things done, my phone is one of them, but if I could only have one, I would still want my laptop.
I'm noticing a sense over the course of the series, different groups of people gravitate in different ways, and any writer I'm starting to expect will always say their laptop because it's like you can get most of what you need done on the laptop. You can still text people. You could still use maps, right? You might look a bit weird walking down the street doing it, but you could if you had to, but you can't beat the real keyboard, right?
No. I mean, imagine writing a 1500-word essay on your phone. Like, the very thought makes me tremble.
No. Every once in a while, I'll make a mistake and I'll want to go edit my post afterwards and I'll do it on my phone because I'm out somewhere in the world and it's torture every single time.
I can imagine actually editing being more annoying than writing because you've got to like go through and like tap in just the right spots.
Do you ever write on anything like an iPad or any other tablet or anything like that or is it always a laptop?
Sometimes. Every once in a while I'll take like a three-day weekend kind of trip and I know that I don't really need a laptop for anything. So, I have an iPad with a keyboard attachment and I'll just throw that on and I like it. I like kind of having the laptop junior, but if I'm being honest, that's probably something I'm doing three or four times a year tops.
And what is your laptop of choice?
I have one of these M4 MacBook Pros because, you know, to run Chrome these days, Mike, you can't get by with a simple M3. You have to upgrade.
And when we've got AI like dripping out of our browsers in the future, like, you know, it's going to need all the RAM you can give it.
All right. So I want to jump into the workflow. I want to look kind of start to finish of how an issue of Platformer, your wonderful newsletter, is made. I want to start off with where the ideas come from. How much of what you write for Platformer is driven by news versus maybe themes or ideas that you want to cover?
So I think there are a few different kinds of Platformer editions that come out. One is essentially just a straight-ahead news story. I went out in the world, I found something out, and I write it down. Those tips can come from anywhere. I put my contact information in every email. People send me emails, they send me messages on Signal, and I kind of do it that way. But another thing that I do in Platformer is a kind of news analysis where I wake up in the morning, I see what the big story of the day is on my beat, and I start thinking about how could I move this forward? What is being unsaid? How does this connect to other stories that have come before? What does this thing that happened today predict about what is going to happen very soon? And from there, I can usually start to formulate a column. So, I've been writing a daily newsletter now for seven years.
Coming up on Platformer itself is about to turn five. I wrote a newsletter at The Verge before then. And there have been different eras. In some eras, it's very easy. I sort of know every morning when I wake up immediately what I'm going to write about. And then there are eras where it's harder and I have to work harder to figure it out. But those are some of the main ways that I get ideas.
Yeah, I know that feeling. Like there's always stuff happening, but sometimes it's like, is this actually the stuff I want to be talking about?
You're actually responsible for being the news sometimes, right? Like some of the stuff that you will write about becomes the news that other people will write about. What is it like, for as much as you could talk, I know it's quite sensitive, but what is it like working with sources? Because I imagine you are getting stuff all the time, some of it's real, some of it's not. On another podcast that I do with Jason Snell, you know, we look at a lot of Apple rumors, and one of the things we're always talking about is like trying to understand what the beginning of that rumor is. Like what do you use as like an idea of like, yes, this is something I want to kind of expand on, write about?
As you probably imagine, it varies quite a bit by the story, by the person. People have different motivations for sharing things. I write a lot about tech policy, the intersection between platforms and democracy, and my work often speaks to people inside companies who are trying to do the right thing. They got into this because they want to make the world a better place. They see tech as a point of leverage where they can do that. At some point, for many of those people, it will stop feeling like that's possible at the place where they're working because there will be some sort of change. They'll stop doing something they were doing before. They cut a team that was doing something really important. They discover something that they want the outside world to know that their company refuses to do anything about. Those are usually the moments that people will get in touch with me. I find that in general, if you write about a subject long enough and you give people inside these companies a sense that you actually care about it, you will start to build trust with them. And at some point, they may say to themselves, 'Hey, I actually want to talk to this person about what's happening.' It can also work the other way, too, where I will get in touch with someone and hope that they will tell me something. Candidly, I do less of that. I always feel awkward like trying to get people to tell me stuff that they're not supposed to. If I were a better journalist, I'd do that a lot more. But yeah, that's the basic way.
But I guess over time you end up building a roster of people, and I expect they're probably getting in touch with you sooner than you would even know to get in touch with them on a lot of things, right?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's the dream, you know? I mean, when Elon Musk took over Twitter and started to gut that workforce, I'd been covering Twitter for like a decade, and I truly could not even keep up with the tips that were coming into my Signal inbox because so much was breaking simultaneously. And I think I'll probably always look back on that as one of my favorite periods of reporting just because it was so easy.
I mean, similarly, you know, you mentioned that, I'm taken back to all the great work you did at Basecamp and 37signals. That was like a similar time where like it just felt like every couple of hours you had another new article. It was amazing.
Yeah. Yeah. That was another really special one where I would say that I managed to get in touch with one or two employees and build some trust. And one thing that I always say at the end of every interview is, who else should I talk to? And sometimes that just ends up in a dead end because they're like, I don't know. But in this case they're like, oh, talk to him and talk to her and let me give you their phone number. And like pretty soon I really did feel like I'd talked to half the company.
I know I would feel a lot of responsibility in that scenario, and I feel like I would be quite anxious about it. Like I imagine that you must have to take a lot of device security stuff really seriously in this line of work.
It sort of depends on the company, but some of them are incredibly invasive. I would say when it comes to their employees' devices and privacy, companies like Meta will hire former intelligence agency employees to do these kind of internal reviews. So if they suspect someone is leaking, they bring them into a room and they intimidate them, and it's like, you know, give me your device and show me whose phone number you have in your device. So that stuff's really spooky. And so I think over the years a bigger part of being a reporter is helping the source understand what they might be up against, which often works against the interest of the reporter, by the way. Like typically the reporter wants to break news. But I think if you're a good person and you want the people you're talking to to keep their jobs, you do have to explain the risk to them, and then you have to take whatever steps you can come up with together to protect them. So that's, yeah, it's a dance.
So, if you have something you want to cover, you have an idea for a story, where do you keep the ideas? Where do your ideas get saved?
So, I'm sort of bad at this because I do it in a lot of different places. And I sort of always have aspirations to do it slightly differently. So, I'll tell you a few of the things that I do while making clear that I do not recommend any of these systems because I think they're sort of like psychotic and self-defeating. So the main thing that I do in the morning is a kind of daily journaling practice, and for that I use Capacities. Five years ago I started doing this in Roam, which had sort of invented the concept of bidirectional linking, and I did Roam for like a year, but it didn't really develop very quickly. So, I tried Obsidian for a while. Then I tried something called Mem. Then I was sort of ready to give up on everything. But one of my readers was like, 'You have to try Capacities.' And so I tried Capacities because I kind of have a problem. And I just kind of loved it. It is pretty simple. It can do complicated stuff. I don't use most of the complicated features. What I like is it opens every day to a daily note. I sit down in the morning, I create a bullet point, and then I just kind of empty my mind. A lot of the stuff I'm emptying my mind about is just personal stuff. A lot of it is like what I did for dinner last night with my boyfriend. I like just kind of having a record of that kind of stuff because it's fun to go back a year later and be like, what was I doing at this time last year, you know? So, none of that is really productive at all, except that I do think it kind of clears my brain. And then after that happens, typically I will noodle on an idea. You know, I'm looking at headlines on Techmeme. I'm thinking I could write about this thing that's happening with Meta right now. I could write about this thing that's happening at OpenAI. And then sometimes I'll start to do a kind of basic outline of like, well, I like to hit these three beats, or this thing happened earlier this week, I could sort of bring that in. I haven't really seen anybody make this connection yet. So, some days it is like very simple, like a sentence or two about what the column might be. Other times I'll actually sort of like outline the column. I actually did this yesterday for the column that I wrote. You know, I knew I was going to do this, and it turns out that once a year I just love writing about kind of what I'm doing with productivity. And so in Platformer I wrote like, here's basically everything I've learned over the past year. And it just so happened that I decided I kind of wanted to outline it in Capacities. And so I did. Could I have done that literally anywhere else? Yes. Like there's no superpowers in Capacities that are making it easy, except that I really do like this kind of time-based note-taking, putting everything into a daily note, creating a little miniature time capsule every day, and I kind of really like it. Now, it can also do tagging, linking. I've experimented with having a sort of big-picture idea like the internet is splintering into zones, and then as I see new stories that speak to that, I will throw those links into that note, and the hope has been that's going to lead me to some really cool columns. I think what I've learned over the past year is by the time I've added the third or fourth link to that note, it's already occurred to me to write that story, right? Like there actually was not that much value in creating that note. And as far as keeping track of all the links, like Google exists, ChatGPT can now find those stories. So even though I'm constantly drawn to this idea of like being a digital gardener and like creating this like amazingly rich interconnected series of notes, having done this for five years now, I just have the learned experience that it is not that useful to me.
Yeah, I've spent a lot of time looking at this on the show, like the PKMs and all this kind of stuff, right? And the offboard brain, and I just always come back to I just search. Like maybe I'll keep the notes, right? Like and I'll just make some notes about stuff is pretty good most of the time, and like I'll find everything that I need from that. You mentioned outlining in Capacities. Is outlining a typical part of your article writing process? Does that come before writing?
The way that I have learned to defeat like the terror of a blank page is by writing what I call the first draft. What I've learned over the years is that editing is 100% easier than writing. And so even if you write the worst sentence in the entire world, even if you just write down four keywords and a verb and a period, you will be able to edit that into a paragraph much easier than if you try to get it right the first time, if you tried to write a beautiful sentence right the first time. And so for me, I always begin by thinking like, what are the beats of this column? It's usually like this thing happened a week ago or a month ago and it made us think this today. This new thing happened and here's a little quote from the story where we learn what was really going on. And then from there I get into whatever the column is going to be about. I bring in other voices. I contrast it with another news story. But like structurally that's how a lot of my columns operate. And so just like getting those beats down into an outline, it gives me the confidence that when I sit down to like do the dang thing, I have a road map. I know where I'm going and I can write the piece in one and a half to two hours.
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When it comes to doing the writing, what tools do you use for that?
So, I do a lot of writing in Google Docs, even though I think it's a hideous product. It's basically disgusting to me. I get the sense that this is something that's pretty typical for people that have worked at larger organizations at some point.
Yeah. I mean, I think anyone who ever had to like have their document edited by someone else would do it this way.
The reason I do it now is because I have an editorial assistant at Platformer who writes link summaries for like the links that I save that I put in every newsletter. And we can't both be in the CMS at the same time on Ghost, which is the platform that we use. And so I just need to be somewhere else to write this thing, and Google Docs is just the easiest thing to do.
Well, never write directly in the CMS, right? You should never be doing that.
You know what? Here's what's actually interesting. This is a thing that has gotten better in tech. It did used to be like 10 years ago it was psychotic to write inside the CMS. You could basically do it now. I hate to say it, you can.
It is a joke, but like essentially then don't write in Google Docs, right? Like everything is just saving everything constantly. The reason you didn't write in the CMS before was because it didn't save. And if the browser crashed, you were done, right?
Exactly. And now Ghost, which I write in, will just say like, 'Hey, your last thing didn't save.' And that's usually how I learned that my home internet went down. So yeah.
And then it's like immediately copy and paste into a note and get on with your day. So Google Docs in Chrome, I guess, is where you're doing the writing.
Yes, I do Google Docs in Chrome. Every once in a while, Lindsay, my assistant, like finishes early and I'm able to just write directly in the CMS, and I like doing that as well. But it's one of those two places.
You mentioned editing. You said you have an editorial assistant. Are you editing your own work? Do they help? Like do you have other people help you with editing? How does that work for you?
Yeah, so until like last year I had a managing editor, Zoe Schiffer. She edited my columns. She's at Wired now. After she left, I experimented with just having chatbots do editing for me. A year ago, they were really bad at this. They constantly told me that I was making mistakes that I had not made. They would refer to text I had not written. They did not have access to the web. They could not do any meaningful fact-checking. They can do that now. And so now every day like I'll usually have ChatGPT, Gemini, or both just go fact-check my columns. They find mistakes all the time. They find typos all the time, grammatical mistakes, style errors. It's really quite good. And so I am actually like delighted with the state of AI editing in this moment. Now I also am very like confident as a writer. I am not looking for structural help with my stories. I'm not looking for like feedback on like did you like my lead or like did you like my kicker? If I were a more junior reporter, I would absolutely want those things, but I'm an old man now, so I just write the way I want to write and then try to fix the typos.
Yeah, it's gotten so much better. I mean, I know that I tried to use this kind of stuff in the past and I felt like, oh, it's just writing its own version of the thing that I was writing about. It's like we're not even in the same ballpark anymore. But it feels like with such little instruction now you can be like just fix my grammar and punctuation.
If you want to make some recommendations, make them, but otherwise just keep this text the same. I find it to be really good for that.
And be clear like I actually don't even have it like recommend changes to the text in terms of like how would you like tighten this up? Like I truly am like leaning on myself for that now. Maybe at some point I'll stop doing that, but I like the system I have so far.
It always asks though, right?
Yeah. It's always like let me know if you want me to completely redo this. It's like, well, I don't actually. You can relax.
Is that the only spot that AI is playing a role in your work or Platformer, or are you using it for research too?
Yeah. Some of the things that it's great at, number one, finding sources. So, if you're writing about something and you have not read all the academic literature and you want to know who has researched this, ChatGPT will go out and they will find you the research. They'll find you the people that wrote it, and they'll find you their email address and their phone number. And they'll do that in about a minute. That's incredibly useful. Starting to use it all the time. It's also really good at finding a time when. So, a lot of times when I'm writing the column, I'll be trying to link something to previous times where it happened. You can now go into ChatGPT. The thinking models in particular are great at this and say, give me some examples of how the Trump administration is cracking down on free speech. It's like, if I thought long enough, I would remember them, but I'd probably miss some. And now I have an LLM that will just go sort of like pull up everything that's, you know, happened since January. Or after the GPT-5 backlash, I said pull up some other examples of when a tech company cut off access to a model and caused an outcry, and it went and it did that for me. So I find that really useful. So yeah, those are a couple I'd point out.
Yeah, I feel like for me now Google is where I search when I know the thing I'm looking for. Like I know where I want to go, and ChatGPT is where I don't know. It's like I just have a question. I have no idea. But Google is just like a quick jump to the thing that I want rather than remembering what the URL is.
I mean, obviously this stuff's been around for a long time now. It has not changed the ethical considerations at this point. How are you dealing with that, if at all? How do you approach that kind of thinking?
When DALL-E first came out, I was like blown away by it. I was like, 'This is incredible. I can just like make images now.' Almost like creating illustrations or cartoons for my columns. And you know, I would never hire an illustrator to illustrate an individual column, right? So, I didn't feel like I was taking away anyone's job by doing this. And it was fine for like a year, and then like people just turned on it. And people started sending me these emails. It's like, I'll never like buy a subscription to Platformer if you like keep putting this slop art in there. And eventually I just kind of declared defeat. And I was like, okay. Like, 'Y'all hate this. I'm going to stop doing it.' I do think that the way that these systems were trained is incredibly unethical. I've talked about that a lot over the years. I think that people should be compensated for the work that they did to build these models. The fact that nobody could opt out of it, I think is really bad, and I think it's shameful. Unfortunately, we live in a country where there's no accountability for anybody about anything, at least at the level of like technology executives. And so, I can keep talking about it. I can keep saying that I wish things were better, and I can keep advocating for systems like Cloudflare's Pay per Crawl, which hopefully will incentivize people to keep making more web pages and actually compensate the people making them and will be paid by the AI companies. So that's like kind of where I'm trying to put my advocacy energy to like live in a more just world. I'm also just somebody who likes trying new things. I like trying new software. I like doing things more efficiently. I'm also a solo entrepreneur running a business trying to write three newsletters a week and make a podcast. So, if there's a tool out there that helps me as a research assistant, as an editor, and increasingly a lot of other things, then I am going to use it.
I'm in a similar spot to you, which is like I really wish this was done differently. However, this is one of the biggest leaps in technology that I've seen in my career. Like, I can't deny what these tools are doing. And what these tools are doing is it's impressive. Even though there are still moral and ethical dilemmas to it that will probably never be resolved.
So, you mentioned Ghost. This is the platform that you use for publishing. I know you originally started on Substack, and talking about more reporting, like, but you had like issues with Substack and the lack of content moderation, which you have proven to be right about over time. I think, how did you come to Ghost when it came time for you to leave Substack, and have you been happy with that experience?
Yeah, for the most part, yes. When we decided we wanted to leave Substack, we looked at a couple other options. The two main ones were one called Beehiiv and one called Ghost. Beehiiv is another venture-backed platform. They have a lot of outside investors. Their valuation is creeping up, and I just felt very burned with my experience trying to build a business on a platform that owed a lot of money to Andreessen Horowitz. And I thought, I don't want to be in this position again. I do not want the fate of my business to rest on what happens to this company. The cool thing about Ghost is that it is open-source software. And it's a bootstrapped company that's been profitable for a long time. It's a small team. And even if that company blew up, the software would still work. It's not like the servers would be unplugged or be like sold to some private equity company. So, there's just not as much pressure on Ghost to do what Substack is doing now, which is push into podcasts and videos and ads and whatever else it's going to take to live up to their insane valuation. And that just gives me a lot of peace of mind, you know, even beyond like the fact that Substack continues to host literal 1930s Nazi content. I just don't think that business is going to have that great of an outcome, and I don't want my fortunes to be wrapped up in it. So I've been very happy to not have to worry about that anymore.
Yeah. I mean like we are, sorry to put you in this bucket, content creators, right? Essentially, and we know what those businesses look like, and they can be really good for individuals and small teams. But even with scaling that up to lots and lots and lots of people, I don't see a scenario where that creates like a unicorn business. It's just no.
You can make a great business, but you're not going to live up to that kind of investment.
Also, I was paying Substack tens of thousands of dollars a year to get the exact same level of service that somebody who was paying them $100 a year was getting. Like, there's always been something really broken about their business model, and the founders have not wanted to fix it. They're just like, 'Come for the network. We'll pump up your free subscribers, and you'll be able to turn those into paid subscribers, and you'll never even miss the 10% of your revenue that we're taking from you.' But if you click around, you'll see that this spring some people's number of new free subscribers started to drop precipitously. The thing is, like I write about tech platforms. I know how it works. And tech platforms do not become friendlier to creators over time. They start out friendly and then they get less friendly. And we're now in the starting to get less friendly era of Substack. So I just think we're going to hear a lot more squealing from the people over there as the screws start to tighten.
So yeah, Ghost, as you mentioned, is open source. They have a hosted version and you can self-host. Are you self-hosting Ghost?
No. So we pay for Ghost Pro, which is their hosted service. It's like, I don't know, less than 20% of the cost of Substack for us. They're super responsive, like great support. There are some things that we have to do now ourselves that Substack did for us. So like Substack used to handle all of our customer service. We now handle that ourselves. Substack would send out your like welcome email and your subscription renewal email. And we now use a third-party service called Outpost to do that for us because Ghost doesn't do that natively. So, are there like aches and pains along the way of like doing this ourselves? Like, yes. But I'm just like, when I think about what it's going to be like in five years, I just know I'm going to be thrilled to be doing it the way we're doing it.
How many people are kind of involved in some way with Platformer today?
It's a three-person operation right now. So, it's me, it's my editorial assistant who helps me summarize the links every day, and then I have an executive assistant who does ad sales, customer support, helps me manage like my calendar and various other administrative tasks. So, we're a three-person operation. Next month, we're going to have our first fellow. So, for nine months, we're going to have another younger reporter who's going to be working with me, learning from me, and hopefully leveling up our AI coverage. So, yeah. So, next month, we're going to be four. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really excited.
What made you want to do that?
Somebody emailed me and they said, 'We would like to hire a fellow to work for you and do a bunch of journalism for you at no cost to you.' And I said, 'That sounds like an amazing deal. I'll do it.' I said, 'I'm sold.' I said you drive a hard bargain, but I'm going to allow it.
How do you all communicate? Are you using Slack? Discord? None of them?
We use Discord. I don't like Slack. The app brings me no pleasure. And when I use Discord, I feel 20 years younger. So that's our solution is we do everything on Discord.
Your gaming roots, right?
Exactly. You know. Yeah. Exactly.
Slack is one of those classic tools. It had so much promise. It was so exciting and then it just stopped.
Yeah, it turned out mostly to just be a place inside the company that collects all the grievances about the company that would then like leak out to reporters like me. And so I often say that Slack is a piece of software that is built to destroy companies, and it has taken down more than one.
Slack is terrible for discovery process, right?
Absolutely. Here is my like very like pro-management tip is like if you run a company, do not let the employees create their own channels, okay? Like you're going to want to keep a very firm hand.
I think the issue is it is still work communication.
But it doesn't feel like it. You know what is actually, that is also good advice for employees too, right? Because you want to make sure that the things that you're saying, if you don't want them to ever be read by management, don't say them in the company tool.
It's true. Although it's always interesting to me how many things employees do want management to see. Of course, if you take the path I described, what employees now do is they just start up their own separate Slacks or their own separate Signal groups. So, you know, the horses are out of the barn. The grievances will be collected. I just, I find something uniquely distasteful about Slack as a place to run my business.
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Do you have any kind of to-do management amongst the team? Do you use Trello or Todoist or anything and share tasks?
No. Fortunately, we're small enough that I don't have to do that. I used to be really excited about those apps, but then I realized that there's almost no upside to the individual worker of using those things. Like, it is always software that the manager has to force you to use, and you're only ever going to use it begrudgingly in like 90% of cases. And I just didn't want to run that kind of business where I was like forcing employees to run software. So instead I'm just on Discord. It's like, hey, can we do this? How's it going? And that works really well. Now we're a three- to four-person team so we can do that. If we were 10 people we probably would have to have a different system, but at the level we're at it's working great for us.
What is your current app of choice for reminders and tasks?
So my hot take about this is that every to-do list app is exactly the same. Like truly, they're all exactly the same, but I still enjoy changing them out about every six months for aesthetic reasons. Like, I think you should use the to-do list app that you think is beautiful. Inevitably, it's going to fill up with a bunch of stuff you don't want to do. You're going to look at the stuff that you haven't done, and you're going to think, 'I hate this to-do list app. I just want something that works for me.' And then you'll shift over, and then it'll look so beautiful when there's nothing in it. And then, you know, over six months, it'll fill up with stuff you haven't done, and you'll change again. So, I truly just change every six months for no reason at all. I'm currently on Todoist. I think, twist my arm, Todoist is the best of them. I think they're the most thoughtful, and it feels like they pay the most attention to how people actually work and like what would be easy to help them get stuff done. But do I use 98% of the functionality of Todoist? Absolutely not.
Yeah, I agree with you. I have lived that life of moving to-do managers, and eventually I was just like, I'm just sticking with Todoist. Sometimes I wished that to-dos had a system that was kind of like email so you could move without having to manually retype everything because no export tool works the way that you want it to. They just don't. It's like, would you like just a blank list of stuff with no dates on anything anymore? Not really. It's not what I was looking for. I mean, sometimes I think that the bullet journal people have figured this out where it's like if it's really important, you actually should just recopy it into your planner every single day. And the moment that you stop recopying it is the moment that you admit to yourself you were never going to do it anyway. Like I do think there is actually a wisdom to that.
So if we're kind of like looking at your workflow, I jumped out for a moment, but like you've written in Ghost, you've done all your research, you've written the post, you've put it out. How much time do you spend promoting your work?
Yeah. So probably like 10 or 15 minutes a day. Like every day I will go on to Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. I will usually pull a screenshot of whatever I think is the most enticing thing in the column, craft a post, put it out there. I guess I should say I've also been experimenting with LinkedIn, although less consistently. Sometimes I think about doing other things, but I think like it's easy to imagine a world where I'm spending 30 minutes to an hour to create like a video promo for Instagram and TikTok and trying to use that to drive subscribers, but I think the effectiveness of that would be like very limited.
Do you still find text-based social media to provide you with the value that say Twitter used to, like when it was the one place?
No. Nothing is as good as Twitter. I grieve Twitter every single day. I refuse to use X because I find it disgusting, but there's a cost to me because there are still a lot of customers that I could reach there. I just can't bring myself to do it, basically.
Especially writing on AI because it feels like that's where all the conversation is, right?
I know. I hate it. It's like a sacrifice I'm making for a principled reason that is costing me money. And so, I do feel that every day, but I just can't imagine another way to live. You know what I mean?
Let me drop a name. I had dinner with Sam Altman last week. It was me and nine other reporters. And I was trying to press him to like, I was like, 'Sam, Elon Musk hates your guts.' Or at least he acts like he does. He's trying to destroy your company in court right now. And every day you and all of your employees go on X.com and you create value for him to help fund his effort to destroy your company. Sam himself could personally single-handedly move all of AI Twitter wherever he wanted to. If he went to Threads, Bluesky, there's rumors that OpenAI is building its own social network, make your own, do anything, literally. And I've made a suggestion to him more than once, and I think it's starting to have an effect. So, that is my hope. It may be that nothing is ever as good as Twitter was for this purpose, but we'll just make do with what we have.
I just find it so frustrating that I now have three where I used to have one.
On Twitter, I used to really love the replies I would get. Like, I really loved the audience that I had on Twitter. There were like people who would show up all the time that it felt like we had this like really fun jokey relationship with, and that's like mostly gone. The closest that I have to that, believe it or not, is on Threads. On Bluesky, I feel like I'm only ever talking to people who are barely putting up with me and maybe hate me. And that's just like not a fun place to hang out, you know?
I think like I follow you on Threads. I mean, I don't know if you do this on other networks too. I feel like you let your comedic side out more on Threads.
I mean, I started writing about social media because I thought it was fun. I thought it was like fun to go on Twitter and write a little joke and see if people liked your joke. Like, to me, that was the whole appeal of it. And then I realized like, oh wow, I could like grow an audience and maybe like build a business. But like those were all secondary considerations to me. Mostly I just wanted to like tell jokes and get attention.
I mean, but there was a time where like that was just what Twitter was. It was just jokes about technology. It was incredible.
I know. And we'll never... The amount of grief I have for Twitter blows my mind. I truly never thought I could miss a piece of software the way that I miss Twitter.
There truly has never been anything like it in my life.
No. And there just won't be again because no social network will ever be started with the same aspirations that they had when they started.
I mean on one hand I'm sort of like never say never, like you just kind of never know. But on the other hand, these things do evolve. And so I feel like even if we get a replacement for Twitter in some ways, I do think it will look very different. It will operate differently. So many people tried to create a one-to-one Twitter clone after Elon bought it. And it was just impossible to get a critical mass. But I don't know. I mean, I think there's reasons to be optimistic about Bluesky. There's reasons to be optimistic about Threads. And so I try to live in hope rather than despair.
Do you promote in any other way? Do you consider any other outlets that you would get your word out? Obviously, you have your podcast Hard Fork. Do you consider that as part promotion for Platformer too, or do you see it as distinct?
Yeah, for sure. Because it happens on a semi-regular basis that I'll write something that we will talk about on the show that week. And you know, I usually get emails from people every week that say like, hey, like I finally became a paid subscriber because I've been listening on Hard Fork. I would not say it's an overwhelming number. I think like there's a Venn diagram between the Hard Fork audience and the newsletter audience, but they're sort of separate. Like people who like getting their news via podcast and people who like getting sober tech policy analysis in their inbox. It's not a perfect circle. On one hand, I absolutely do think it's like very useful, but on the other hand, like it has not been a bonanza in terms of new paid subscribers.
Do you know how people are reading your work? Are they reading in RSS, email, the web? Like, do you have a sense for where your audience is?
Yes, mostly via email. Second on the web, RSS distant third. We work with Outpost to create sort of token-gated RSS feeds. So, if you're a paid subscriber, you can get full-text RSS. It's a very small percentage of our audience. I'm very happy to offer it to them, but it's not the majority of people.
