I got this nice email from Defector, an online publication I pay for (along with De Programmatica Ipsum, Garbage Day, and Today in Tabs. I think that’s it, though I guess I can include Rubyland.news and Short Ruby Newsletter too). I yearn to share something like this for everyone who actively, if not always monetarily, supports my own work. The feeling is there, though not words this nice.

Subject: Thank you for supporting Defector

I like when people ask me how Defector is doing. Thanks to subscribers like you, I get to say that not only that Defector is doing well, but that I love my work.

I spent most of my life as a writer in jobs that were always and obviously impermanent. Roughly every 20 months, the people running things—people I never saw, and who had no interest in the work we did—would get bored, or nervous, or fall for some dippy executive fad, and pivot some number of us out of our jobs. Basically every innovation in media over the last few decades has been some version of this: an attempt by executive types to see how much less they can do, and how long they can get away with making everything smaller, sadder, and worse.

The most fundamental benefit of owning your workplace, as we do at Defector, is that we just don’t have to worry about that. Instead, we’re trying to solve the opposite problem: how to make the site better and broader and more surprising and more fun, tinkering towards the right balance of smart and stupid. If you replace mystified Executive Maneuvers with the less abstract challenge of “writing good blogs for people who like to read,” this turns out to be both a good job and a viable business.

But even after filtering out the noise from upstairs, there are plenty of other things to worry about. Chief among them is making sure that those good blogs reliably get in front of both existing subscribers like you and new ones we’d like to bring into the fold. All of those bad, previous jobs happened on an internet that worked better than our current one. Then as now, the people in charge were craven and nasty and dumb, but it was easier to find things, and there were notably more non-toxic places in which to talk about it all.

So: thanks again for reading our blogs, and thanks especially for sharing them with people you think should know about Defector. (Here I’ll remind you that subscribers get an unlimited number of gift links each month to facilitate sharing.) Thanks also for making this the best job I’ve ever had. I’m very lucky to be able to keep doing this, with my friends and for such an engaged community of readers. None of it would exist without you.

Be well, David