Sunday Digest: Creeping as a Service (CraaS)
Everything we published this week and more.
Hello and happy Sunday!
How was your week? Ours was lovely. The collective switched from Slack to Discord, and it was a wonderful decision. We hung out in an audio chat room for over an hour, chopping it up about everything from first jobs to article ideas. As one writer put it, the whole thing felt like “hanging out on the bleachers after high school.”
We also published some pretty great stuff! This week Fadeke Adegbuyi returned to Divinations with yet another chart-topping post. You may remember her from her hilarious exploration of the weird world of LinkedIn. If you liked that, you’ll love her take on the obsessive way many of us update our Twitter bios. The moment we hit “publish” the post skyrocketed all the way to #1 on Hacker News and garnered surprisingly positive reactions from that notoriously persnickety corner of the internet.
All-in-all, a solid week. Let’s keep the streak going.
What We Published
This week’s output: 4 articles, 3 podcasts, and 2 live conversations.
📝 ARTICLES 📝
Creeping as a Service (CraaS)
by Fadeke Adegbuyi in Divinations
Fadeke was back this week with another singular close look at a strange social networking phenomenon: Bio Stalking. Examining the uses, intentional and otherwise, of Spoonbill, an app that allows users to track changes in Twitter bios, she has once again found profundity in the detritus of a strange new service—in this case, it's the way Spoonbill offers "a wake of rejected selves" in a piece of "irrefutable proof that people are watching." So who is watching, and why? Fadeke offers an answer that tells us something about ourselves as Users, while still leaving plenty of room for us to think beyond. There's a reason her piece hit #1 on Hacker News inside an hour.
Read (12 minutes)
Welcome to Free Radicals
by Annaliese Griffin and Sherrell Dorsey in Free Radicals
Now that Free Radicals has published five interviews, Sherrell and Annaliese took a step back to explain their vision and roadmap for the newsletter. In short, the goal is to explore a single question: what does great leadership look like right now?
Read (3 minutes)
Validating a Side Hustle
by Justin Mares in Superorganizers
The founder of Kettle & Fire shares how he tested his business idea for a new kind of bone broth before quitting his job. Instead of starting by creating the product—which he was confident would be doable—Justin decided to build a simple website and drive traffic via advertising to see if anyone actually wanted to buy it—a riskier proposition. Learn the principles and techniques that gave Justin the confidence to leave his job and pursue Kettle & Fire full-time.
Read (7 minutes)
Weekly News Roundup: Snap’s Spotlight Program Led To a 22% Rise In DAUs
by Li Jin and Nathan Baschez in Means of Creation
Per usual, there was plenty of news from the passion economy to digest this week. Nathan and Li dove into the various types of growth Snapchat has seen from its Spotlight program, a widely-adopted newsletter-texting platform, and much more. Their back and forth is a particular pleasure to read this week—just like the takes themselves, it's something you can't find anywhere else.
Read (15 minutes)
Also from Means of Creation: Nathan and Li's conversation with WattPad CEO Allan Lau is now up as a Podcast!
🎧 PODCASTS 🎧
#57 - How to conduct a luxurious edit
Talk Therapy with Dan Shipper and Nathan Baschez
Dan and Nathan rapped on editing this week: how they do it, how that's changing, and what they've learned along the way. It's a great inside look at the process at work at this here writer collective, but it also takes into account the emotional experience of being on either end of the editing process.
Listen (17 minutes)
#11: What's so impressive about a diamond except the mining?
The Long Conversation with Rachel Jepsen
In advance of Fadeke's new piece, she joined the TLC crew to talk through her own writing process, as well as the editing experience she shared with Rachel. Topics also included the journey on to the next piece (and how to handle it while writing another one) and how to communicate one's own self when writing about something as tenuous as identity in the age of the Internet.
Listen (39 minutes)
What’s Going On
- The New York Times wants to test Wirecutter as a subscription product
- Shopify extends Shop Pay to Facebook and Instagram
- Andreessen Horowitz Wins Deal for Creator Economy Startup Stir at $100 Million Valuation
Culture Corner
Our podcast producer Babe Howard can't claim to be partial, but he wants to recommend a movie he worked on: Lapsis, an independent sci-fi satire out this week. The movie imagines a new realm of the gig economy: quantum cabling, where workers pull cable over miles of terrain to connect large, metal cubes that link together the new trading market. The New York Times called the film a "gently comic satire" that "feels entirely in step with the world outside our front doors." Check it out and let us know what you think!
Tweet of the Week
An Invitation to Every
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