Notices by Tony Stubblebine (coachtony@me.dm)

The thing about the WHCD shooting is that the Straight of Hormuz isn’t going to be open this year and the Epstein Files still haven’t been released.

@reflex @anildash Yeah, that all started changing over the last few years and I can give you an official update.

A) there are zero VCs on the board right now or with rights to appoint a board seat.

B) I took over in 2022 and Ben left before I had my first board meeting. Kevin had left long before that.

C) we did a full recap in April 2023 and at that point A16Z lost a lot of their equity position and lost all of their preferred stock (converted to common).

@reflex @anildash

I never got any sense of media agenda from Ben in the tiny bit of overlap or in the tales of company history.

But even if so, they have no say now and if based on other investments probably have a small financial incentive for Medium to fail.

@reflex @anildash Last thing, I often think people over estimate how political a site is, certainly their estimation of us.

In a normal world, Medium's sweet spot is non-content-producers documenting their lives, especially their professional lives.

That's just not very political unless politics veers into refuting the expert knowledge of 99% of scientists & economists.

My keynote from Medium Day. It was overall a pretty positive message but I also didn't shy away from what's broken on the Internet.
https://blog.medium.com/state-of-medium-c54d1706a9b4

This is what I was trying to work out what to say recently, why the Internet needs more spaces that are paid for directly by the users rather than by advertisers.
https://blog.medium.com/be-part-of-a-better-internet-5c4aa58ec826

At some level, the point of social media is to have fun having opinions. Like I'm doing.

But then it got sold as simultaneously being about a source of information. That's different. Having an opinion about something you are informed about and care enough about to get right (and correct yourself if you miss) is a totally different thing.

Testing whether my Threads account connect up here? I'm so confused by where Facebook is taking their fediverse integration. (And that's even after having talked to them about it)

https://www.threads.net/@the_coach_life/post/C7uak2Tyu0C

Hotel lobbies are under appreciated places to work. Sarah and I went to the Fairmont in SF for a writing retreat. She's working on a novel. I'm working on a board letter and marketing announcement.

Wild ride to get here.

https://blog.medium.com/thank-you-for-one-million-members-d0b39d1be8b3

@darnell @evan @flipboard @mike @manton

The reason I gave was that I didn't think it was a healthy community experience to have our community simply syndicate here even if it did pull some comments back to their posts. I think this is a social experience and to do it well you have to be present and having a similar experience to everyone else.

Occasionally life will hand you the opportunity for the perfect title. Rob took advantage.

Got my 2022 gratitude list done, finally. I don't see how the specifics matter to you, but the general form is really helpful.
https://coachtony.medium.com/52-good-things-from-2022-cc2db6df52c7

I'm on break so I can think about fun things. One of those is what to do about a trademark troll, Entrepreneur Magazine. Somehow they won a court case that gave them courage to think Entrepreneur is not a generic term. And so they hassle people that start publications like, hypothetically, "Entrepreneur Howto."

That's obviously generic. Nobody sees that and thinks, Oh gee, a publication by Entrepreneur Magazine. They think the obvious, it's advice about how to be an Entrepreneur.

This live and let live theory of platforming Nazi's doesn't hold water. For example, every time you link to Substack you are adding to the backlinks that help their SEO.

If you can't tell, I think this pro Nazi SS announcement is just bonkers.

Some of this “platforms have to be pure free speech” areas reeks of outdated startup thinking about needing to achieve monopolies. It’s not a good experience for the consumer.

The case I know for a platform to be anti-nazi comes in two parts:

A) duh
B) not having your platform overrun by divisive morons leaves more oxygen for people to talk about things with substance.

So Substack is pro nazi now? I guess that’s good news for nazis.

Are there any Colorado lawyers who have had cases in front of the Colorado Supreme Court who also have podcasts. Would love to listen.