It feels like more, but the total amount of culling this year has been relatively small, though a few major sites/services are included:
- Instagram. The platform is garbage, the company is worse, and I stopped posting more than a year ago. This one was easy.
- LinkedIn. I barely used LinkedIn at all, so nuking it was also easy.
- Substack. Their stance on actual Nazis made me move my newsletter (which then died of neglect) and also unsubscribe to about half a dozen newsletters, including several I paid for. The platform is also clearly working to entrap writers into their “ecosystem”. Those that stay may ultimately regret it, Nazis or not.
- verge.com. I normally wouldn’t include a mere website, but The Verge decided to offer an optional subscription, but also decided to just arbitrarily block content at random (?), which annoyed me enough to just remove the bookmark. I’ll miss David Pierce’s gushing over every terrible tech company’s latest thing.
- Posthaven. In my quest to find a WordPress alternative, Postahaven was a finalist. But if you don’t pay for a full year (month by month) they nuke your site, which was enough for me to give it a pass.
Dumping Substack and The Verge have saved me the most time, purging LinkedIn also provided some relief for my inbox.
What will get culled in 2025? We’ll know soon!
