Tony Stubblebine

CEO @ Medium. Early Twitter user, like really, really early. Some people call me Coach Tony. Partner is Sarah. Dog is Eloise.

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Last Notes

2026-04-29 02:04:38 GMT

New post about how combining AI-assisted writing tools with morning pages has changed my productivity system. The morning pages are transformed by AI into a todo list, which then becomes a day-long journal. It's mindfulness meets productivity.
https://medium.com/p/48a7c76af7a1

2026-04-26 14:13:39 GMT

The thing about the WHCD shooting is that the Straight of Hormuz isn’t going to be open this year and the Epstein Files still haven’t been released.

2026-04-20 21:47:00 GMT

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@nprofile…fefh it’s been consistently good enough to work from. AI generated summaries of your own writing for your own use are pretty useful because you don’t get fooled by mistakes.

2026-04-19 19:56:59 GMT

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This is the prompt I use:
Make a task list of any things that I said I needed or wanted to do in the current note plus any unfinished tasks from yesterday's journal. Format it as a task list. If possible, write the tasks in terms of first step followed by the goal. It's ok to guess at the first step.
#writing #morningpages #productivity #promptengineering

2026-04-19 19:56:19 GMT

I've been typing morning pages for 17 minutes every day. Then I added one AI prompt that turns them into my daily todo list. Now I do them every day. Self-care sticks when it feels productive.

2026-01-29 20:04:28 GMT

This is what we said inside
@nprofile…vtcd in order to give space for people to participate in tomorrow's national strike.
https://media.me.dm/media_attachments/files/115/980/175/931/014/257/original/c9a08756cbc4b22e.png
https://media.me.dm/media_attachments/files/115/980/176/304/177/448/original/effc5fd990047453.png
https://media.me.dm/media_attachments/files/115/980/176/707/256/019/original/c22387c4cd895d33.png
https://media.me.dm/media_attachments/files/115/980/177/211/145/202/original/4731b864bb0639af.png

2025-11-11 19:05:24 GMT

This is the most useful reaction I've seen to 37signals moving off the cloud to dedicated servers.
#aws #cloud
https://medium.com/@tobrien/leaving-the-cloud-isnt-for-everyone-b6520d55c41f

2025-11-11 19:04:47 GMT

Gotta love the art behind a good reframe or spin. This piece on prosperity theology is excellent in that regard. Turns out words can mean anything!
#religion
https://medium.com/science-and-critical-thinking/jesus-said-help-the-poor-evangelicals-heard-buy-a-lake-house-77478b1a4d1d

2025-11-11 19:03:59 GMT

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Trains run on time. Talked to a lot of locals about healthcare--it's both free and if you want to pay out of pocket, cheap. One of our expat friends paid $250 for an MRI just because she wanted the peace of mind. Streets are clean.
Mostly though, it's a special feeling to be surrounded by people that are healthy, educated, and doing well.

2025-11-11 19:03:34 GMT

There's the red pill and the blue pill, but what's the pill where you visit Europe and see everything they get for their higher taxes?

2025-07-13 01:24:33 GMT

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@nprofile…lh5j @nprofile…spv0 Me too! We think we can be a partner to you for a long time.

2025-07-13 01:23:56 GMT

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@nprofile…vrg2 @nprofile…spv0 Yes, and. We also innovated on the product quality. For us the content is the product and we had to invent a new way to do recommendations that took into account expert signal. That's the part that is not PE.

2025-04-15 04:13:53 GMT

Medium is a home for the intellectually curious — people that are driven to expand their understanding of the world. And for curious people, diversity isn’t a threat, it’s a strength.
https://blog.medium.com/yes-to-a-diverse-community-3f72df3c2ff9

2025-03-24 13:51:48 GMT

The landscape of external traffic has flipped around in the last few years. Here's a viral post that slayed on Threads, and did pretty well on BSky, but didn't get anything from formerly important aggregators like Pocket.
https://media.me.dm/media_attachments/files/114/217/731/102/837/380/original/e24b76fe2c74c42d.png

2025-03-24 12:55:41 GMT

The WSJ basically runs an all day news ticker of ways Trump is bad for the US economy. Voice of the resistance?
https://media.me.dm/media_attachments/files/114/217/513/018/329/208/original/19be59787ffdb40b.jpeg

2024-08-19 02:40:44 GMT

Do you remember when hover boards were a thing? I watched this guy board a flight on one in 2015.
https://media.me.dm/media_attachments/files/112/986/372/119/682/907/original/942b5858c1e933f2.jpeg

2024-08-17 17:59:41 GMT

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@npub175x…2fat That's a weird way to display that but if you read it top to bottom, moving from monthly to annual drops the price from $60 to $50. That's our standard price. Then 20% off is $40. As displayed in the bill today.

2024-06-12 20:07:56 GMT

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@npub1dtx…ahel I think we are close to supporting turkey. But some of these problems are specific to the country, ie there is something screwed up going on with India and stripe right now.

2024-06-12 01:50:38 GMT

This is what I was trying to work out what to say recently, why the Internet needs more spaces that are paid for directly by the users rather than by advertisers.
https://blog.medium.com/be-part-of-a-better-internet-5c4aa58ec826

2024-06-10 04:19:15 GMT

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@npub1lap…elxz does this hold up seven years later and Ev did not pull the plug on Medium and Medium is becoming self sustaining?

2024-06-06 22:39:27 GMT

I love being done with a board meeting.

2024-06-06 21:56:17 GMT

I ❤️ paywalls

2024-06-02 20:02:13 GMT

Testing whether my Threads account connect up here? I'm so confused by where Facebook is taking their fediverse integration. (And that's even after having talked to them about it)
https://www.threads.net/@the_coach_life/post/C7uak2Tyu0C

2024-06-01 16:31:27 GMT

At some level, the point of social media is to have fun having opinions. Like I'm doing.
But then it got sold as simultaneously being about a source of information. That's different. Having an opinion about something you are informed about and care enough about to get right (and correct yourself if you miss) is a totally different thing.

2024-06-01 16:18:26 GMT

The thing about the conviction news yesterday is that I want there to be more news to read but there isn't. There's just opinion, nearly none of it well thought out.
Maybe it's because I'm such a sports fan, but I saw things like Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless on ESPN and wanted way less of this. Who cares about opinion for the sake of opinion?
(My opinion)

2024-06-01 16:15:29 GMT

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@npub1clr…p7jp 100x cooler. A third of my board letter is just administrative details.

2024-06-01 16:14:34 GMT

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They are doing this trying to squeeze out tens or hundreds of dollars from us.
This is the definition of a local maxima because meanwhile...
We are hunting for deeper pieces and boosting them.
And there is a job market (even now) that pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for experts.
So if I were writing technical stuff I'd be writing to impress someone important who could open up those doors.

2024-06-01 16:12:55 GMT

"write to impress someone important."
That's probably the most elitist thing I've ever told a Medium writer. But it was specific to programming topics and I still agree with it.
Medium has a huge, huge readership in software development.
But we also have a ton of technical writers who write simple programming content, a lot of it summarized from other sources, and all of it destined to be replaced by AI summary and copilot.

2024-05-27 19:12:11 GMT

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@npub1sm2…lftg Yeah, we'll be in the office tomorrow and have a board meeting there on the sixth. Come on in? I'm pretty sure we should just get you a pass.

2024-05-27 18:55:31 GMT

Hotel lobbies are under appreciated places to work. Sarah and I went to the Fairmont in SF for a writing retreat. She's working on a novel. I'm working on a board letter and marketing announcement.

2024-04-10 01:06:16 GMT

Wild ride to get here.
https://blog.medium.com/thank-you-for-one-million-members-d0b39d1be8b3

2024-03-02 18:47:16 GMT

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@npub1tsn…z7ve Allow? No. Be able to stop? Maybe.
https://blog.medium.com/default-no-to-ai-training-on-your-stories-abb5b4589c8#:~:text=The%20default%20answer%20is%20now,t%20already%20talking%2C%20contact%20us.

2024-01-01 01:32:55 GMT

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@npub1xpc…3t05 what did we do?

2023-12-28 19:15:27 GMT

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@npub1grx…uxfe and yet, the conversation here is more interesting. I’m in Threads now too but it reads to me as all for show.

2023-11-30 00:34:15 GMT

I don't really understand the scope of ChatGPT corrections.
Can any of you ask, "Did Tony Stubblebine write The Regular Expression Pocket Reference?"
https://media.me.dm/media_attachments/files/111/496/688/408/774/192/original/0499987e1dcf8c98.png

2023-10-15 23:36:13 GMT

New phone experience of going from iphone 12 to iphone 15 is on the one hand great: better camera, better battery.
But on the other hand it's also same apps, same background. Is there even such a thing as the killer iphone 15 app?

2023-10-01 20:58:38 GMT

Does anyone think there will be a downside to opting your content out of Google’s AI training set? Right now there isn’t. But I wouldn’t want to screw up people’s SEO traffic.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894779/google-ai-extended-training-data-toggle-bard-vertex

2023-09-28 17:48:42 GMT

I think it's worth talking to real people about how they feel about AI as a counterbalance to the massive PR hype campaign that we mostly see. Hint: it's very negative as evidenced by the comments on my post about Medium's new stance.
https://medium.com/p/abb5b4589c8

2023-08-23 16:44:40 GMT

I'm writing up our position on AI LLMs training on Medium stories and just having a hard time getting past the text LLMs as leaching value off of the Internet in order to then spam it.

2023-08-21 01:07:41 GMT

Twitter is basically useless today for news about the hurricane hitting SoCal. That sort of stuff used to be a core competency.

2023-08-17 17:31:27 GMT

Text of my #MediumDay keynote is up.
https://blog.medium.com/state-of-medium-f633e21a172a#e82f

2023-08-12 12:17:07 GMT

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@npub1sm2…lftg @npub1dn4…cue6 and speak! we thought hard about doing a 24 hour version. What then? Do the keynote twice?

2023-08-11 22:15:32 GMT

#MediumDay starts tomorrow at 9am ET.
https://mediumday.com
Community led, more than 200 speakers, 20,000 attendees, messy and wild like Medium. It's a rock concert for people who love reading and writing.
Plan your lineup:
https://blog.medium.com/plan-your-medium-day-lineup-b514d4b89355

2023-08-08 17:59:18 GMT

Four of our last seven days were all time records for growth.
Pretty direct connection between growth and redoing our recommendation system to focus on substance.
It's been a nice validation that there are people that will pay for substance over attention.
Notable, the key to the new recommendation system was putting more humans in the loop.
We're going to stick with this pro-human approach no matter how off trend it is.

2023-07-31 15:14:15 GMT

An interesting part Medium's board meeting was comparing notes on AI.
My notes are that in practice AI generates trash and the detection tools don't work. Humans want to talk to humans, are the best AI detectors and hate it, and human stories rock.
On the flip side, the board members do a lot of investments and are getting pitched on all the AI innovation that is coming. So they were very much optimists for what is coming.

2023-07-24 18:28:16 GMT

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@npub1wcu…9j6s Am I reading this right, that in a surprising move a lot of AI companies broke copyright law by purchasing copyrighted material from someone who didn't have a license to sell it? That's also what the Sarah Silverman case looked like.
So there is a copyright violation in practice even though there didn't need to be. If they'd just spidered the sites themselves then they wouldn't be in violation.

2023-07-24 18:13:06 GMT

I've heard three main requests that content creators and platforms want AI companies to adhere to in order to train on their content:
* Opt-out.
* Credit.
* Compensation.
Unfortunately, copyright law doesn't really do enough to stop an AI company from doing a statistical analysis of your content. And most people aren't gungho to extend copyright law.
That leaves platforms who can negotiate on your behalf or cut off access.

2023-07-18 18:48:16 GMT

Everyone has a story to tell.

2023-06-27 21:05:31 GMT

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@npub13kx…35yf @npub1xpc…3t05 I thought we had emojis :medium:

2023-06-25 22:13:40 GMT

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@npub1xpc…3t05 it’s not an in house publication

2023-06-21 15:22:43 GMT

The trending posts feed on me.dm is great. Sure, Mastodon is not user friendly yet, but is anyone having a great time anywhere on any of the other short form platforms? I had to work for it a bit, but Mastodon is easily 1000x better for me than where I came from.
https://me.dm/explore

2023-05-13 14:29:29 GMT

Yes.
https://medium.com/technology-hits/what-is-mastodon-and-is-it-the-future-of-social-media-c7f45935713c

2023-04-17 19:50:33 GMT

We added #[0] to Embedly. So now Mastodon links embed more naturally on #[1] and every other service that uses Embedly to handle embeds.
https://blog.medium.com/now-you-can-embed-mastodon-posts-in-medium-stories-99b11d0baa7f