Notes on why plaintext is the way it is

plaintext is a place to read and write, and nothing else — no images, no video, nothing that autoplays or refreshes itself. It is built against the machine that optimizes for misery: the infinite scroll, the engagement bait, the surveillance, the adversarial sort. This is the opposite end of the pendulum, for those of us who actually want a low-tech, quiet space to share ideas.

This place is not a business — no ads, no data for sale, no investors to answer to. Nothing here is for sale, and neither are you. A place that isn’t selling your attention has no reason to capture it.

I hold the least I can: an email, so I can send you a sign-in link, and the words you choose to write. No password to steal, and nothing that follows you off this page. What is never collected cannot leak, and cannot be demanded. The privacy page has the whole of it.

The writing here is meant to be yours. There are other, better venues for AI slop. Write the thing you would actually want to read.

There are no profile photos. Identities are premade swatches in muted, newspaper-printable colors — a soft pink, a quiet purple, sage, clay, honey, slate, dark coffee — each carrying its own preset, readable ink.

There are no likes and no public counts anywhere on plaintext. The single gesture is “Noted” — a quiet acknowledgement that doubles as a private save.

The feed is finite. It shows what the people you chose said, in the order they said it, and then it stops. I do not farm engagement time from readers. Light Markdown is welcome — headings, bold, italics, lists, blockquotes, strikethrough, links, and code blocks for those who write about code.

plaintext is invite-only, and every call — what you see, who stays — is human, never automated. The house rules say the rest.