As I and many others predicted it would, Substack at some point moved to a model where you can no longer simply add your email to the list of a given publication; now (of course!) you have to make an account on the platform to subscribe to anything.

But you also have to make an account to manage subscriptions from that earlier time. Which means that, when people you’ve been following for years start cranking out a sub-publication that delivers two tranches of (admittedly clearly labelled) “AI” writing to your inbox every week, your attempts to unsub from such result in Substack asking you to set up a username and all the other bollocks.

Which means, for me at least, that unwanted Substack stuff gets tagged as spam from here on out. I don’t like doing that, because I understand the whole writers-trying-to-make-a-living thing; it ain’t their fault.

But all the same: fuck that shit. I’m not helping those fuckers juice their presumably-declining user-growth metrics. The web I loved was pull, not push—and yeah, sure, that web is dead and it ain’t coming back, but I’m not obliged to stay in the building while it burns down. You start pushing, I send your stuff straight to the kill-file.

In other what-was-the-web news, the recently updated ActivityPub plugin for WordPress is making this site throw fatal errors on the back-end, so I guess I’m switching that off as well. If anyone needs me, I’ll be right here, yelling into this dank old barrel as always.