All articles
The slow web
The slow feed: why I stopped posting every day
For three years I posted daily. Then I cut back to one piece a week. Readers went up, and so did the replies worth answering.
Noa Kestrel
·
12 min read
In 2023 I posted every single day. Short notes, links, a photo when I had nothing to say. The numbers looked healthy and I felt terrible. Every post was competing with the last one, and none of them had room to breathe.
What changed
In January I moved to one long piece a week, sent on Thursday at nine, with short posts only when something genuinely could not wait. The first month was quiet. By the third, the weekly piece was getting more replies than a whole week of daily posts had.
Fewer posts gave each one a longer shelf life. The archive started doing the work the feed used to demand from me.
The numbers
Open rate went from 41% to 61%. Unsubscribes halved. The replies got longer, and more of them turned into the next piece. Traffic from search, which rewards pages that stay useful, grew every month.
What I would tell you
Pick a day, protect it, and let the feed be a place people come back to rather than something they scroll past. You can always post more. It is much harder to post better once you are trained to post often.
Written by Noa Kestrel
Writer and designer in Lisbon. One essay every Thursday, short posts in between. Replies are open, and I read every one.
