Summer fasterthanlime update

Thanks to my sponsors: Zalán Bálint Lévai, David E Disch, Zac Harrold, Anna M, Justy, Antoine Boegli, David White, jatescher, Johnathan Pagnutti, Sean Bryant, Guy Waldman, Andy F, Marco Carmosino, Luuk, Andrew Henshaw, Vladimir, AdrianEddy, Daniel Silverstone, Peter Shih, Jake Demarest-Mays and 276 more Zalán Bálint Lévai, David E Disch, Zac Harrold, Anna M, Justy, Antoine Boegli, David White, jatescher, Johnathan Pagnutti, Sean Bryant, Guy Waldman, Andy F, Marco Carmosino, Luuk, Andrew Henshaw, Vladimir, AdrianEddy, Daniel Silverstone, Peter Shih, Jake Demarest-Mays, e9zaktw1, Aaron Gorodetzky, Tomas Sedovic, Guillaume E, Wojciech Smołka, DaVince, Isak Sunde Singh, Max Bruckner, Kyle Lacy, callym, Felix Weis, Malik Bougacha, Duane Sibilly, Chris Biscardi, Radu Matei, Guilherme Neubaner, Victor Song, Eugene Bulkin, Jean-David Gadina, avborhanian, Adam Lassek, Marcus Griep, Mikkel Rasmussen, Ives van Hoorne, Chris Emery, Niels Abildgaard, Michael Alyn Miller, Òscar Pérez, Kevin Anderson, psentee, C J Silverio, Elendol, Hamilton Chapman, Cole Tobin, Scott Sanderson, Philipp Gniewosz, Julian Schmid, Matt Jadczak, Yann Schwartz, John Horowitz, Tobias Bahls, Ronen Cohen, Ben Wishovich, John VanEnk, Sawyer Knoblich, James Brown, Marcus Griep, Jim, Elnath, Philipp Hatt, Samit Basu, Kevin Nguyen, playest, bbutkovic, SeniorMars, Hadrien G., Romain Ruetschi, budrick, Boris Dolgov, Chris Sims, Makoto Nakashima, old.woman.josiah, David Barsky, Andy Gocke, Josiah Bull, Kai Kaufman, Marky Mark, Stephan Buys, Ross Williams, Diego Roig, Jonathan Adams, Scott Steele, Horváth-Lázár Péter, Ben Mitchell, Vincent Mutolo, Matt Campbell, Mark Old, Michał Bartoszkiewicz, Richard Pringle, genny, Mattia Valzelli, Yufan Lou, Garret Kelly, Egor Ternovoi, Mario Fleischhacker, Jack Duvall, Jelle Besseling, Michał Zalewski, Luke Konopka, Gioele Pannetto, Antoine PESTEL-ROPARS, Morgan Rosenkranz, Kamran Khan, Steven Pham, compwhizii, Senyo Simpson, Nicolas Riebesel, Raphaël Thériault, Sam Leonard, clement, zed, messense, Dave Minter, Xirvik Servers, Adam Gutglick, Aleksandre Khokhiashvili, std__mpa, Toon Willems, Christopher Valerio, Manuel Hutter, Blake Johnson, xales, Geoffroy Couprie, Neil Blakey-Milner, Wyatt Herkamp, Ula, Aalekh Patel, Torben Clasen, Chris Thackrey, Tiziano Santoro, Luke Yue, Brandon Piña, Zaki, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Paul Horn, Brian L. Troutwine, Ahmad Alhashemi, David Cornu, Dirkjan Ochtman, Paul Marques Mota, Mason Ginter, Max Heaton, Josh Triplett, Tanner Muro, dataphract, Jonas Platte, Tabitha, milan, alethiophile, Jan-Stefan Janetzky, prairiewolf, notryanb, Lena Schönburg, Santiago Lema, Romet Tagobert, Timothée Gerber, Cole Kurkowski, Valentin Mariette, Zachary Myers, Christoph Grabo, Dominik Wagner, Olly Swanson, ofrighil, Aiden Scandella, WeblWabl, Integer 32, LLC, qrpth, Twan Walpot, Jörn Huxhorn, Beth Rennie, Olivia Crain, Enrico Zschemisch, Corey Alexander, Nyefan, Arjen Laarhoven, Jon Gjengset, Lyssieth, Ronen Ulanovsky, 0lach, Zoran Zaric, Simon Menke, ACRL, Ivo Murrell, Benjamin Röjder Delnavaz, you got maiL, Michael, Marc-Andre Giroux, Mateusz Wykurz, Lucille Blumire, Thor Kamphefner, Taneli Kaivola, Sung Jeon, Walther, Justin Smith, Zachary Thomas, Sylvie Nightshade, Nicholas Orta, Yuriy Taraday, Dom, jer, belzael, Jesse Luehrs, Michal Hošna, ShikChen, Justin Ossevoort, Dimitri Merejkowsky, Jimmy Hartzell, Reto Trappitsch, Alex Rudy, Lawrence Bethlenfalvy, Xavier Groleau, Daniel Papp, villem, Pete LeVasseur, Borys Minaiev, Zeeger Lubsen, Guillaume Demonet, Noel, Sindre Johansen, Chris Walker, Mark Tomlin, Matěj Volf, Laine Taffin Altman, Colin VanDervoort, Henrik Tudborg, Daniel Strittmatter, Mike English, Matt Heise, Alan O'Donnell, Christian Bourjau, Matthias Zepper, Sarah Berrettini, Alex Krantz, Mark, Antoine Rouaze, Max von Forell, Marcin Kołodziej, Seth, Evan Relf, Dylan Anthony, Thehbadger, Geoffrey Thomas, traxys, Yves, Urs Metz, Björn Marschollek, anichno, ZacJW, Herman J. Radtke III, Astrid, Brooke Tilley, Romain Kelifa, Raine Godmaire, Olivier Peyrusse, Ryan, Joshua Roesslein, Philipp Angerer, Nicholas, Braidon Whatley, Marty Penner, Gorazd Brumen, Menno Finlay-Smits, Matthew T, Tyler Bloom, Beat Scherrer, Ripta Pasay, Geoff Cant, Andrew Neth, Chris, teor, Paige Ruten, James Rhodes, L0r3m1p5um, René Ribaud, Ian McLinden, Marie Janssen, Andronik, Bob Ippolito, James Leitch, Pete Bevin, pinkhatbeard, Mathias Brossard, Berkus Decker, Matt Jackson, hgranthorner, Richard Stephens

There are news!

Here are all the changes I’m implementing, summarized as a table:

Let’s get more in-depth into them, if you will.

Looking back

It’s been about a year since I announced my “new business model”, which was roughly: I release pieces as articles and videos at the same time.

Videos were accessible for free for everyone on YouTube because they usually had corporate sponsors.

Bronze sponsors had access to “bonus content” on articles like sample Rust apps in the form of Git repositories in pieces like the virtue of unsynn, although that’s fairly new.

Silver sponsors had access to the article on day one, six months before anyone else.

I guess I must’ve been stressed about money when I came up with this scheme: I wanted to give sponsors good value for their money and I thought that if they had 6 exclusive articles waiting for them, they’d feel good about it.

Also! There was only one RSS feed.

Which means non-patrons got got notifications about a new article, only to discover that the rest was paywalled. Some paywalled articles even made it onto Reddit or HN and the comments were justifiably unhappy about being forced to “pay or watch the video”.

Some folks argued that I was paywalling accessibility: the video version is not as accessible as the article version, which, fair enough. I just didn’t know how to solve it at the time without rethinking everything.

But also: six months is a long time.

Anybody who was excited reading the article six months early had most likely moved on to something by the time it unlocked — me included.

I also discovered (surprise!) that not all content is equally suited to both text and video.

Watching a lot of code blocks whizz by on a video isn’t a good experience (no matter how nicely those code blocks are rendered).

And yet, I like making videos. I enjoy tinkering with the rhythm, jokes, flow of a video until it’s a pleasure to watch, and I don’t want to give that away.

In my more recent drafts, I’ve been planning for articles and videos, even if they’re from the same source material / research spree, to have different content, to optimize for what works best in each format.

Looking back, I think my mistake is treating this like a “product”.

When you support a creator, you’re not paying for a product. You’re throwing money their way because you’d like them to keep doing what they do. It’s more art than it is industry. The early access is a nice-to-have, you’re not unlocking an online real estate course.

It’s really hard to keep that spirit when doing this several years in a row. I just need to remain open and curious, and explore whatever looks interesting, sharing the results with y’all. This is what you’re here for. I’m going to refocus on that.

A Discord server

Because I’d like to engage with the community more, I’ve created a Discord server, with tiered channels so folks can talk about early access content without spoiling anyone else, help each other with bonus content, and share ideas on what they’d like to see next.

Patreon has built-in support for this, and when I flipped the switch, immediately pulled everyone into the server. Sorry about that!

For Github Sponsors, I had to cook something custom (hence, coolbearbot in there), which you can see in all its gory details in the home repository.

I’m looking forward to exist in that space. Maybe it’ll bring about collabs, maybe it’ll help some of us feel kinship. We’ll see.

Early access revamp

Instead of coordinating the release of an article and a video at the same time, keeping the article under lock & key for Silver patrons/sponsors and above, I will release things in early access, when they’re ready.

When I’m done with the article version of a piece, it’ll become available in early access. When the video is done, it’ll also become available in early access, both on Patreon and on this website (for GitHub Sponsors).

Early access cuts will not contain any sponsored segments, no “native advertising”, just me talking about whatever I obsessed about for the past month.

To test out the system, I’ve released an early access cut of “All color is best-effort”, even though it came out on YouTube a while ago. Let me know if you have any issues with it! (It’s on Patreon as well).

Dual RSS feeds

The public RSS feed will now only show articles you can read fully, which should resolve the main complaint I’ve had this past year: you only want to start reading what you can finish reading, and that’s fair enough.

For sponsors of the Silver tier and above, you now have access to a private RSS feed showing early access articles as soon as you have access to them: get the address under your profile.

I also vow to do a better job of posting early access content directly to platforms people use to support me, so that folks who don’t use RSS don’t miss out on the latest :)

Bye Ko-fi

Supporting Patreon & GitHub sponsors is already a lot of work — I added support for Ko-fi a few months ago, but it remains significantly lower-volume than the other two, and provides so few features I may as well build directly on top of Stripe.

For example, Ko-fi doesn’t provide an OAuth2 API: you can’t “Log in with Ko-fi”. Hence, the e-mail login system, which then did a lookup through the Stripe API to find the corresponding subscription.

When it comes to video, they don’t do hosting like Patreon does, they let you embed an unlisted YouTube video. Cool. Alright.

More casual-posting

I want to be able to post about stuff without working one month on it — whether it’s as a YouTube short, or as a short blog article. So I’m going to do that again I think!

Not everything needs to be super researched and polished, sometimes I just want to share something neat: at least that way I’ll get something out of hours and hours of doomscrolling HN and Reddit. If I can surface the positive and exciting bits to you, then that’s good.

What about content that was still exclusive?

All content that was still exclusive to this day is now available for everyone, which includes:

• The promise of Rust
• The virtue of unsynn
• All color is best-effort

As I’m publishing this announcement, I’m also making an article available in early access — it should show up on the frontpage while logged in :)

Let me once again thank all of you for your support — I could not do this without you.

See you around!