NoSub

<rant>

It feels like every other website out there wants you to either subscribe or to give them your email. I find that exhausting. And they are littered with ads such that they become unusable. (One especially bad culprit are cooking/recipe websites. Everytime I’m trying to follow a recipe, an auto-played video that I didn’t ask for that has nothing to do with the recipe gets interjected and moves my recipe text out of the viewport, which frustrates me to no ends. But I digress.)

I also find asking for subs horribly non-authentic, because the moment someone asks you to subscribe, they turn into a content business that does 3 things:

1. Keep you addicted subscribed to them
2. Sell you stuff
3. Find new addicts subscribers, and repeat 1 & 2

Well, I’m here to say “to hell with that”. I refuse to fall into that category. (I’ve tried in the past, but found that every time I did, I lost steam because my motivation wasn’t pure anymore b/c it got infected with those diseases.) To be fair, it’s definitely possible to not lose your humanity while building a content business. I’m just not one of those people, and I can confidently claim that most aren’t.

The other reason it doesn’t make sense to subscribe is because the meaning of that word has become so diluted nowadays. You can literally subscribe to anything or anyone without any limits. But that will keep you glued to your content devices forever if you plan on consuming all their content. But, fundamentally, time is a limit resource, so it’s impossible to be 100% engaged in all your subscriptions. Realistically, a sane person with a normal life might only have enough bandwidth for 3-5 subscriptions at 100% engagement. So, we instead divide our attention and give the vast majority of our subscriptions about 1% engagement.

There’s literally too much content out there! And because there’s too much content, the temptation is to rely on algorithms to help us sift through relevant content. But then, those algorithms have incentives too, for now those algorithms become the ad-targeting business.

Anyways, it’s madness.

Tis also the reason I don’t want to write this on my platform out there: Substack, Medium, Dev.to, etc. You really gotta sift hard for the good stuff out there.

Show, not tell. It’s a huge turn-off for me when others ask me to subscribe. If their content is really that good, I’d want to eagerly follow them myself.

</rant>

Anyway, if you’re still determined to “subscribe”, I offer you the following ways:

1. RSS

To get notified of the latest, use RSS. If you use an RSS Reader App with no tracking, no one will know, not even me. I actually prefer this, because it means less work on me. RSS is insanely easy to maintain.

2. LinkedIn

LinkedIn has got too much AI slop these days. I hate it. Maybe I’m foolish enough to try something different and actually write every word myself. Anyways, I’ll post every technical deep dive, and that should be a good way for you to get notified. And, LinkedIn is infrastructure managed by someone else not me, which saves me effort. And, you don’t have to give me any personal information.

3. Email

I’ve been told to offer a more “convenient” and “direct” way. This convenience comes at the expense of:

• a) more infrastructure for me to maintain,
• b) your privacy, meaning you’ll have to hand me your email. Feel free to use a junk one, I won’t be offended.

You’ll only get notified of 1) a confirmation email, 2) new posts, and 3) a unsubscription success email if you ever want to de-list yourself.

I won’t inject these boxes while you are reading (I hate that). It will only ever sit at the very bottom of each post.

Behold, the almighty CTA below: