The newsletter/subscription purge continues (I swear)

Today I cancelled a Substack newsletter and a streaming service:

  • Sweary History (after not quite a year)
  • Netflix (after being subbed for many years)

The reasons were a bit different for each, but both are part of my ongoing digital decluttering process.

For Sweary History, I actually quite like James Fell’s foul-mouthed writing style, and his personal posts (which require a paid sub) were especially enjoyable and informative. But as someone who chronicles human history, and given how dark and awful so much of human history is, Fell often wrote about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things. And in the same way that actively seeking out current news was making me generally unhappy, I found getting a dose of daily “look how terrible people have been throughout history” started having the same effect. This morning I started to read the latest newsletter and just stopped partway through, like a little switch in my brain flipped. I unsubscribed.

Netflix was different. I found that I just wasn’t compelled to watch any of the current stuff on it (Archer has grown stale, Stranger Things is something I want to catch up on, but it seems the season four episodes are long, and it’s more of a commitment than I’m willing to make right now), plus Netflix seems to think they can keep raising their prices and make up declining subs by squeezing their most loyal subscribers that much harder.

Didn’t work for me! I checked “too expensive” as my main reason for dropping the sub, and it’s true. If Netflix was cheaper, I’d probably just keep it, but it’s $18.47/month after taxes and that is too much for the very minimal use it gets.

For streaming, I still have Prime Video (as part of Prime), Disney+ and Apple TV+ (as part of Apple One), so depending on how things go, I could potentially get down to just a single service. And more time to draw.

Another newsletter bites the dust (Pocket)

These companies are making it easy for me to slim down my reading list.

In the case of Pocket, it’s ironic, because they’re all about providing reading lists.

A while ago, Pocket switched from a weekly newsletter to a daily one, with an option to change the frequency, so you could go back to a weekly newsletter if daily was too much.

I stuck with daily for some time, but eventually did decide it was too much. I switched to weekly, which seemed more manageable. It was fine at first. But then I got my weekly newsletter, and it was “sponsored” by The Wall Street Journal. This means every article was from…The Wall Street Journal. I subscribe to the Pocket newsletter to get stories from a number of sources, not just one. I don’t know if their answer is to go back to daily (which I won’t do) or pay for the premium version, which will somehow spare me the sponsored newsletters.

This morning, my weekly Pocket newsletter was again sponsored, this time by MarketWatch. I don’t even care about MarketWatch! Or its stories.

So I unsubscribed.

I’ll still use Pocket to occasionally capture interesting stories I want to read later. It works well enough for that, though it would not surprise me if the free version eventually gets crippled in some way to make it too annoying to use. Which may make you ask, why not pay for the premium version? And the answer is I don’t use it often enough to feel it’s worth the money (it’s $4.99 US per month or $44.99 annually). If they did make it horrible to use the free version, I’d probably just create a temporary bookmark folder as a “read later” dumping ground. Not ideal, but it would be functional.

So thanks, Pocket, for helping me in my ongoing quest to digitally declutter!

FAKE EDIT: I also emptied the Pocket folder in Outlook, deleted its category, then deleted the Pocket folder itself. Doing these things was strangely satisfying.