# DHK Newsletter Fifth Anniversary *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.* By [DHK dao](https://paragraph.com/@dhk) · 2026-06-16 writing, appledaily --- 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](https://ckxpress.com/newsletter-anniversary/) · [Year 2](https://ckxpress.com/season2-finale/) · [Year 3](https://ckxpress.com/season3/) · [Year 4](https://ckxpress.com/season-4/) 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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. 5. 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. 6. 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) --------------------------- * 💈 [Will Taiwan and Hong Kong Disappear in the Age of AI?](https://ckxpress.com/en/claude/) 💈 * [An Old Salt’s Upgrade Diary: Is the AI in WordPress 7.0 Any Use?](https://ckxpress.com/en/wordpress7/) * 💈 [Hong Kong Sends Undercover Agents Into a Bookstore](https://ckxpress.com/en/bookpunch-standup/) 💈 * 💈 [Dear Algo, What Is an Algorithm?](https://ckxpress.com/en/dear-algo/) 💈 * 💈 [Travelling Back to the Qin Dynasty to Maintain Stability](https://ckxpress.com/en/a-step-into-the-past/) 💈 * [3ook.com – Give books a voice](https://ckxpress.com/en/custom-voice/) * 💈 [One Punch to Wake the Readers: Independent Bookstore Facing One Lawsuit After Another](https://ckxpress.com/en/bookpunch/) 💈 * 💈 [A Slave to Freedom, or A Free Slave? On Jimmy Lai of Apple Daily](https://ckxpress.com/en/jimmy-lai-sentencing/)💈 * [LikeCoin v3 Upgrade Accomplished: Heading Toward the 8th Minting Anniversary](https://ckxpress.com/en/likecoin-8th-anniversary/) * [Just Books — The Bookstore That Sells eBooks](https://ckxpress.com/en/justbooks/) * [Paper Books Sold Out, E-books Take Over: The Dignity and Meaning of Out of Print](https://ckxpress.com/en/ibo-limited-edition/) * [Silent Night, Upgrade Night. My Fear Of, Your Missing Out.](https://ckxpress.com/en/fomo/) * [Decentralized Publishing: The YouTube of Printed Media](https://ckxpress.com/en/youtube/) * [Stocks have IPOs, Tokens have ICOs, Books Need IBOs](https://ckxpress.com/en/ibo/) * 💈 [Reflections on the Hong Kong Deadly Fire: Today’s Newspapers and Magazines, Tomorrow’s Cultural Heritage](https://ckxpress.com/en/conserving-news/) 💈 * [Thanksgiving to the Preservers of Culture: Airdropping ETH and LIKE](https://ckxpress.com/en/thanksgiving/) * [Acting as a Human ATM: The Price Scare on LikeCoin v3 Launch Day and My Rookie Mistake](https://ckxpress.com/en/likecoin-v3-mistake/) * [A Big Question for Creatives: Should You Publish in Print or Digital?](https://ckxpress.com/en/print-or-digital/) * [Upgrade to LikeCoin v3 and Share a 10,000,000 LIKE Incentive Pool (Full Tutorial Included)](https://ckxpress.com/en/likecoin-v3-launch/) * [LikeCoin v3 Upgrade Countdown: 5 Days Left. See You at the Launch Party on November 3rd.](https://ckxpress.com/en/likecoin-v3-party/) * [LikeCoin v3 Whitepaper Officially Submitted for Community Vote](https://ckxpress.com/en/likecoin-v3-proposal/) * [Imperfectly Completed: New Book “The Dao of Games”](https://ckxpress.com/en/imperfectly-completed/) * [Embedded Wallets: The Account is the Wallet, Bringing Web3 to 5 Billion Netizens](https://ckxpress.com/en/embedded-wallets/) * [A Soft Resistance Against iPhone’s Dominance: I Switched to a Black-and-White Phone](https://ckxpress.com/en/hibreak-pro/) * [LikeCoin v3 Whitepaper in Plain English](https://ckxpress.com/en/likecoin-v3-whitepaper/) Financial Freedom (14) ---------------------- * [The One Thing Bitcoin Holders Need to Do in the Face of the Quantum Computing Threat](https://ckxpress.com/en/q-day/) * [Privacy: A Feature for the Virtuous, or a Bug for the Wicked?](https://ckxpress.com/en/fluidkey/) * [Please, Just Take the Money: My 8-Year Struggle to Give Away Web3 Red Packets](https://ckxpress.com/en/cash-handout/) * [Celebrating the Year of the Horse: 188 USDC Red Packets Giveaway](https://ckxpress.com/en/year-of-horse/) * 💈 [The Underlying Logic of Queuing Gangs: Proof of Work](https://ckxpress.com/en/proof-of-work/)💈 * [From Gaming Clans to Web3 Guilds: Venturing into the Base Chain World](https://ckxpress.com/en/base-guild/) * [A Guide for Base “Immigrants”: Start Your Base Chain Life in Three Steps](https://ckxpress.com/en/base-onboarding/) * [Both sides now: Coinbase = COIN + Base](https://ckxpress.com/en/coinbase/) * 💈 [The Eight Great Misconceptions About Money: Cryptocurrency Edition](https://ckxpress.com/en/4-myths-on-crypto/) 💈 * 💈 [Eight Misconceptions About Money: The Fiat Currency Edition](https://ckxpress.com/en/4-myths-on-money/) 💈 * 💈 [One Last Gift, Part 3: Avoiding Single Point of Failure with Social Recovery](https://ckxpress.com/en/last-gift-social-recovery/) 💈 * [💈 One Last Gift, Part 2: Summoning Shenron and Finding the Dragon Ball Guardians](https://ckxpress.com/en/last-gift-dragonball/) 💈 * [💈 One Last Gift: A Decentralized Plan for Your Cryptocurrency Inheritance](https://ckxpress.com/en/last-gift-trezor/) 💈 * [Five Years of “The 5-Minute Sovereign Account”](https://ckxpress.com/en/magiclink/) Democracy (6) ------------- * [Instagram Removing End-to-End Encryption: Not a Feature Adjustment, but a Precision Harvest](https://ckxpress.com/en/instagram/) * 💈 [The price of privacy? HK$100k and 1 year in prison.](https://ckxpress.com/en/privacy/) 💈 * 💈 [Legitimacy Beyond Legality: On DAOs and Association, from the NASU Referendum](https://ckxpress.com/en/nasu/) 💈 * [Substance Over Form](https://ckxpress.com/en/substance-over-form/) * 💈 [A Decade for Ether, A Century for Humanity: Ethereum’s 10th Anniversary, Part II](https://ckxpress.com/en/a-century-for-humanity/) 💈 * 💈 [A Decade for Ether, A Century for Humanity: Ethereum’s 10th Anniversary](https://ckxpress.com/en/ethereum-10th/) 💈 Diary (6) --------- * 💈 [Imperfectionism: Ship First, Let the World Help You Improve](https://ckxpress.com/en/imperfectionism/) 💈 * [Bitcoin Pizza Day | eMPF | Sandy Lam’s Resonance](https://ckxpress.com/en/empf/) * [The Premier Hub for Mega Events, The Worst Hub for Ticketing](https://ckxpress.com/en/ticketing/) * [Shino Lin “Tempting Heart Coordinates” Concert](https://ckxpress.com/en/shino/) * [2026 Main Quest: Books and Push-ups](https://ckxpress.com/en/2026-planning/) * [2025 Report Card](https://ckxpress.com/en/2025/) * * * p.s. Looking back, freedom turns out to be right there, where the lights grow dim. --- *Originally published on [DHK dao](https://paragraph.com/@dhk/season5)*