DHK Newsletter Fifth Anniversary

Repeating once a year shouldn’t be too much, right?

On June 24, 2021, Hong Kong’s Apple Daily was shut down, and my column #decentralizehk came to an end along with it. Unwilling to simply stop writing, I launched DHK Newsletter #0 the very next day, June 25. Since then, I’ve written one piece every week without a single break. In other words, this issue, #261, marks DHK Newsletter’s fifth anniversary.

Following past tradition, I’ll close with an annual review.

Previous reviews: Year 1 · Year 2 · Year 3 · Year 4

I can’t quite tell whether these five years have passed quickly or slowly. Two contradictory feelings circle me at once — one says five years blinked by in an instant, the other says I’ve finally made it through five years. The objective fact is: although I once wrote a newspaper column for nearly a decade, five straight years of weekly output is, for me personally, the most sustained record I’ve ever kept.
Since I choose my own topics, I already knew that this year, among the “three freedoms”, I leaned more heavily toward “freedom of information.” But it wasn’t until I just tallied everything up that I realized how lopsided the distribution actually was — articles related to “freedom of information” made up half of the total, followed by “financial freedom” at 27%. Pieces on “democracy” were fewer than in previous years, only 6 articles, while “Diary of a Fool” stayed at around 10% as usual, also 6 articles.
This year there were especially many articles on “freedom of information” — partly because of the LikeCoin v3 update, around which I wrote ten pieces, and partly because over the past year authoritarian power has grown ever more brazen: bookstores raided, the press suppressed, with related incidents occurring more frequently than ever.
As in past reviews, below I list all the year’s articles, with 19 specially recommended pieces marked out. That might seem like a lot, but they’re all important topics, so I won’t limit myself to a fixed number. I’d suggest saving this post and coming back to reread it when you have time — branching outward from it, you can connect to all the articles from these five years.
For six months of this past year, alongside writing the weekly Post, I was also preparing my new book The Pursuit of Freedom. Though I call myself a “full-time writer,” I write extremely slowly, and on top of that there’s 3ook.com and Just Books to run part-time. With everything piling up, the newsletter sometimes felt like a real struggle to write — but I still managed to publish on time every week, and never once let AI ghostwrite for me.
I believe the topics I’ve chosen matter, and I’ve done my best to “tell the web3 story well.” And yet, over this past year, paid subscribers haven’t grown at all — worse, the open rate has kept declining, dropping from the low 30s to the low 20s percent within just a year, a drop of over 20 percentage points. Honestly, I have almost no idea what to do about this. But “knowing shame is close to courage” — so on the occasion of this fifth anniversary, I want to let everyone still reading know about this trend, so we can face it together.

Freedom of Information (25)

Financial Freedom (14)

Democracy (6)

Diary (6)

p.s. Looking back, freedom turns out to be right there, where the lights grow dim.

DHK dao