What if we made no money?

March 2, 2024 5:02 PM

This was a way to experiment, free of the pressures of a formal publication TinyLetter shut down on February 29th.

“It was good to be reminded that there were things I would write even if nothing was necessarily going to happen with them. No money, no virality, sometimes even no response,” Romanoff says.

“That is sort of the original spirit of the internet,” Shane says. “What if we made no money? What if money wasn’t even something we were thinking about?”

posted by craniac (11 comments total)

Was there a difference between Tiny Letter and just sending an email to a list of people? The article plays up the simplicity so much that it isn't clear how it was different than a listserv or other old school mailing list.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 5:55 PM on March 2 [2 favorites]

Yes, looks like an easy way to make a mailing list.

http://web.archive.org/web/20110719032207/http://tinyletter.com/
posted by brewsterkahle at 6:17 PM on March 2 [7 favorites]

Thanks for the link, brewsterkahle -- I sure am glad there's a service like Archive.org available to preserve bygone websites like that. ;)
posted by Rhaomi at 6:50 PM on March 2 [6 favorites]

Do you remember, when you could do cool stuff on the internet for free? Pepperidge Farms remembers…
The days of newgroups and IRC..l
posted by Windopaene at 7:41 PM on March 2 [1 favorite]

oh i had a couple of years of writing there
posted by PinkMoose at 9:00 PM on March 2 [2 favorites]

.
posted by dragonplayer at 5:47 AM on March 3

The FPP starts out noting that Google Reader contributed to the demise of the personal homepage … and it made me think, what really has Google contributed to the web? Is the internet truly better for Google having existed? I’m honestly on the side of “no”.

We went from 99% IE6 to open standards, and now everything is Chrome.

We went from “search is hard” to “holy cow look how good search is”, and now everything is SEO auto-generated AI bullshit with zero chance of finding relevant results because your search terms are quietly manipulated on the back end to serve you more ads.

We went from few people having email to everyone has a Gmail account so email is ubiquitous, and now it’s utterly impossible to use anything but a major email platform because the work necessary to get your own self-hosted email not immediately blacklisted is insane.

Everything they touch looks good for a hot minute, then it turns to shit and we are worse off than we were before. What could the internet have been if Google never existed?
posted by caution live frogs at 7:20 AM on March 3 [10 favorites]

Tiny Letter was a great little service. I miss it. I recently fled Substack (for Nazi reasons) and I miss the polish of Substack, but not the tech-bro engagement hustle it optimizes for. (Are you sure you don’t want to add a subscribe button?)

Buttondown’s DIY aesthetic rubs me the wrong way, and I’m actually glad it has a paid tier. There’s a chance it may stick around.
posted by device55 at 11:27 AM on March 3

now it’s utterly impossible to use anything but a major email platform because the work necessary to get your own self-hosted email not immediately blacklisted is insane

Is the argument on this one that if we didn’t have acceptable free mail services from a handful of big players somebody would have actually had to fix email? Because I don’t think the core problems with email can really be blamed on Google.
posted by atoxyl at 12:59 PM on March 3 [1 favorite]

I don’t think the core problems with email can really be blamed on Google.

As someone who has recently had to deal with Google's incredibly opaque deliverability failures, twice, as a competent RFC-compliant and non-RBLed sender with positive address rep who just wants to, y'know, let my family shoot a few emails off... yeah, Google's implementation itself is a serious problem. Google just randomly fucks up delivering email and senders have no recourse whatsoever.

We actually ran into this at work several times—where my product sends a shit-ton of email and I also happen to administer the outbound relays—and the only reason it got fixed is because someone in management's boss' boss had a direct contact number for an unrelated-to-GMail Google product manager.

Google doing shit wrong, badly, opaquely, and in that particularly-Google-ly irreversible and unfixable way has certainly made the existing core problems with email worse for a lot of people who, uh, are in the email business. Microsoft is prone to similar issues; I've had to fight similar fights with them, it's just that they have a phone number and answer it (although, of course, because it's Microsoft they answer the phone with someone who has no idea what they're talking about, and whatever they say is completely wrong).

Hilariously, I've had relays that did briefly appear on RBLs before for one or another reason, and that didn't cause a problem with GMail deliverability at all. The only real failures have come when they just... decided by broken heuristics to fail.
posted by majick at 3:27 PM on March 3 [2 favorites]

I never thought of Buttondown's aesthetic as "DIY" but I don't really know what that means. But I agree that it's good it has a paid tier...together with a roadmap, responsiveness, and reliability. It's the closest thing to TinyLetter I could find when I moved there, a while back when the writing was on TinyLetter's wall.
posted by fncll at 8:54 AM on March 6