People I like

This morning I found that my most recent emails were almost entirely from a single source - a substack blogger who previously posted rarely enough that I'd mostly forgotten about why I'd subscribed or who he was. My first thought was that he'd lost control of his account, which was being used by a spammer. My second thought was that the spammer was simply faking the sending address.

Nope. The first of the stream of 13 posts had the subject line "1 day. 30 blogposts". Reading that one, it seems the blogger has decided to improve his blogging skills by massively upping the volume of his output. He clearly didn't think about what this would look like for his followers. I replied to his blog, politely describing my experience, and listing my available remedies, since I simply can't handle this volume of emails appearing in my INBOX. Then I implemented the mildest of those remedies, auto-filing everything from that blogger into a sub-mailbox where I'm unlikely to often notice it.

Given my experience of human nature, I very much doubt the blogger anticipated that some quantity of his readers would regard him as having turned his blog into a giant nuisance, and head for the exits. It certainly didn't occur to him that some of us would first assume the account was compromised. (If it had, he'd surely have announced this plan in advance.)

Rather, he thought about the plan from only one POV - his own. He's presumably got a working "theory of mind", but applies it only at the most obvious level - "people don't always know things I haven't told them yet". The idea that they might have their own needs, preferences etc. is only there if he's recently been reminded of it.

Of course that analysis presumes he's more or less normal. He did overshare (in one of the 13 posts) that he's twice experienced hypomania. Maybe the root cause of his behaviour is another unrecognized hypomania bout, rather than the normal human pattern of not thinking about how others will experience his behaviour.

I skimmed one other of the 13 posts - the one about his most recent recognized hypomania experience. It wasn't worth the bother of reading, so I left the remaining 11 unread.

I imagine that I'll tend not to notice incoming posts from him, and will eventually unsubscribe when I find I have several 100 unread messages from him waiting for me.

I've been using the AP as my source of US news headlines. I started with its daily email summary, which was actually one of a pair - morning and evening - and they presumed all readers subscribed to both. I didn't want twice-a-day news, but also didn't want to get stories framed as extra details/reaction to some story I'd never seen. Since my main reason for following daily new was to know about unicorn events that I might need to act on, I subscribed to their breaking news alerts, but never got around to unsubscribing from their morning summary.

My main news source is the Guardian. I pay them. The household also has paid subscriptions to local paper(s) that basically don't do national or international news.

This morning I clicked on the "read more" link in one of the AP emails, and got a spam wall - a requirement of a "free account" to continue reading. AP already knows my email, and IIRC they've bombarded me with unwanted extras - mostly ads for other newsletters - every time I've subscribed to one of them. Their "free" account will presumably involve more of the same, plus collecting and selling the details of what I click on - though frankly I'm surprised they aren't already doing that, via extra arguments to the links in their email newsletters.

I haven't decided yet whether I'll respond not by signing up, but by deleting my existing free email subscriptions.

Yes, I get it that they would like to be paid, and this is a step towards getting money from free readers like me. Moreover, they have a perfect right to refuse to provide a free service. But OTOH, their daily summary emails are a very poor imitation of what I'd prefer to be reading. To be suitable, they'd need to include breaking news that turned up between e.g. midnight my time and 6 AM my time, and *not* presume I'd already read their afternoon news email summary. I'm not eager to pay for service this bad, not even in wasted time.

I could, of course, create an account using an email alias, and deactivate that alias once confirmed, to avoid the expected flood of ads for other services. But they'll probably require me to use that email to login, and the gods alone know whether their login screen will play nicely enough with my password safe that I won't need to memorize my login ID.

I'll decide when I'm more awake, since I'm almost always at my grumpiest pre-coffee and pre-breakfast.

Meanwhile, I wonder how long they've had this spam wall, but I didn't notice because I didn't click on any of their stories.

[Edited to add: the Guardian seems to have mostly equivalent email subscriptions available. These may be the best available answer to AP's new feature.]

[Update: it seemed that I could click on AP break news alerts and see the underlying story, but not on links from their morning summary email. So I thought I might keep the alerts, for now, and drop the morning summary. But then I found that it's not that simpler - this evening I can follow links from the morning summary.]