the case for linkposts (and a list of my favourites)

I love linkposts.

More than just providing interesting content, I love the linkpost for another important reason.

Linkposts serve as a solution to the discovery problem—helping interesting, underexposed content from writers without pre-existing audiences find a much larger readership. Without an audience, even a brilliant post disappears into the void; as a writer without an audience, you may never even know if what you wrote was remarkable or medicore, because the feedback loop simply doesn’t exist. Once a blog reaches a certain level of success and accumulates subscribers, it achieves a kind of critical mass: almost anything it publishes has the potential to reach escape velocity and break into the broader conversation. Because readership compounds in a winner-take-all economy, already-popular blogs effectively hold a monopoly on attention, meaning each post benefits from an audience far beyond what the marginal quality of that given post would otherwise attract. But most writers don’t have this. A curated linkpost is one of the best ways for already-successful bloggers to generate positive externalities and contribute to the broader intellectual blogosphere, redirecting their attention to help the world discover great content and lesser-known writers.

A second reason I love linkposts: similar to a blogger sharing their Goodreads profile, a linkpost gives you a real sense of who a person is—how they think, what captivates them. Exposing their intellectual diet is a window into their mind that no single essay can quite replicate.

The third and most obvious reason: linkposts are just filled with great content, and I selfishly want to discover more of it!

So this post has two purposes: to encourage more people to write their own linkposts, and by steering more traffic to existing linkposts, to give encouragement to those already writing them—to help them build their audiences and keep going.

My two favourite linkposts are Readsfast and Marginal Revolution.

Marginal Revolution’s linkposts are one of the most important intellectual anchors of my life. So many of my favourite writers had their audience growth meaningfully accelerated by a Tyler Cowen link (myself included)—the attention and momentum that comes from being discovered there is hard to overstate; it can completely alter the trajectory of a writer’s reach. And because so many of us read the daily links, Marginal Revolution functions as a kind of shared substrate: everyone who reads MR will know who Matt Lakeman is and when he publishes a new travelogue, or when something wild happens with a prediction market (and Tyler says ‘Okie-dokie’)—giving these communities a shared set of references that makes every conversation richer.

Readsfast is written daily by Tony Gao and offers mini-essays on seemingly everything happening across the AI, EA, rationalist, and broader Tyler Cowen universe, with a healthy dose of arts and culture links thrown in. While MR daily links are the OG and undisputed GOAT, I think the mini-essay contextualizing each link is the superior form of the linkpost, and Tony executes this exceptionally well.

Not quite a linkpost, but I also want to draw attention to something in a similar form: the Sentinel newsletter. It is a hybrid of news, linkpost, and forecasting—sharing analysis of the past week’s events in link form, accompanied by predictions on how those events will shape our near- and mid-term future. It is one of my favourite things to check every week.

List of linkposts
(If there is another linkpost you enjoy—or if you write one yourself—please share it in the comments or by email and I will add it here!)

Daily:

• Readsfast *

• Marginal Revolution *

• update.news

Weekly:

• Sentinel *

Monthly:

• nomagicpill *

• Michael Bateman’s Passing Time *

• Astral Codex Ten

• Slime Mold Time Mold

• herfingersbloomed

• Sam Enright

• Ben Goldhaber

• an1lam

• x.com/james1ach *

• Eleanor Konik

• Splitting Infinity

• The Zvi

• Nintil

Non-active but excellent linkposts I wish came back:

• David Oks

• Guzey’s Best of Twitter

• Rachel Strohm’s Africa Update

In memoriam:
Jake Seliger

EDIT:

I recommend everyone check out all the links in the comments. Two additional sites I love which aren’t quite linkposts but worth sharing are:

• The Podcast Browser - a curated list of recommended podcast episodes

• The Browser - a daily singular link, always excellent

Will Michaels has also shared a great linkspost, which you can check out here.