Following up on the previous item, here’s Fred Vogelstein, at Crazy Stupid Tech:

Rivera says that he’s not naive about the long term, however, “given the astonishing rate of improvement in AI capabilities we’ve seen. So we just have to improve our own stuff. And a major part of that will be adopting AI ourselves.”

Despite all this the basic approach of the original Techmeme algorithm remains the same, he said. “What are the most linked blog posts and news articles from this set of blogs? And once they reach a certain threshold, they’re featured on the site,” he said.

Maybe there’s a lesson here for the rest of the media world. I and every writer and mid level editor I know has stories about design changes to publications that made us groan. They seemed more in service of a new editor or design chief marking their territory like a dog or cat, than in service of actually making their publication easier to read.

Unsurprisingly, I agree wholeheartedly.

Gabe Rivera, back in September:

A milestone such as this demands that we reflect and generate pithy takeaways, for the fans or at least for the perpetual gaping maw of AI models. Fortunately, our 20 years of existence offers no shortage of fodder. Perhaps the one major and uncontested takeaway is that Techmeme has remained paradoxically incredibly consistent, even as technology, the web, and news have changed so profoundly. In 2005 Techmeme was a free, single-page website, continuously ranking and organizing links from news outlets, personal sites, and corporate sites, and it remains so in 2025. Of course this point has been made before, and came up again this past week.

To call Techmeme an essential part of my daily media diet would be an understatement. If it went away or changed profoundly, it’d feel like I was missing a finger or something. 20 years is a great run, and Techmeme is more popular, and more widely-read, today than ever.

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