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.