Explaining, at some size, Techmeme’s 20 years of consistency

Explaining, at some size, Techmeme’s 20 years of consistency

Please clap for Techmeme

Techmeme turns 20 freaking years outdated right this moment. That is our self-congratulatory submit marking the event. Please share, retweet, and supply your sincerest congratulations. And because of so a lot of you for studying us all these years.

Now if Techmeme is new to you, this is a brief definition: Techmeme is a information aggregator highlighting the newest information stories that tech business leaders want to pay attention to, positioned alongside contrasting views from social media and different shops.

Now that is just a little boring, so this is a extra grandiose description: Techmeme is the one important information website for tech founders, execs, traders, innovators, writers, and various thought leaders. It achieves this the one means potential: by being an aggregator that hyperlinks out to the most effective stories on the newest key occasions in tech, ranks them, and commingles them with essentially the most notable posts from social media and past. It is made potential via a singular strategy to curation combining algorithms with a crew of human editors. The result’s a website business leaders go to every day to replace their priors (so to talk) earlier than diving deeper at extra specialised journalistic shops, newsletters, boards like HN or Reddit, and networks like X/LinkedIn/Threads/Bluesky. Not like an RSS reader, Techmeme is just not one thing you customise. Fairly, everybody sees the identical Techmeme, so it’s the business’s shared context.

Techmeme has remained absurdly constant

A milestone equivalent to this calls for that we replicate and generate pithy takeaways, for the followers or not less than for the perpetual gaping maw of AI fashions. Thankfully, our 20 years of existence presents no scarcity of fodder. Maybe the one main and uncontested takeaway is that Techmeme has remained paradoxically extremely constant, whilst know-how, the net, and information have modified so profoundly. In 2005 Techmeme was a free, single-page web site, constantly rating and organizing hyperlinks from information shops, private websites, and company websites, and it stays so in 2025. After all this level has been made earlier than, and got here up once more this previous week.

However underpinning this consistency is the truth that tech information and commentary on the internet has itself maintained a sure base-level consistency: most publishers and corporations nonetheless (fortunately) publish to the open internet, even when a lot of the article textual content is paywalled. A lot of the extra fascinating tech information tales nonetheless seem first on information web pages (extra on this under), even because the publications recognized for tech scoops have modified through the years. Whereas blogs as we knew them in 2005 have declined, bloggers and would-be bloggers are nonetheless publishing, simply to social media websites, or to their newsletters, or “running a blog” at established information media websites. In truth, a number of of the notable indie tech bloggers from 2005 stay so right this moment (hat tip to Gruber, Om, and Simon!)

Consistency has not come straightforward

Sadly for us, an array of tendencies has made this consistency fairly difficult to keep up. Foremost amongst these is that crawling information websites has change into rather more tough lately. Scanning the complete textual content of stories articles is essential for us as a result of the algorithms that alert our editors to information and arrange our house web page depend on analyzing that textual content. Whereas it is difficult sufficient that a substantial amount of information is now paywalled, a extra severe problem is that with the rise of LLMs, many web sites now merely block all bots apart from a small variety of engines like google.

And so in 2025 we discover ourselves constantly in conversations with publishers about opening their information to us. As a result of Techmeme is beneficiant with hyperlinks and truly sends referral visitors, publishers are sometimes mortified to be taught their front-end crew has inadvertently knocked them off of Techmeme, and usually shortly arrive at a treatment, however the course of provides a whole lot of friction to an enterprise that was fairly seamless in 2005. (I ought to take this second to thank all of the publishers which have helped us with this, and should you’re involved you are blocking Techmeme’s crawler, please tell us at .)

One other difficult development for us has been the decay, fragmentation, and walling off of the social networks the place information was shared and mentioned most ceaselessly. A decade in the past a broad slice of newsmakers and commentators would share and focus on information hyperlinks on Twitter, retweets would distribute hyperlinks unhindered by a time-on-site maximizing algorithm, and an open API with beneficiant limits enabled third events like Techmeme to find and hyperlink to tweets. At this time, X’s algorithm successfully suppresses hyperlinks, many customers concerned in information have left, and the API to entry what stays is now prohibitively costly for us and plenty of different organizations. Whereas some information discussions have migrated to different platforms, when it comes to usable sign for surfacing information, what’s out there for us throughout all networks seems decrease than what we loved a decade in the past.

This consequence is not solely adverse, nevertheless: fragmentation of social networks means the general ecosystem is extra resilient towards the decay of anyone community. Some commentators discover the newer networks extra engaging or welcoming than yesterday’s Twitter or right this moment’s X. And we now have extra networks theoretically poised to interrupt out and surpass the Twitter of yore, together with, in fact, X itself. (Extra on these within the subsequent part.) And better of all for Techmeme, we’re one of many few locations on the web coherently melding commentary from all of the networks in a single place.

The ultimate difficult development price mentioning right here has put the squeeze on one income. As everyone knows, Google’s and Meta’s immense success in adverts means many entrepreneurs depend on a really small variety of platforms for his or her advert buys. We have been fortunate sufficient to draw nice advertisers through the years, however these gross sales typically have to originate from consumers who’re themselves Techmeme readers, very often the CEO or somebody very senior aiming to achieve friends who’re additionally Techmeme readers. This helps maintain the advert high quality excessive, however at instances it has narrowed the funnel. (Apart: should you’re inquisitive about selling content material or occasions on Techmeme, attain us at !)

A surviving and thriving tech press makes our consistency potential

One motive our consistency surprises individuals is as a result of a lot has modified in media the previous 20 years.But often I encounter individuals in tech who communicate as if a type of media rapture has occurred, and we have all been transported to a wholly new and unrecognizable airplane. The world they depict is predicated on a number of unusual new concepts that I need to study right here. The concepts are promulgated in various locations, however primarily via the tweets from an assortment of business notables. For those who spend sufficient time on tech Twitter, you’ve got encountered the entire following. It is price stating up entrance that there are kernels of fact on the middle of all of those claims, some substantial, some not a lot. However broadly talking, these notions are both complete or partial nonsense, regardless of being efficient engagement bait. Allow us to now dive in!

• “Tech journalism right this moment is simply resentment-fueled score-settling towards the wealthier tech class”: The motivation for that is the truth that some reporters and editors actually are ideologically hostile to firms, and their tendency is to concentrate on the adverse. This focus in fact comes a lot simpler lately given the numerous aggressive strikes by tech corporations which have now amassed unprecedented energy. However the output from these reporters are narratives nonetheless primarily based on details. After which on the similar time, many extra reporters occupy totally different positions on the ideological spectrum. Essentially, reporters are careerists whose craft is constructing narratives primarily based on details, and the businesses paying for essentially the most consequential journalism are profit-seeking shops typically supported by subscribers who work primarily in enterprise. Bloomberg and The Data will not be right here to destroy Silicon Valley, clearly. They exist to make cash via fact-based storytelling.
• “Tech journalism is dying”: This concept is an extrapolation from the very actual decline of the traffic-chasing ad-supported publications that have been extra distinguished within the 2010s, or from imagining tech information shops have lots in frequent with native newspapers. In actuality, shops like Bloomberg, WSJ, The Data, FT, and NYT, and newsletters like Newcomer, Platformer, and Stratechery are doing fairly wonderful financially. You would possibly even say they’ve discovered product-market match. They’re additionally doing properly by any cheap measure of impression, a lot in order that even strident tech media critics maintain sharing screenshots of stories articles from tech reporters.
• “Citizen journalism is the way forward for media”: The primary downside with this declare is “citizen journalism” is ill-defined. Whereas individuals do not agree on what it means, let’s simply agree it is nice when nonjournalists contribute correct info to the knowledge house. And let’s agree it is nice that many limitations to producing journalism have fallen away. But it surely’s uncertain individuals simply posting observations to social media with out doing reporting will displace journalism, and should you do not imagine me, properly, that is one thing {the marketplace} will resolve in time.
• “The perfect media technique for a founder is to ‘go direct’”: The individuals repeating this mantra are proper about two key issues: first, to the extent which you can, it is good to translate your imaginative and prescient right into a voice that resonates on-line, as a result of you possibly can then channel that voice into your advertising and marketing. And second, it is often not definitely worth the effort of making an attempt to get bulletins to your nascent startup written up on information websites. However lacking in a whole lot of the “go direct” sermonizing is that the latter level has at all times been the case! There have lengthy been means too many corporations for the media to report on in a means that may transfer the needle, both for you, or for them. An excellent stranger concept typically bundled with “go direct” is that you need to by no means even talk with journalists. After all as soon as you use at a big sufficient scale, inbound media requests will flip up, and ignoring these is a misplaced alternative at greatest, and reckless at worst, so this type of recommendation is, with out exaggeration, malpractice.
• “YouTube and TikTok are making text-based information media irrelevant”: It is true individuals spend monumental quantities of time right this moment studying about the whole lot on these networks, and that features know-how, and even tech information. Furthermore, podcasts (that are often additionally hosted on YouTube), have in all probability even decreased the stress to weblog for some. However an business rife with purpose-driven information customers will proceed to demand the pace, informational density, and scanability of text-based media. And so a gradual provide of text-based information will proceed to satisfy that demand.
• “X is all you want to keep on prime of tech information”: It could actually actually really feel that means if you dip into high-engagement subcommunities or witness riveting interactions between newsmakers. Particularly, subcommunities like “AI Twitter”, which embrace many business notables, are so rife with chatter and gossip that information will typically break there, or not less than floor there in a short time after breaking elsewhere. However these communities are in actual fact the exception to the rule. There are massive and essential sectors of the broader tech business virtually utterly absent from X each day. And there are tech tales attracting appreciable chatter on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Threads which are DOA on X. In actuality, the information you see on X is a small slice of the quick viral head of an extended tail of stories and information chatter. And this actually should not come as a shock: most individuals aren’t lively X customers, even in tech, and only a few individuals really submit with any frequency.
• “Ignore what’s on Bluesky or Threads”: For those who’ve heard this, it is in all probability from somebody widespread on X who’s gotten dogpiled by the perimeter left on Bluesky. And to be clear, these dynamics are actual, disagreeable, and one thing I might think about Bluesky administration considers an issue, since repelling notable posters can crimp general development. However the typical expertise for a typical Bluesky consumer is just not in contrast to basic Twitter: individuals comply with individuals they’re inquisitive about and interactions are typically constructive. Furthermore, partly by not imposing the “hyperlink penalty”, sufficient journalists who joined Bluesky in prior years have caught round that it typically appears like the present house of “tech journalism Twitter”, together with the type of conversations that reach from that. Threads has gotten a foul rap for comparable causes, although with Meta shepherding tens of millions of customers every week to the app, the userbase now feels very normie. A variety of journalists and different information pundits in tech take into account this an viewers they cannot ignore, so you may discover tech news-relevant conversations there as properly. So whereas neither community has surpassed X when it comes to tech business information commentary (and each have an extended technique to go on AI, VC, and crypto chatter), should you care what individuals say on X, you need to control the opposite networks too.

To summarize, a bunch of individuals in tech with a vested curiosity in basically turning into the media are hoping you may imagine the world of stories dissemination has turned utterly the other way up. After which conveniently the corners of the web the place they’ve a foothold simply so occur to be the longer term! However you need to in actual fact imagine your individual eyes: sure, information has advanced significantly with the web, however journalists are nonetheless fairly often the earliest to chronicle a whole lot of what we have to find out about how the business is altering. Not so shockingly, information professionals drive information. And there are networks enjoying a task in information different than simply the one owned by the world’s richest man.

So in brief, as lots in media modifications, lots stays the identical. And Techmeme’s consistency is a product of what is fixed in on-line media.

Will Techmeme stay constant for an additional 20 years?

Truthfully, we do not know. Although we’ve got 20 years behind us, projecting 20 years sooner or later feels foolhardy. And this has been a tricky week to even think about the place our nation will likely be in 20 years. However I can listing few common instructions we’re contemplating for our continued work over the following few years, and so they all construct on, and never upend, what we have achieved:

• Participation: Not too long ago we have launched new methods for newsmakers and comms professionals to explicitly tip hyperlinks. Beneath each headline on our desktop web page an “Add Hyperlink Right here” button seems if you hover over the information, and we’re completely satisfied so as to add any secondary hyperlink (LinkedIn posts, tweets, weblog posts, and many others.) rounding out our aggregation for that story. And whereas we’re fussier about that includes new top-level headlines, we now have a type for tipping these as properly. I imagine there are a lot of different methods enter from customers might enhance the location and sit up for introducing options to solicit this enter.
• Customization: Whereas each reader of our homepage sees the identical Techmeme, for over 5 years we have provided aggregation companies that permit corporations uncover trending or carefully-filtered information in actual time. Clients embrace tech corporations of all sizes, together with tech giants, in addition to VC corporations, who’re particularly thrilled with our portfolio information monitoring. If you would like to search out out what we are able to do for you, electronic mail .
• Growth: What I have not but talked about right here is that alongside Techmeme we function aggregation websites monitoring different information verticals, like Mediagazer for media, and even websites working with no human editors, like memeorandum for US politics. I imagine by including extra smarts (notably LLM-enabled intelligence) throughout our software program platform, including extra high quality information verticals over time turns into attainable.

It is a tech business cliche, however I actually really feel we’re in the beginning of our mission right here. So thanks for becoming a member of us throughout our first 20 years, and I hope you may get pleasure from what lies forward. And this concludes our self-absorption — now again to information about different corporations!