10 Years of Kottke.org Membership

An important KDO milestone whooshed by the other day and I was so heads-down on tuning up the new search engine (more on that below) that I missed it. So: it’s been 10 years since I started the KDO membership program! (Quick recap of the value proposition from the membership page FAQ: “kottke.org is my full-time job and member support keeps the site free, open, and available to everyone on an internet that is increasingly paywalled.”)

10 years! It is impossible for me to overstate the impact membership has had on my work. Beyond the simple fact that KDO wouldn’t exist without it, membership support allows me the freedom to choose when, where, how, and why to work, resulting, IMO, a better place for all of us to spend time.

The last couple of years have felt especially membership-inflected and influenced. We’ve been working together on building the KDO comments into a quieter haven for sharing stories and information, outside the social media networks driven by algorithms and outrage. It’s taken time, but KDO is starting to feel like a neighborhood joint where folks can stop by and find a welcoming place for interesting conversation.¹ And more to come!

I’ve also been working hard on different ways of helping people find stuff to read/watch/listen to online and just generally making things easier to use around here. There’s:

• The Rolodex (which includes a mini feed reader for members), which is a list of the sites and people I read that you might like too.
• Improvements to the comments to help make following & having conversations easier. This has been a steady effort — tweaks and new features every few months since launching member comments three years ago. (How has it been that long?!)
• Prometheus, a search & discovery tool for gift links, open only to members for now.
• KDO site search. Still only open to just members. I spent a lot of time over the past weekend tuning it to return better results, and I think we’re getting somewhere. Improved the speed as well, at the expense of, well, increased expense.² It’s still not magic, but I’m hoping to open this up to everyone soon.
• Underscore, a web-based music player I built for listening to music across multiple streaming platforms while I work. Anyone can listen to my collection and members can compile their own collection to listen to.

And this is in addition to the site’s usual service of curated links and posts. A lot of this has happened in just the last month — Jesus, Kottke, slow down! — but I’ve been working on some of these things, on and off, for years. I couldn’t focus on this stuff for months and months earlier this year — launching requires a level of attention that’s difficult for me to muster when other things are going on. Getting the move behind me and establishing myself in surroundings more suitable to my temperament has been a real boon.

I hope all of this adds up to a place and project that people want to make use of and support. Twenty-something years into doing KDO as my full-time job, I can honestly say I am enjoying it more than ever. Thanks so much for reading and for your support. If you’re not yet a member and want to join us on this ride, you can check out your membership options here — it only takes a minute to sign up (less if you use Apple Pay or Stripe’s Link autofill).

1. Maybe KDO readers have always felt this way about the site, but for me, the comments have livened things up and added a new dimension to things. ↩

2. I’m using a couple of outside services for search, but at the relatively small volumes I’m dealing with, it won’t come to more than a few bucks every month. ↩

• kottke.org