Al Zone Media.
Hell and welcome to Better Offline.
I'm, of course your host ed zetron as ever, and today I am joined by the incredible critic and author of the Citation Needed newsletter Molly. Why Molly, thank you for joining me, Thanks for having me. So you generally seem to this is a strange way to put it. Actually love the internet can be like like you're mad at what they've done to it, but you actually enjoy the computer quite a lot.
Yes, big fan of the computer over here.
You wrote this fantastic thing about RSS, and I think like a lot of people kind of have the idea it's a feed. Can you walk people through exactly what our SS is and why you like it so much?
Yeah? So, RSS is just a protocol. It's sort of a system by which websites can make their content available to be ingested by programs called feed readers, which are websites or applications or you know, can be an app on your phone where you can pull together feeds from any number of sources, whether it's the newsletters you follow, the news organizations that you subscribe to, podcasts, YouTube videos, massed on feeds, any sort of feed like structure can
be pulled into these feed readers, and then you can read them anytime you want, on your own time, without you know, going to the substack app, opening your massed on account, you know, going to wired dot com. And it's a really wonderful way to interact with the web these days, because it's sort of radically different from how a lot of uh are online or actions have become this sort of abusive you know, wrestling match with whatever it is that you're trying to read. You know, the
content appears there. There's usually no ads in your RSS feed. There's not any goodhead.
And is it like you could you said, you can put Mastodon posts and Bluesky into it, like you can have your social feeds in that too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A ton of different services provide RSS feeds, sometimes without people even realizing it, so pretty much any WordPress site will publish an RSS feed. Every ghost blog has an RSS feed by default. Substack has RSS on by default. There are other you know, content management systems where it's either on by default or easily enabled with a click
or so. And the real benefit to the person using an RSS reader is that you don't don't have to rely on the sort of algorithmic feeds that we have become accustomed to, where you know, if you go to Twitter and you just want to see, you know, news articles written by the journalists that you chose to follow, there, chances are you're not going to see that. You're going to see Twitter ads, You're going to see rage bait that's being boosted.
By the algorithm four or five. That kind of yeah, like.
Elon Musk's posts always show up even though you don't follow him, right, and then the journalists that you did go out of your way to follow, the chances are you're not going to see the news articles they wrote because Twitter do downranks links, and so.
That's the same thing with threats as well, I think.
But yeah, I mean it's extent Facebook. I mean, a lot of social media websites have started down ranking links to try to convince people to stay on the platforms rather than going to wherever people actually publish their work. And it's this horrendous situation for both publishers and readers.
And so you could sort of opt out of it by using RSS to follow these things very directly and avoid a lot of the surveillance and a lot of the you know, sort of abusive practices that we're increasingly seeing on platforms.
And do they still get the traffic?
So that was that's the one thing with ours that they've really been able to get my hangof, because I know, I don't get subscribers like I won't get like reads, which is fine, but does this does this not like slightly disadvantaged publishers and suppurse they haven't turned it off?
Well, it depends a lot on how a publisher makes their money. So for example, I write a newsletter. People can pay to subscribe to my newsletter, and it's really no different to me if they read it in their email inbox, if they come to my website, or if they you know, read it in their RSS reader. You know,
it's sort of all the same. And then people who publish Paywalt's content can an opt to have either excerpts of their posts published on their RSS feeds or increasingly we're starting to see people create subscriber RSS feeds so that if you do yep, and you know, I subscribe to four or four media and so I have a specific RSS feed that I can follow there that gives me the full text articles and so you know that's a way in which publishers can still earn money through
subscriptions while offering RSS feeds. The place where it can be challenging is ads supported, you know, publishers where they really rely on you visiting the website to get the AD traffic. And so you'll often see ads supported publishers publishing excerpts from their RSS feeds, but not full text, meaning that if you're following them in a feed reader, you still have to open the page and it takes you to the website and they get the traffic. And so that's how a lot of those sites get around it.
But there are websites that basically decide that it's you know, sort of a lost leader. It's like the Costco retissory chicken. It gets people in the door, even if they lose some AD revenue. You know, you're still seeing their material more that you might not otherwise, you're still visiting the site, you might sign up for a subscription, whatever it might be, And so they sort of decided it's a worthwhile trade off.
And you use innerader, right I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you mentioned this is a really specific one. But I saw on your piece you were saying you no longer recommend Feedley. And I've heard Feedley mentioned a few times.
Why is that.
Yeah, So I used to use Feedley, and I used to recommend them pretty widely. You know, they were doing they had a very nice, full featured RSS reader, and then they sort of started to pivot in ways that were a little bit uncomfortable, where it was very clear that they were targeting you know, cybersecurity recres a lot of the time and very like corporate uh you know people. Yeah, it was a very odd like subset of traffic where they were constantly trying to help me, like follow threats
online and stuff like that. Yes, they and then so but that was fine, you know, I was like, Okay, I'm not the demographic for this.
Yeah, they've just changed their business.
Yeah, except that once they after they did that for a little bit, I started to get promotions about tracking strikes and it was all about monitoring where there might be strikes happening.
Oh and it.
There they they say that they sort of yeah, exactly. They tried to sort of after I, you know, wrote to them a little bit about this, they tried to sort of play it off as like bad messaging and that they were really just trying to help people protect.
Their help people strike.
Yeah, it definitely came off as sort of strike breaking as a service, and I decided I was done with feed ley finally. Yeah, right, what we've all been waiting for. But I mean, the one thing I really love about RSS is that you know, it's a protocol, it's not a service that you're locked into, and so it's actually very easy to switch RSS readers if one of them decides that it's going to start surveilling strikes.
That's a good question.
How does how do you so if you sit and I really I'll be linking to this piece conspicuously or excellent rss pace, but how do you move? Was actually one of my questions.
It's incredibly easy. Pretty much every RSS reader allows you to export all of the RSS feeds that you follow, and it's just a simple XML file. It's the same thing that I used to publish my blog role in my website. So if you're curious, like what blogs I read, I just export those, you know, folders into a PML file is with what it's called, and then I put in on my website.
But the same just just open that file in Yeah, what inner reader or what have you?
Right?
And it took me probably ten seconds to switch from Feebley to my new very readers. Yeah.
Wow, there is there's some stuff in the Internet that works still.
It's magic.
And having you want here to talk about RSS was important because first of all, people say I complain all the time, and they are right, and it's just it's nice to see that there are still some functional parts of the Internet. Is there other other parts that you actually like, other feet things like I don't know, RSS that you use regularly that could make make the world's make our listeners internet world's a little bit better.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's all part of a theme of sort of avoiding these intermediaries that have these incredibly extractive relationships with both the users and you know and off publishers who are on, you know, the other side of that relationship. And so I do everything I can to sort of avoid those intermediaries where possible, and so,
you know, for example, I write a newsletter. I use the Ghost newsletter software, where you know, the relationship that I have with the people who subscribe to me is
very direct. You know, people are subscribing to Molly White, the writer, They're not subscribing to ghost the website that then you know, danes to give me a cut of whatever they're taking in, which is unlike some of the other services out there, for example Patreon, where you know, if you set up a Patreon account, everyone is actually in a financial relationship with Patreon, not with you, and so if you decide to leave, it can be incredibly
challenging to move people to another service, whereas with Ghosts, if I want to leave, I can just set up
somewhere else, I can export my subscribers. The financial relationships are already just directly with me, and so that's a very powerful thing, the sort of escape hatch, where now if Ghosts decides, you know, hey, maybe we're gonna i don't know, slap ads on everyone's newsletter without them agreeing to it, they now have this incentive on the other end, which is like, well, Molly and all the other people who publish with ghost might not like that, and they
might just leave because they can, whereas other services that have more of a locked in relationship can make those decisions and take the gamble that well, it's so hard to leave that people are probably just going to put up with it, and so that's that's one place where I do that. You know, there are sort of other services throughout the web that you know, are sort of similar where I try to keep the intermediaries to a bare minimum.
Yeah.
I used Ghost myself when I used outposts from They're very good.
It's basically it's.
One of the things I actually like about Ghost is that you can build a company on top of it, and the company is just, hey, we'll provide some of those slick little features that you get from a substack or what have you, like following up with people if their credit cards expired or what have you. But it's and it's also for giant babies like me who can't do code.
I didn't vibe coded, I swear.
But thinking of Substack, I've never seen a company go quite as weirdly as them, putting aside on them obvious promotions of nazis. It feels as if substack has just turned into another dogshit social network.
Yeah. I mean substack is a weird platform because they do in some ways have that similar ethos of you know, your subscribers are subscribing to you, not to substack, and so it's easy to leave to some extent, where you know, I used to be on Substack. I decided to leave. I exported all of my email contacts, you know, I moved all of my content to a different website and it went fairly smoothly. And that's always been a part of substax marketing is you know, this is a very
direct relationship. You'll be able to leave if you want. But I'm getting the impression increasingly that they're almost regretting that decision and that they are trying to install ways that lock people into the platform without effectively locking people in by trying to cut off their you know, escape patch essentially. You know, they could say, sorry, you can't export your email lists anymore, or we're going to make it really challenging for you to get, you know, move
your content off the platform. And they haven't directly done that, but they are.
They've got this following thing now.
Well that's that's what I was going to say, is they are sort of trying to add in these new you know, so called features that make it very challenging for people to leave. So there's now followers, which are different from subscribers, and the ideas that you know, if you attract followers, they may eventually convert into a subscriber, and that's very potentially valuable, but you can't take your
followers with you. They have this sort of network and this almost like short form social media platform now where you publish these notes and you know, those don't come
with you when you leave. They are increased. Yeah, they're increasingly encouraging people to use the substack app, you know, which is the idea then, is that if you leave substack, all of these people who've gotten used to reading on the substack app will no longer find you, and they won't, you know, get access to your writing because you're not
there anymore. And so you know, we see this sort of constant gravitational pull of in sertification to use Cory Doctor's word, where you know, platform increasingly are trying to keep people locked in so that they can then extract more value both from the publisher and and from the consumer and while making the experience worse for both.
Yeah, and you're kind of seeing and you've mentioned this in your artcle as well. Publishers are moving towards the newsletter format as well.
It's like twenty twenty one.
Again, I don't know, do you remember in twenty twenty one, when you had like The Atlantic and there was that weird side channel thing, like all these people were like, oh, we're going to build a community. Just gave up on that, right, But it's you're seeing everyone starting newsletters again. It's just you made the point as words at this point, it's just moving stuff into your inbox in a way that people probably don't necessarily want or at least find a little overwhelming.
Yeah, So that is sort of the downside of this newsletter boom, which is that it's exhausting if you read a lot of newsletters, which I do you know to get you know, if you follow ten newsletter writers who are publishing maybe once a week, twice a week something like that, then constantly throughout your workday or your weekend, you're getting, you know, a notification in you're in box at sort of a random time you need to read this email, which maybe you're in the middle of something
and it's not time, you know, not a good time for you to read, and so it's just sort of constantly lurking there or waiting for you to read it. It's you know, potentially edging out other more time critical emails that you need to pay attention to and it's just sort of this you know, daly uge of material.
Whereas it used to be that you know, you would go to the websites that you follow, or you know, open the physical newsletter or newspaper that you receive in your mail, and you know, you could sit down and read the news with your morning coffee. And now it's sort of a different you know, it's it's more of a push relationship than a pull relationship. You're not going to read, you are being sort of inundated with the reading.
And so RSS is a really nice, uh way in my opinion, to handle that as a reader, because now you know, if I subscribe to your newsletter, I can you know, turn off the email notifications, but put the RSS feed in my feed reader, and then at my leisure when I feel like reading my newsletters or going and catching up on the news or whatever it is that I'm reading, I can go do that and it's
all in that one place. And my email in box is you know, safe to have just emails and all of the stuff that's more suited to that.
It is funny, we kind of feel like everyone has built these obtuse and complex ways of delivering the news or selling the news, or getting people news in different forms, and for the most part, the thing that keeps working is the thing from what twenty thirty years ago, just like reading words on a page. It's it's funny as well, because looking at this move back to newsletters, like I hate to give me like Petel any credit at all,
but Google zero is a real effect. I think, I don't know if it's going to zero, but it's it's I'm still getting a ton for my newsletter. But it is funny to watch people try and get back to newsletters. But it almost feels like they're just treating them as the same thing as a regular article, rather than a unique way of delivering use.
Which I guess it is.
But I feel like that the email format is not treated with any any necessary particular respect. It's just almost become a dumping ground for these companies. Like it's just like, hey, I think I with Washington Post. Let's see if I still get them, because I got really pissed off. There was a point when I was getting four or five emails a day from the rest Word of God. It's just its abuse on your inbox. In the same way abuses your feed and so one and so forth right.
I think that's really true, is that especially high volume publishers really need to grapple with the strategy when it comes to these types of relationships with subscribers, because you know, it's one thing to publish twenty articles a day on you know, Washington Post dot com. That's not you know, that's not a problem for anybody. In fact, people probably
enjoy all of that choice. But getting twenty separate emails is not a viable way to have, you know, a respectful relationship with the people who have chosen to subscribe. And so I think that, you know, it is incredibly important to consider that. As you know, if you're a publication that's thinking about creating a newsletter, is like, what
do people actually have the appetite to read? And how can we maintain, you know, a respectful relationship with these people who have you know, chosen to receive this material.
And my answer is ten thousand words, just some ten thousand words every week or so. No one ever emails me to say my stuff is too long. No one has ever complained about it.
It's great.
It's kind of depressing on some level though, because the way it's going. I don't know how these large publishers can, like it's like they don't understand any particular format. They're just they're doing newsletters. Don't trying to bag on the verge too much.
But I don't know.
Suddenly them doing newsletters a lot in the last year doesn't feel like it's specific to It doesn't feel like it's a specific format. It's just like, please give us your emails so that we can continue to email you, which is desperate.
Yeah, I mean, I think there is sort of reasonable desperation.
Oh yeah, I must be clear, like I totally understand why they.
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of publishers have realized that relying on intermediaries, whether it's social media platforms like Twitter to get your news in front of people, or you know, Google search was used to be a massive way that you know, news publications received readership. And now you know, as people are increasingly using the excerpts on Google, they're not clicking through to the page.
And you say accepts, you mean the AI summaries. It depends on the summary.
Yes, it used to be that Google News would just show like a literal excerpt from uh you know, the top result, and then people would often not visit the underlying website or you know, you see the like Wikipedia knowledge panels that that just sort of summarize what you're looking for. But now, yeah, more recently there's the AI overviews that you know, attempt to do sort of a
similar thing, but often drawing from multiple sources. And then you know, if people are satisfied with what they see there, they often don't click through. They don't either see the ads that are funding the website, or they don't, you know, see the invitations to subscribe, They don't you know, view all the other material that might be available to them, and so on, and so the traffic is dwindling at
a sort of alarming rate. And so I think a lot of these publishers are trying to get more direct relationships with readers, and email newsletters are a way that
they're doing that, which I think is very reasonable. I mean, I think that it is you know, incredibly important as a writer to have a very direct relationship with your readers, because if you are relying on Twitter or Google Search, then the second Twitter or Google Search decides it's more profitable for them to twiddle the knobs in a way that is going to cut off the you know, flow of subscribers to you. They're going to do so, and
you're going to be up a creek essentially. But I do think that, you know, there needs to be some thought put into this, especially by high volume publications, so that they are not essentially, you know, directing a fire hose at their readers and essentially turning them off from the publication.
I think it's also a challenge for a publication versus a person, because we were talking about this on the last episode, how it's people will gladly pay for a person paying for an outlet that's different. I also think the other problem is, and I'm not just to be clear, I know I bag on the verge. This isn't about them specifically, but it's the problem that I've seen with legacy media at least, is they're terrified of giving a
voice to their people. They'll give it to their top columnists, but they think, oh no, if we let people develop a personal relationship with the writer, then they could leave and have some sort of autonomy of their future.
It's not why we're in this business. But now it's going back the other way.
Where they realized, oh crap, that's the only way in which people will have any kind of sticky relationship with us. After winning the fil for It Again award eleven times in the space of fifteen years, with Google and everyone else, even I am actually like I loved substack at the beginning because it was free, it was really easy to use. It was just a platform. Hamosh would go out and do these things about this is the future of media, and media is good and we love being free here.
But I think that just it was everything. It was exactly what happens every time. It's oh, right, we need to make more money than we spend.
Yeah, how do we do that? Hmmm.
And it's just it's an inevitable point because it's almost I have here is my media theory. I think media outlets are just too big. I think if they need to cap out at some point, because all of the problems we talk about, every single one seems to start when they get too large for a company or a media outlet, they get too large to have any personality, or they get to the point where they're too large to have an editor who actually still writes and has
a personality themselves. So it's like, ah, we can't give people too much freedom or anything. It's it's disappointing as well, because you've kind of proven this exceedingly well with your many successes, where it's like people will pay for someone who is themselves, stands for something and gives a shit right, and yet they don't want to copy that.
Yeah, I think you're totally right on that where you newspapers are sort of afraid of letting writers develop their own personalities. As you say, I mean, you see this with large newspapers, you know, restricting their writers on social media for example, where if they say something to opinionated on social media, that's you know, against the social media policy. And you know, I think that is very contrary to
what people are looking for. They want to see people who have strong opinions and strong beliefs and strong principles and stand up for those things. And so I do think that, you know, that's a shortcoming. But I also agree that newspapers, some some publications seem to be realizing that that sort of direct relationship with a writer is
a valuable thing. You know, I mentioned my piece that Wired was also one of the outlets that has recently announced a major newsletter push, and their strategy has been, you know, here's five or ten options for different newsletters that you can read, and they're written by specific people at Wired who are you know, seen to be experts in a specific area, so you can follow, you know, the Kylie Robison Wired newsletter and I was.
Like, mist Robinson's mudile behavior, I'll put a link in that, right.
And I saw that, and I was like, oh, hell yeah, sign me up because I know that her work is incredible and I'm going to read it when it shows up in my newsletter or in my my feed reader. Whereas you know, I don't read every single article that
Wired publishes because that's just not feasible. Yeah, And so I think that you know, publications would be wise to do more of that and to sort of understand that people do look at bylines, they do have specific authors who they trust or who's writing they enjoy more, or whatever it may be, rather than going for the sort of faceless you know, we're just the Washington Post or we're just the New York Times and the author doesn't really matter.
It's classic, it's honestly, it's NBA Brain is its core pro Brain where it's like, well, how do we how do do you think that a person like thinks, oh, I love my relationship with the New York Times, But that's how they're thinking about it, Like, yeah, what is the consumer's relationship with the newspulbl There is no relationship with the newspaper. There might be a vibe, but there is not a relationship. I think the Financial Times is
actually found, though not in the newsletter era. They've found a very good balance between hard news and excellently they've got Bryce Elder Skags as well as over a Baron's now but you've got Alphaville. They found a way to unleash it, and the ft has done very well. It's just I don't know, there's some part that feels like this is the come upance for fifteen twenty years of hubris of follow, Google follow meta follow whoever will send us traffic, build build as big as possible on this.
Yeah, and also the sort of view from nowhere news approach, where you know, it's the belief was that there shouldn't be any sort of opinion, There's wouldn't be any sort of you know, principled analysis. It should all just be you know, both sides ism and this supposedly objective reporting, which does strip out a lot of the personality of the writer, and it removes a lot of the you know,
reason that people identify with or appreciate specific writers. And so I think that this was to some extent sort of a crisis of their own doing. In that sense as well.
I also think that I also think that the raw economics of media might be completely fucked on some level. I think that there's just you see, and I think it's because of the Google traffic and the social traffic as well. You've got these massive ad stuffs, you've got these massive social staffs every and it doesn't seem to necessarily connect to anything.
It doesn't. I don't know if it like drives results or not. I truly don't know.
But it's the way that every single media outlet at some point in the last few years has act like it's been acted like it's been pecked to death by birds. Just acted like the verge added their pay well, and I get it, by the way things cost money, but it's it almost feels as if these castles have been built for a land that no longer exists anymore.
Yeah, I mean, I think that the news landscape is incredibly challenging right now for a number of reasons. You know, there's the traffic issues, there's the AI scraping issues that are you know, causing a lot of news outlets to put up paywalls that are then you know, blocking people who previously like real people, not scrapers, who might previously have you know, visited their sites and enjoyed their work.
And you know, now you see this double edged sword whereas people paywall news media, you know, they might block scrapers to some extent, but they're also blocking people from reading the material that might then incentive them to subscribe.
You know, if every article is paywall, there is no way to know if you're going to like what's behind the paywall, right And so I think that, you know, this is sort of an incredibly challenging moment for a lot of news organizations that are really struggling to figure out how to deal with it, you know, how to maintain a sustainable news business when you're facing those types
of threats. You're also facing political threats, increasingly, especially in the United States, for publishing any sort of controversial material about the administration or you know, there's you're seeing an incredible unwillingness by a lot of major publications to have strong opinions or to say anything that is you know, not supported by ten separate sources, you know, any kind of speculation, that type of thing, because of the legal
environment that we're in. And so, you know, I have some sympathy I think for a lot of these publications that are trying to navigate it. But I also think that the ways in which they have been navigating it have often been pretty misguided.
So to wrap us up, is there anything giving you any hope online right now, anything that like genuinely is like thinking things can be okay, even in a different form.
Yeah, I mean I would say so, I do think that there. You know, one thing that has been made very clear to me is that people still care a lot about good writing and people who have you know, new or interesting analysis. You know a lot of people sort of look at the way that I do my newsletter, which is, you know, everything is free. There's no paywall. You don't have to even sign up, much less subscribe, and I have a pay what you want model, so you could pay you know, dollar a month, you can
pay ten dollars a month, whatever you want. And people look at that and they're like, that can't work. You know, they're like, no one's going.
To do that. And it works great.
Yeah, it works great. And you know, people sort of have this belief that, well, if something's free, no one's ever going to pay for it, which isn't true. I think that people will actually strongly value the work that people are doing even if they're not forced to pay for it, and they understand that people need support to be able to continue to do their work, and they
will gladly provide that. And so I do think that you know, there are models available that will work very well that we can try, and different people are trying those models. You know, we're seeing it widely throughout the media landscape where people are just trying new things, whether it's you know, the four or four medias and the defectors and those folks who are doing you know, worker owned media collectives that are doing incredible work. I mean
four or four is you know, trailblazing. I think in a lot of ways their reporting is incredible and there you know, their sort of model is incredible. You know, we're seeing people very proactively setting up ways in which they can create sustainable media that does not rely on ads, that does not require paywalls, that does not you know, rely on clickbait through social media websites, and so I am very optimistic in some ways, even though the sort of landscape is also fairly terrifying.
And on that that note will end it there, Molly, where can people find you?
So?
You can find my newsletter at Citation needed dot news. And then I am also at Mollywhite dot net, which has links to all my social media and everything else.
And you can find me on this podcast better offline dot com as well. And yeah, you can catch us on the monologue this week. Molly, thank you so much for joining us, and this has been Better Offline.
Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T T O S O W s ki dot com. You can email me at easy at better offline dot com, or visit better offline dot com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to Chat dot Where's Youreed dot at to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better.
Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.
Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
You get your podcasts.