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The NewsBlur link was the most useful thing I have read today. I don't have large blog lists and I used the browser bookmarks file to provide the list of blogs I looked at, but the problem of testing each site for new content was a pain if posts were relatively few. Many years ago I used an RSS or Atom feeder, but abandoned it. The NewsBlur option has me trying again.

As regard declines in blogs, I don't see it with the scitech blogs I read. They seem pretty stable. I would have said that of the economics blog from Mark Thoma until he retired it.

The desire to monetize everything is problematic. Why blogs cannot be seen as a hobby activity and a way to seek recognition of one's thoughts seems antithetical. I am not going to subscribe to lots of blogs. My eyeballs are limited. I subscribe to an international newspaper to contribute to its journalism and I am happy that the content is delivered online rather than as dead trees. But beyond that, the content would have to be very special to be worth paying for, and equivalent to a high quality science magazine. A subscription to a bundled a la carte selection of blogs might be worth paying for, but not individual writers.

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I still love my RSS feed. Built on many years of intersecting blogrolls and recommendations by people such as you, Mark Thoma, PZ Meyers and many others too numerous to remember. The list has changed from time to time as one blog or another dies off or is overrun by feral commenters. But I always find (or am directed to) more.

As Ive made clear I find the Substack environment clunky and intrusive enough that it has driven me away from here and Matt Yglesias place in addition to never subscribing to Krugman (who I love to read). Im not happy about this after 20 years of great content from that group and many more. You have been especially prolific with a solid Political Economy core and a wide array of other subjects. Before Substack came along I already had a subscription to TPM which I happily pay for, though I have no doubt that creating their subscription environment was a significant undertaking.

I hope that a better solution is found for content creators soon as I fear my RSS feed may dry up if enough of you are enticed into Substack hell. Maybe not hell, we need to reserve that for Facebook and Twitter - neither of which I will set foot in.

Where I work we used the constant stream of AOL disks as free frisbee substitutes, but apparently a significant percentage of the population installed them and enjoyed the experience. Its been downhill into walled mazes ever since.

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