The Pinked Manifesto
There used to be a version of the internet where you followed people because you liked their writing.
You liked how they could articulate ideas in ways you only wished you could yourself. They could say things you think but can't express. PinkedIn is an attempt to go back to that version.
Not for nostalgia. Just our small push against the enshitification of everything we love.
This is a room without much flash or fanfare. That's a deliberate choice.
A reading room where you can find, follow and read articles from people in the business world you admire. It's not for networking and it's not for finding a new job.
Nothing here is meant to be checked hourly. The feed isn't endless. That's also by design.
You can follow 250 writers. That's the lot. Old Nokia phones held 250 contacts, so saving a number meant deciding somebody was worth one of your slots. Every list since has been infinite, and an infinite list isn't a list, it's a pile. This isn't a place to collect writers, it's a place to follow the ones you actually read. So when you're full, you're full — and letting someone go to make room for someone better is the most honest thing you can do for your own reading.
What we removed
- Advertising of any kind, forever
- The algorithmic feed
- Video, autoplay or otherwise
- Games and streaks
- Public like counts
- Public comments section
- Job boards and recruiter emails
- Notification badges that beg
- Posts written by a machine
What remains
- Following people you chose
- A limit of 250 writers, on purpose
- Reading them newest-first, always
- Writing for people who opted in
- Applause for the writer not the crowd
- Private conversations between reader and writer
- A profile is a byline, not a CV
A person wrote this
If you followed someone because you liked how they think, you should get them — not a machine doing an impression of them. So every post is read by Pangram, an automated writing check, before it is published. A piece it reads as machine-written doesn't go up.
There is no override. A writer can't click past it, and we can't be paid to switch it off. A check you can wave through isn't a check, and this is the one promise the whole room rests on.
What it doesn't catch: using AI to fix your grammar, tighten a sentence, or find the English word you were reaching for. Pangram labels that separately and we leave it alone. Writing in your second language is writing.
The check is automated, and automated things are sometimes wrong. Writers are told exactly what it found and how confident it was, and a person will read anything that looks like a mistake. Readers are told nothing — no scores, no badges, no marks on anyone's posts.
It caught me. Before any of this went live I put my own LinkedIn archive through the same check. More than half of my posts came back machine-written. Not the ones I would have guessed, either.
Moving the line would have taken about a minute and nobody would ever have known. But I think the number is the reading on the dial, not a fault in the dial. If the person building a room for human writing can't reliably get through his own front door, that says something about how far all of us have drifted. It is the argument for the room, not an argument against the check.
So the door stays exactly where it is. It applies to me the way it applies to you, and I have some rewriting to do.
How the lights stay on
Honestly: monetisation isn't the immediate goal, and we'd rather grow slowly than fund this with attention. But we still have bills, so these are the models we're thinking about. All of them aligned with our readers, none with advertisers:
A supporter plan. A modest monthly amount for readers who want to keep the room alive. Perhaps it unlocks small comforts (more saved posts, a reading digest by email), never reach or attention.
Writer patronage. Let readers support the writers they value directly, with PinkedIn keeping a small, published percentage. The good writers earn from being worth reading.
Team reading licences. Companies pay so their people can read well together with the added benefits of shared collections, maybe an internal team email. Useful, boring, honest revenue.
The pledge, regardless: no advertising, no paid games, no selling of attention or data, no paying for reach. If we can't pay for it one of the honest ways, we'll stay small.
Small is fine. Small is kind of the point.