I agree, as the author of this blog, I tried everything to remove it, even using their setting pages to inject some code through the google analytic tags (unfortunatly it’s well escaped, well at least they are good at their job :)).
For once I wanted to write more than managing a blog platform, so I went to substack.
But little by little, I’m trying to decoralate from it. First, I moved to a custom domain.
Then, I will likely move to self-hosted.
However, self-hosted is a lot of work, and time I cannot invest in writing, so I will do it very slowly. It will probably a take a year.
Meanwhile, I will loose a lot of readers, because your reaction is very common. I regularly get downvoted to oblivion on reddit and ignored on HN or lobster because of this.
And I get it, as a reader I feel the same when I face those subscribe walls.
One reasonably quick way to turn this into a self-hosted site would be to use GitHub Actions to read that file and turn it into flat files in a repo, then publish the results using GitHub Pages.
It means if any of you want to bypass the whole stubstack shenanigan, you can use the RSS feed to read it comfortably on your machine, which is quite nice.
I disagree, this is a good submission. Curation is knowledge work, too: curated collections are more than the sum of their parts. We’re enjoying a site right now that uses votes for day-to-day front page curation — by the same token, there is value in a newsletter that uses judgement to curate and summarize a month’s Python news.
Moving from abstract arguments to concrete ones, this newsletter
Puts most of the big Python stories this month together in one place, which of course the individual stories can’t do; and presents them at the same time, which Lobsters can’t.
Reminded me of the upcoming deprecations in the standard library, which I had missed
Contains links to specific articles with specific information
In the section on Pip 23.1/resolvelib, @bitecode tells the background story in a single paragraph. That’s journalism: I searched, and AFAICT the story is not in any one page.
I’m glad you found utility in this particular submission!
Please try to imagine what happens when we’re stuck with a pile of submissions of curated lists whose content we can’t vote easily (say, 80% good python content and 20% cryptocurrency spam)–narrow focus of submissions helps make the voting of Lobsters work properly.
Further, try to imagine how easy it is to spam big ole digests because of their utility for SEO or portfolio building. Giving them a place here emboldens growth hackers and other folks who do sketchy shit.
Finally, consider that if the main usefulness of this is “hey, this is this month’s Python stuff” we start to bias towards novelty/newishness and not technical content. Eventually, this leads to terminal community rot.
You raise good questions. Sorry, past my bedtime, so this reply is short because I lack the time to make it long. But your questions/points really are good; and even if I don’t follow up here, be assured I’m examining my standpoints.
I find this kind of content at least much more useful than the “Awesome” lists where someone just dumps a bunch of links in a GitHub readme, post them here and have them get 10+ upvotes. At least, here the author takes time to share thought and curate why I should bother caring.
I haven’t seen those “awesome” lists here much, and I make the same complaint and religiously downvote them when they do.
“This best-of recent happenings list is okay this time because I happen to like it and the curation” only extends the window to include some of the “awesome” lists…and eventually normalizes their presence. Please take the long view, friend.
I really don’t like the “subscribe to my newsletter” begging pop-up in the middle of the article and didn’t finish reading it.
I agree, as the author of this blog, I tried everything to remove it, even using their setting pages to inject some code through the google analytic tags (unfortunatly it’s well escaped, well at least they are good at their job :)).
For once I wanted to write more than managing a blog platform, so I went to substack.
But little by little, I’m trying to decoralate from it. First, I moved to a custom domain.
Then, I will likely move to self-hosted.
However, self-hosted is a lot of work, and time I cannot invest in writing, so I will do it very slowly. It will probably a take a year.
Meanwhile, I will loose a lot of readers, because your reaction is very common. I regularly get downvoted to oblivion on reddit and ignored on HN or lobster because of this.
And I get it, as a reader I feel the same when I face those subscribe walls.
Have you tried buttondown? That’s what I use for my newsletter, and there’s no pop-up wall.
Substack offer a full RSS feed of content from https://www.bitecode.dev/feed.rss
One reasonably quick way to turn this into a self-hosted site would be to use GitHub Actions to read that file and turn it into flat files in a repo, then publish the results using GitHub Pages.
I have at least part of that setup here: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog-backup/blob/6fd9222dc34693171a68a0820b91b017c6dc235a/.github/workflows/backup.yml#L70-L86
Just saw that the rss contains the full article.
It means if any of you want to bypass the whole stubstack shenanigan, you can use the RSS feed to read it comfortably on your machine, which is quite nice.
Its still great content, maybe switch to a different blogging provider, but please keep writing
Thanks, even if I’m one of those lucky person that enjoys writing, having readers that appreciate your work makes it a hundred times better.
I recently moved to bearblog.dev (after 14 years of self-hosted/GH pages Jekyll), which is paid and seems no nonsense.
No affiliation of any kind, just discovered them recently and I am happy so far.
You don’t need to self host necessarily. You can use gohugo, ci/cd, and github pages instead. It really takes very little time to set up.
This annoys the hell out of me, i mostly leave the site after that. I dislike substack for that, reminds me of medium
Please don’t post rollups and newsletters. Specific articles with specific information are way more useful and easier to discuss.
I disagree, this is a good submission. Curation is knowledge work, too: curated collections are more than the sum of their parts. We’re enjoying a site right now that uses votes for day-to-day front page curation — by the same token, there is value in a newsletter that uses judgement to curate and summarize a month’s Python news.
Moving from abstract arguments to concrete ones, this newsletter
I’m glad you found utility in this particular submission!
Please try to imagine what happens when we’re stuck with a pile of submissions of curated lists whose content we can’t vote easily (say, 80% good python content and 20% cryptocurrency spam)–narrow focus of submissions helps make the voting of Lobsters work properly.
Further, try to imagine how easy it is to spam big ole digests because of their utility for SEO or portfolio building. Giving them a place here emboldens growth hackers and other folks who do sketchy shit.
Finally, consider that if the main usefulness of this is “hey, this is this month’s Python stuff” we start to bias towards novelty/newishness and not technical content. Eventually, this leads to terminal community rot.
You raise good questions. Sorry, past my bedtime, so this reply is short because I lack the time to make it long. But your questions/points really are good; and even if I don’t follow up here, be assured I’m examining my standpoints.
No worries, sleep well!
I find this kind of content at least much more useful than the “Awesome” lists where someone just dumps a bunch of links in a GitHub readme, post them here and have them get 10+ upvotes. At least, here the author takes time to share thought and curate why I should bother caring.
I haven’t seen those “awesome” lists here much, and I make the same complaint and religiously downvote them when they do.
“This best-of recent happenings list is okay this time because I happen to like it and the curation” only extends the window to include some of the “awesome” lists…and eventually normalizes their presence. Please take the long view, friend.
This and your other reply are fair points, thanks for taking the time to articulate your thoughts!
No problem. I keep meaning to write this up so I can reuse it, alas…