The Sky is Falling! Read-Later App Pocket is Shutting Down!

(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of Claude.)

(Like the previous blog post, this one is also nostalgic.)

What Happened

On May 22, 2025, Mozilla announced that Pocket would be shut down on July 8th. I learned of this terrible news on May 26th, and my heart was shattered:

Woc, 天塌了！

— David Feng (@davidfeng88) May 26, 2025

Around 2010, when I first encountered read-later apps, I found them interesting on one hand, but confusing on the other: wouldn’t it be enough to just bookmark articles to read later in the browser? But after trying them out, I found features like cleaning up webpage formatting quite useful. Initially, I was torn between the free Instapaper and ReadItLater. Later, it seemed like Instapaper started charging, so I wholeheartedly embraced ReadItLater. In the early days, saving articles on iPhone seemed to require setting up a bookmarklet in Safari, which was quite complex. Later, perhaps when iOS opened up permissions and native apps became available, the user experience improved dramatically.

The only problem was that saving articles was like “an avalanche,” while reading them was like “pulling silk threads.” The backlog kept growing, and every time I opened the app, the psychological pressure was considerable. Some people online said to just declare digital bankruptcy and start fresh! xintao recommended www.getpocket.com/random, which could randomly return a saved article to prevent “head-of-line blocking” (when the most recent article is very long and difficult, delaying all other articles). My solution was to spend time every few months doing concentrated cleanup. Some articles seemed interesting when saved, thinking I’d study them more carefully later, but looking back, once the novelty wore off, they didn’t seem that interesting anymore. (Lacking research spirit, accomplishing nothing, haha.) Sometimes links would die too, which felt regrettable, but then I’d think, oh well, there’s nothing to do but let go. Occasionally I could clear the entire unread queue, feeling refreshed and accomplished, like I’d completed something important! But looking back, life continued as usual, sliding forward by inertia…

I’m digressing. After searching online, I decided to go back to Instapaper. (Was it acquired by Pinterest at some point?) However, I heard “never waste a crisis” - instead of fussing with exports and imports, why not resolve to clean up the long-accumulated backlog! So I did just that, first organizing the saved articles, filtering out uninteresting ones, then categorizing by topic and temporarily storing them in logseq, then writing some reading reflections - after all, “without output, there’s no thinking.” Future reading reflections will be tagged with Pocket. Without further ado, let’s begin:

Orwell: Politics and the English Language

Orwell is the author of 1984. In this essay, he gives advice on English writing that I believe applies to non-literary writing in any language. Going straight to the end of the article, he provides his own summary:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (Don’t blindly and mechanically apply the above rules).

The essence is to be as concise as possible and avoid mystification. But also apply flexibly without rigid adherence. The ultimate goal is to communicate information clearly and effectively.

Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners (PST)

Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners

On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft.

The overall lifecycle of a company’s products/services can be represented by this diagram:

Products evolve from highly innovative, expensive, and customized to standardized and mass-market.

At each evolutionary stage, different talents are needed to advance the product/service to the next stage. The author calls them pioneers, settlers, and town planners respectively.

Pioneers must build new prototypes from scratch. Projects are high-risk, failure is normal, but if successful, returns can be enormous. Settlers transform pioneers’ prototypes into products (the diagram uses the word “steal”), and town planners scale settlers’ achievements, making them faster, better, and cheaper. Conversely, pioneers use town planners’ achievements as components to build new things. All three roles are important and do innovative work. Sometimes companies can replace certain roles through outsourcing (such as using external ecosystems or public APIs). Author Simon Wardley has many articles on his blog discussing other aspects of this theme, worth reading if interested.

This set of concepts isn’t new. If we analogize company growth to military operations, the three types can be labeled as commandos, infantry, and police respectively: commandos storm the beaches, infantry implement occupation, and police maintain the new order. Tesla’s early development strategy was summarized as a three-step approach: first sell high-performance, high-price Roadsters to support the development of mid-range Model S and Model X, then finally sell the cheapest mass-market product, Model 3 (back then I was wondering when Model 3 would launch - I was definitely going to support it immediately! But with delays year after year, I eventually gave up.) When I worked in Oracle’s advertising department, Rob Tarkoff categorized everyone’s work into three categories by timeline (horizon) length. The longest timeline work was the most innovative, highest risk, and if successful, highest return - conceptually similar.

My reflection: Traditionally, pioneers seem to receive the most praise. I think one reason is supply and demand - there are probably fewer people capable of being good pioneers. Another factor is survivorship bias - pioneers without results are unknown to anyone. (As an aside, I once told a soccer-watching classmate about how some star player got injured again, and he said all professional players have injuries - we just don’t know about non-stars getting injured. Sigh.) As individuals (“selling yourself as a product/planning yourself as a company”), if you have choices, you should select appropriate careers (nowadays they use the trendy word “track”?), companies, and work content based on your risk tolerance and capability strengths/weaknesses. Also, if we divide a two-dimensional plane by time dimension (short-term, medium-term, long-term) and risk dimension (high, medium, low), personal planning shouldn’t be concentrated in just one area of this plane.