Daring Fireball

Markdown’s popularity seems to stem from its simplicity. Complicating the base standard may hurt more than help, as tools that only need the basics (what it was designed for) would be pressured into full support of a complex standard.

It’s one thing for an app to create scope creep for markdown that those users can leverage. It’s another thing for the standard to create the scope creep, which is then pushed onto all the apps that may use it.

At some point, markdown loses its human readability when too many features are added. So if it gets too complicated, someone will inevitably create a new more simple standard… or push something like “markdown classic”.

John Gruber, who created markdown, doesn’t even use it for all the stuff most others do today.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/04/apple-notes-markdown

Dating Fireball just posted about how broken SwiftUI is for basic things AppKit was doing correctly in the late 90s (undo/redo)[0].

I think peak productivity for desktops was probably hit about 10 years ago. Most things since then are worse, and the best things from macOS (drag and drop everything nearly anywhere, consistent keyboard shortcuts and interfaces, scriptability of everything, etc.) were never copied by other systems.

Now systems are being designed to follow Node JS-style development which doesn’t work like a normal thing anywhere and native apps are just as bad as electron apps from a usability perspective…

At least they can be vibe coded since Interface Builder is no longer needed?

0 - https://daringfireball.net/2026/06/swiftui_only_makes_it_easy_to_develop_bad_apps

There are cases of individuals who make money charging for content (Ben Thompson comes to mind: https://stratechery.com/) and others who give away their content but have managed to put together revenue streams that don't annoy their users (http://daringfireball.net/).

If someone has unique content that other people want, especially as an individual rather than a multi-person business, there are ways to make money. It's not "baked into the web", so it may require being creative about how the offering is put together... but, it's still doable.

What makes Ben Thompson an interesting example is that there is no shortage of people writing about trends in tech. But he has a focus and style that are unique enough that people pay to subscribe to his updates.

Would seeing this on HN count as advertisement?

I also see HN Jobs that I did not ask for, would this also count as advertisements / marketing?

How would say, Daring Fireball [1] earn income from this cancerous mode of operation? Should this publication stop charging $11K a week to stop shilling products we don't need in your RSS feed?

So then it follows that all of these are 'cancer' by the author's definition.

How do we solve this once and for all to satisfy the author?

The only way to stop this would probably be to "close your eyes?" or perhaps maybe adblock, although we cannot adblock billboards, or this isn't really a big enough problem in the first place.

Solutions to this would be much welcome.

[1] https://daringfireball.net/

Registered Apple developer here.

I visit the following sites to keep myself up-to-date on Apple ecosystem:

http://www.macrumors.com (Covers news relevant to developers, entrepreneurs and consumers alike. The only blog one needs to follow to get updates on happenings in the Apple ecosystem)

http://daringfireball.net (John Gruber personal blog. For the quality of its editorial and views on happenings in Apple and Tech world. He is also the created of Markdown)

http://www.loopinsight.com (Jim Dalrymple's views on happenings in Apple ecosystem, the widely renowned Apple insider)

P.S.: Not for a regular visit, but Macrumors also maintains a very insightful buyer's guide at http://buyersguide.macrumors.com

I run a series of e-mail newsletters on topics I'm interested in and have about 190k subscribers.

But that's only one tiny way, there are lots of people who do things like blog about news full-time, run tumblelogs, industry analysts, etc. http://daringfireball.net/ would be a top example of one of these. http://www.loopinsight.com/ are another. Lots of podcasts, YouTubers, etc. Generally "indie media" I guess.

It's worth noting, however, that it's quite hard to make a good living in that way and only a small percentage make it to an enviable position. It's certainly a lot easier to make $100k+ per year as a full-time programmer than as someone consuming/producing media.