I was just reading an article how Substack is gaining attention lately. Very interesting that a good old fashioned Blog engine with a good old fashioned newsletter can achieve results whilst Blogs and Newsletters are literarily dieing.
I have been thinking about that for quite some time, what is the driving force that people keep changing their main information channel. Historically I can remember that I used e-mail, IRC, ICQ, Skype, Slack, Push Notifications, RSS, New Aggregation Sites, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. as the main source of information. And every single one of them got overloaded. Every single one of them started taking away too much of my attention and I started shifting to the 'new' solution without realizing that the new solution will have the same problem. After a while I direct there a lot of information and the platform gets overloaded. As I can't separate the wheat from the chaff I keep looking for a better platform.
What is the real problem
I think all of these platforms are awesome. They provide ways for people to communicate, to share information, to argue, debate, agree, disagree, hate, love and eventually make us better. On the other hand these platforms fail to structure the information on the way as we humans need those. When I start scrolling any of the above it contains information about many of my interests: coding, startups, politics, sports, cultural events, hiking, cycling, etc. And they made me very tired. On each platform different content creators are fighting for my attention and I keep abandoning platforms and moving to newer and newer ones in the hope that it will be less noisy and will focus more on what I need. But this will never happen unless we make something different.
Taking back the wheel
Even if those platform would show interesting content to me, there is still the issue that even on 1 tiny topic I could spend my whole life just reading articles and discussing, debating them. And my life is definitely not around one single tiny topic. I want to decide how much time I spend on different activities. I want to decided how much I work, learn, read, do sport, spend time with kids, etc. But in order to be able to do it, I need to have the information available when I actually want to do those things. I don't want to be distracted by 'phone bills' when I'm writing this blog article. I don't want to see my health insight update for the last month when I'm reading about internal affairs (politics) whilst drinking my morning coffee. This is what Contexty about. Stay tuned.