Two years ago, I quit my job to start Platformer. Last year I told you all how it was going, and to my surprise, it became one of the most popular posts of the year. With that in mind, today I want to reflect on what I learned in year two, and tell you about some of the changes I’m making in response.

When I announced Platformer, I described my reasoning this way: “By going independent I hope to demonstrate that reader-funded reporters can survive and even thrive, breathing new life into a profession that is bleeding out in no small part due to the platforms I cover.”

Two years later, I’m happy to tell you that — thanks entirely to you — Platformer is a growing and sustainable business. When I left my full-time job at The Verge, there were about 24,000 of you reading every free edition. Last year, that number grew to 49,000. Today, there are just under 75,000 of you. And of that group, thousands have become paid subscribers, funding the growing ambitions I’ll share more about below.

I think all this speaks to the need for independent, reader-supported journalism about some of the biggest questions of our age: about the relationship between social networks and the world around them; about how technology ought to be built and governed; and about some of the seismic changes that result from innovation.

I also think it underscores the appeal of this newsletter’s design: one big idea a day, delivered straight to your inbox at a reliable time, without any ads, affiliate links, pop-ups, SEO bait, or any of the other now-familiar features of our digital landscape. Platformer shows up, tells you a few things, and ends. I think the value of this is still somewhat underrated.

But it only works because you show up every day to read, share, and support me. Whether you’re a free or paid subscriber, thank you for making Platformer the best job of my life. Together, I truly believe we’re helping to prove out a new model for independent journalism, and my hope is that many more will take similar approaches in the future. I hope you feel good about that.

Anyway!

What I learned

It’s still a hits business.

As was the case last year, most of the moments that drove large numbers of free and paid subscriptions came when I broke news or wrote a piece of analysis that really resonated with you.

Some of the journalism you funded last year:

• I broke the news that Instagram was walking back controversial changes to the app.

• Along with Zoe Schiffer, I revealed how Twitter’s plans to build an OnlyFans competitor were foiled by its struggles to find and remove illegal content on the platform.

• I brought you one of the first on-the-record interviews with a former TikTok policy manager to explain what working for ByteDance is really like.

I’ve also regularly delivered news from inside Twitter as Elon Musk attempted to buy — and then get out of buying — the company, explored the fascinating case of the man who got fired by his DAO, and became one of the first writers to regularly illustrate my newsletter with DALL-E. These pieces really struck a chord with you, and the business grew accordingly.

Despite the fact that most growth is driven by hits, though, medium-performing posts help the business grow as well. They attract enough subscribers to offset churn — I averaged around 3 percent churn over the past three months — and often inspire some reader to reach out to me with some new idea or scoop that turns into the next hit.

That’s the basic flywheel that powers subscription growth, and it continued to work well in year two.

People will pay you to tell them it’s complicated.

Sometimes when I feel like it’s been too long since I’ve had a scoop, a bit of existential dread can creep up on me: is the work I’m doing here really valuable enough to charge for? (In a related story, I started therapy for the first time this year.)

What I am forgetting in those moments is that people are generally under-served by the commentary and analysis they find online. Most takes (and many reported articles) are still tuned to perform well on Twitter, and as such they tend to emphasize fear and outrage above all else. Most people experience a broader range of human emotion than these, and so browsing the Twitter timeline, or the stories produced in order to appease it, often leave us feeling empty: we know there is nuance and complexity there that has been sacrificed in hopes of getting retweeted.

One reason that some newsletters have become successful during this period, I think, is that they are built with different incentives. I write my newsletter assuming you’ll open it whatever it happens to be about that day; I pride myself on writing headlines that, if not exactly boring, at the very least do not over-promise.

On Twitter, each story competes against every other, warping coverage in ways that can undermine trust. But Platformer competes mostly with the other emails in your inbox — a competition that ought to be much easier to win, if only because there are funnier tweets in Platformer than you will find in most emails.

Moreover, because I write several times a week, the newsletter has an episodic format that makes it resistant to the more obnoxious forms of punditry. I don’t have to tell you absolutely everything I think about a particular subject, because I’m almost certainly going to talk about it again in the future. This lets me focus on nuances and trade-offs that folks in the hot-take business might not. (I sometimes joke that the two most common phrases in Platformer are “on one hand” and “on the other,” only at this point I’m not really sure it’s a joke.)

Anyway, let me give you a concrete example of how this works.

Last month I wrote about a tricky case involving a man who said he had wrongfully been accused of sharing child abuse materials. The case had been well covered by the New York Times. But I wanted to add some context, and underline some aspects of the case that I felt were getting lost in the discussion. In the next 24 hours, 29 of you became paid subscribers — effectively giving me a $2,900 raise (before taxes and platform fees) for a day’s work of walking through some subtle questions about tech policy.

That doesn’t happen every day. And some of those folks will churn before the year is over. But I truly wish every reporter could have the experience of getting a raise on the same day they produced something of value to their readers. It’s a powerful signal about the kind of work you want me to do, and helps to guide me to cover subjects that I might have otherwise set aside.

The Biden era is different.

I knew Platformer would be a different publication after President Trump was dislodged from office. Trump was a walking catastrophe for both social networks and democracy, and his election had set in motion the series of events that led me to start writing a newsletter in the first place. (The events of 2016 were particularly difficult for one of my beat companies, which at the time was called Facebook.)

It took one failed coup and another year, but we’re firmly in the Biden era now. And while we still have no shortage of national crises, they’re not breaking out at the same chaotic frequency as they were during the Trump years. From 2017 to the start of 2021, I almost never struggled to decide what to write about on a given day. By 2022, though, it started to happen with some regularity.

That led me to explore subjects adjacent to my core focus on social networks: crypto and AI in particular. For the most part, you all came along, even when I was way too credulous (as I was with Axie Infinity). But because I had wedded myself to four columns a week, I often couldn’t manage to do as much reporting as I wanted to.

Unfortunately, I think the coming years will bring us chaotic news cycles more reminiscent of the Trump years than the ones we are living in today. In the meantime, though, I think the moment probably calls for less analysis and more reporting overall. There are moments when you want someone to help you to understand what you already read, and there are moments when you want someone to give you some interesting new things to read about. I feel like we’re in a latter such moment right now, and I need to move Platformer in that direction.

And to that end …

A four-times-a-week cadence has started to feel like a drag on newsletter quality.

The most common question I get about Platformer is how I do it four times a week. The answer is that I rely heavily on the reporting of all the amazing journalists out there illuminating various aspects of tech platforms every day. And when the job is mostly making sense of stories you’re already reading about, I find it enjoyable to show up once a day and try.

But in a moment that calls for more original reporting, four times a week can feel oppressive. It doesn’t give me enough time to talk to platform employees, read upcoming books, chase newsmakers for Q&As, and wander down blind alleys.

I want to be clear that what I am describing here is not “burnout.” I love what I do, and if it seemed appropriate for the news cycle, I think four times a week would be the right way to go. But given where we are, I have some other ideas, which I’ll get to below.

You did not really want Platformer to be a jobs board.

I was excited to give that one a shot, and it made a little money, but for the most part you were not clicking on job ads and companies were not buying them. I did like highlighting jobs at nonprofits for free, though; I might want to experiment with some other approaches to this in the future.

You do like the Discord, though.

Sidechannel never quite lived up to the expectations I had for it as a kind of collaborative newsroom of independent journalists. But a solid group of you show up there every day to drop links, share commentary, and analyze events with me in real time. It has been an incredible resource for me this year, in sometimes unexpected ways — such as when some lawyers who had previously argued in Delaware Chancery Court helped us pick apart Elon Musk’s Twitter lawsuit.

I still think I’ve realized only about 1 percent of the value of having a Discord server, but this year convinced me that it’s worth investing in.

Substack figured out some new ways to get newsletters to grow.

Last year I wrote here that the only way my newsletter grows is when people tweet about it. As of 2022, though, that’s no longer really the case. Substack did two things that were very helpful here.

• One, Substacks can now recommend each other, and when you sign up for one newsletter, you’ll be asked if you want to subscribe to another publication that the newsletter recommends. I’m grateful to the dozens of Substacks who recommend Platformer; thanks largely to them, I’ve added 9,000 free subscribers since August 1. At the current trajectory, Platformer should easily hit 100,000 free subscribers within the next year. (Also, you can see all my recommendations here.)

• Two, Substack now lets me send paywalled previews to free subscribers. I love having a model that lets me do journalism and send it out for free to anyone who wants it once a week. But sometimes I write something else during the week that I think might cause you all to consider becoming paid subscribers. Paywall previews let me do just that, sending you the top of a story and inviting you to pay to read the rest. I try not to do this too often, but whenever I have I’ve seen great results.

Substack is also experimenting with a referral program: some paid subscribers of Platformer will soon be able to give away one-month free subscriptions to their friends and co-workers, in hopes that they will stick around longer.

So far, none of these have been a game-changer in the way that, say, launching a Discord server for paid subscribers was for me last year. But they’re steps in the right direction.

What’s changing

So what am I doing with what I learned?

Last year, I told you that I had two goals for year two: to launch a podcast, and to hire someone to help me. Like any good journalist, I blew right past my deadline. But I’m happy to say that both are happening soon.

So:

The podcast is coming October 7.

Since February, I’ve been working with the New York Times on a new weekly chat show that will cover tech, business, and our weird future. My co-host is the great Times journalist Kevin Roose, and we’ve spent the past few months exploring ideas and developing something we’re proud of.

Collaborating with the Times and their incredible producers, artists, composers, and other teams has been a career highlight. I could say a lot more about the show, but I’d rather you just listen to it. To that end, the trailer drops next week — that’s when we’ll share the name of the show, by the way — and the first episode will premiere a week later.

I’m moving from four guaranteed text posts a week to three.

For the podcast to be as good as it can be, I need to set aside a day during the week to focus on it. The timing feels right to make this change: the news cycle is a beat slower than it was during the Trump era, and moving to three posts a week will give me more time to do the additional reporting I want to do.

The way I’m thinking about this is that my output will basically be the same, but the fourth “post” of the week will be a podcast — one whose editorial interests align closely with what we talk about around here. And that podcast is going to contain original journalism, by the way: we’ll be interviewing newsmakers, Times journalists, and anyone else who can help explain the moment to us.

And so, with that in mind, this week Platformer moves to its new schedule: you can expect posts from me Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, with the podcast arriving Friday morning. As always, I may write more depending on the news. But I won’t regularly be writing on Wednesdays any more.

I hired someone.

For some time now I’ve been looking for someone who can help me summarize the links in each day’s post, to edit my typos and to catch my broken links. I’ve also been seeking someone to help me on the operational side, working to grow the newsletter and business overall.

I’m excited to tell you that I’ve found just such a person — and, as a bonus, this person also does incredible journalism in their own right. I can’t say who it is just yet, But I’m excited to do that very soon — and to share their work with you here over the coming year.

In conclusion

The day I announced Platformer, I said I wanted to create a “tiny media company.” As of this week, that company is now a bit less tiny: paid subscribers are now funding not one but two jobs in journalism, and in time there could be an opportunity grow even further.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you for supporting me these past two years. I truly believe that year three is set to the best yet: more newsy; more multimedia; more curious. If that sounds fun to you, and you haven’t become a paid subscriber, now’s the time. The future is going to be messy, but there’s a lot that we can figure out together.

Governing

• A federal appeals court overturned the ruling of a lower court, paving the way for Texas’ awful social media law to take effect. It would allow users to sue if they believe their posts were removed based on their political content. Nazis are salivating. (David McCabe / New York Times)

  • Mike Masnick drags the ruling for filth: “the single dumbest court ruling I’ve seen in a long, long time.” (TechDirt)

• Uber suffered a significant hack that saw its internal systems breached; the attacker claims to be a lone 18-year-old. (Kate Conger and Kevin Roose / New York Times)

  • The hacker also apparently got access to the HackerOne bug bounty program for Yuga Labs, creators of Bored Apes Yacht Club, raising risks of a further breach. (Lawrence Abrams / Bleeping Computer)

• California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a child safety bill that among other things could require websites to take invasive steps to attempt to identify visitors’ ages, worrying privacy advocates. (Natasha Singer / New York Times)

• The Pentagon is reviewing its use of fake social media accounts to spread propaganda and conduct influence campaigns after Meta caught and removed them. (Ellen Nakashima / Washington Post)

• Under pressure from the Biden administration to act after the Uvalde shooting, YouTube, Twitch, Microsoft and Meta announced new initiatives to stop the spread of hate speech on their platforms. (Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post)

• The App Association markets itself as a voice for small developers, but receives the majority of its funding from Apple itself. (Emily Birnbaum / Bloomberg)

• A look at the potential antitrust implications of Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of Figma, given how much it would consolidate the design market. (Biz Carson / Protocol)

• The Department of Homeland Security awarded a $700,000 grant to study the intersection of gaming and extremism. (Matthew Gault / Vice)

• Parler said it would begin building its own internet infrastructure so it couldn’t be kicked off the internet the way it was after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Inevitable and fascinating. (Makena Kelly / The Verge)

• How Russian trolls sowed division within the Women’s March organization, contributing to its dissolution. (Ellen Barry / New York Times)

• Targeted political ads have made the leap to streaming TV, which politicians now serving personalized messages to users of Samsung TV Plus, LG Channels and other ad-supported streaming services. (Natasha Singer / New York Times)

• An audit Facebook undertook of developers’ access to data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal has come partially to light thanks to a privacy lawsuit. Among other things, it found that developers routinely sought access to data that had no obvious connection to the purpose of their apps. (Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch)

• India’s government has been pushing Google to stop the spread of illegal digital lending apps in the country. (Nupur Anand and Ira Dugal / Reuters)

Crypto

For the first time in a while, there were enough big crypto stories over the weekend to justify breaking them out into their own section.

• The White House released a comprehensive framework for the regulation and development of the crypto industry. (Tim Hakki / Decrypt)

• The Justice Department created a network of 150 prosecutors to fight the use of cryptocurrencies in crimes. (Dustin Volz / Wall Street Journal)

• In the wake of the successful Ethereum merge, developers are considering a range of new projects dedicated to improving the network’s scalability, decentralization and security. Hilariously, these initiatives are known as the Surge, the Verge, the Purge and the Splurge. (Sidhartha Shukla / Bloomberg)

• Now that Ethereum mining is no longer nearly as profitable, miners say they’re about to flood the market with used GPUs. (Michael Kan / PCMag)

Industry

• ByteDance plans to spend up to $3 billion to re-purchase some of its shares from investors, in a deal that values the company at $300 billion. (Reuters)

• A profile of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew finds that he has limited power, with the company’s growth and strategy teams reporting not to him but to ByteDance. Some great, illuminating details about the company here. (Ryan Mac and Chang Che / New York Times)

• The iPhone 14 Pro camera shakes violently when people capture images and video with apps including Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram. The jokes write themselves. (Chance Miller / 9to5Mac)

• Meta shares dropped another 14 percent last week, with the stock price nearing a low it reached early in the pandemic. (Jonathan Vanian / CNBC)

• BeReal hit 15 million daily users and plans to add paid features to avoid using an ad model. (Akila Quinio, Cristina Criddle and Tim Bradshaw / Financial Times)

  • YouTube said it would begin showing ads on Shorts and sharing 45 percent of revenue with creators, rather than 55 percent. Someone once told me that YouTube always regretted being so generous with creators when it set up its partner program. So I guess that mistake has now been fixed! (Nico Grant / New York Times)

• A look at how harassment and abuse issues, particularly against women, have continued to plague YouTube creators. (Taylor Lorenz / Washington Post)

• Amazon began offering third-party sellers a new multichannel shipping service called Veeqo that is designed to lower costs. (Paul Hill / Neowin)

• A look at how advances in artificial intelligence have made competitive chess more like poker: in order to confuse strategies devised by computers, subterfuge and misdirection are now required to win at the highest levels. (Matteo Wong / The Atlantic)

Those good tweets

cladee ⛷ @hanfjob

everyone gangster til the tickle monster show up

September 17th 2022

4,009 Retweets38,486 Likes

Daniel @growing_daniel

My son has been missing for for a full 24 hours now. If we can hit 10k likes I’ll report it to the police

September 17th 2022

3,848 Retweets79,706 Likes

Daisy Alioto @daisandconfused

microdosing wikipedia (marrying a man with ADHD)

September 17th 2022

7,450 Retweets101,922 Likes

Kelsey Farish @KelseyFarish

Thanks for the push notification, Siri - that’s exactly what I needed in that moment 🫠

September 18th 2022

1,926 Retweets40,368 Likes

Talk to me

Send me tips, comments, questions, and Platformer feedback: casey@platformer.news.