Advertising is killing Tech Journalism

I'm not against the model where people subscribe to see some of the content. In fact I prefer the substack model where you are choosing to pay for an author that really connects with you opposed to Medium where you are paying money to eat at a buffet of trash.

I am against the idea of email newsletters though because the last thing I need is another email subscription. Everybody and his brother and his sister and fifteen cousins wants to send me email, I don't want anymore. For instance I used to like hearing about offers at Best Buy because they used to have good sales and I found shopping fun, but they sent me an email every day and I have neither the energy or money to buy something every day... And then the pandemic came and they quit discounting.

I see it as a problem that a web site pop up anything that covers the content be it apologizing for cookies or asking for my email address. Substack loses points for the "let me read it first" language that suggests that it's not legitimate for me to just read articles I like online instead of subscribing.

A medium article loses a lot of points for being on medium. It has to be really exceptional for me to want to promote it. A substack article loses a few points relative to a blog, it's nowhere near as bad as medium, but still it is annoying as hell to nag me every day about an email subscription that I'm never going to create.