Nilay Patel

Substack announces “over 20,000” writers on its platform have raised “over 1.2 million” from readers who’ve pledged to pay if said writers flip on their paywalls. Calculator.app announces that this works out to $60 per writer if (improbably) distributed evenly; reality suggests the most popular free Substackers almost certainly collected the vast majority of this money and the median payout was probably closer to $0. The creator economy, baby!

The ratio of wiper size to effectiveness here is so low as to be almost zero.

I love Atmos for movies but hoo boy the entire spatial music experiment is littered with bad ideas and sloppy remixes. Here’s Kid Cudi complaining — he deleted an earlier tweet directed at Apple Music for remixing his work without his knowing.

Vergecast listeners know I keep saying it feels like a reset moment for the internet, but here’s Om Malik making the direct comparison to the original SEO content farms and what happens next:

Seriously, no one’s being all that shy about it! Here’s G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown to Peter Kafka about that AI-written list of Star Wars movies in chronological order that wasn’t actually in chronological order (emphasis mine):

Nice one, Adam.

Talk about dropping a bomb. (Sorry, I’m sorry.)

Mosseri ran through the now familiar list of upcoming Threads features (edit button, following feed) in his weekly video, but added “web presence” to the list, which, well obviously that’s coming. But hey, here’s a prompt: fascinating that after all these attempts to run mobile apps on laptops that “web version” is 100 percent synonymous with “desktop,” right?