# 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.

**Published by:** [DHK dao](https://paragraph.com/@dhk/)
**Published on:** 2026-06-16
**Categories:** writing, appledaily
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@dhk/season5

## Content

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) 💈 Will Taiwan and Hong Kong Disappear in the Age of AI? 💈 An Old Salt’s Upgrade Diary: Is the AI in WordPress 7.0 Any Use? 💈 Hong Kong Sends Undercover Agents Into a Bookstore 💈 💈 Dear Algo, What Is an Algorithm? 💈 💈 Travelling Back to the Qin Dynasty to Maintain Stability 💈 3ook.com – Give books a voice 💈 One Punch to Wake the Readers: Independent Bookstore Facing One Lawsuit After Another 💈 💈 A Slave to Freedom, or A Free Slave? On Jimmy Lai of Apple Daily💈 LikeCoin v3 Upgrade Accomplished: Heading Toward the 8th Minting Anniversary Just Books — The Bookstore That Sells eBooks Paper Books Sold Out, E-books Take Over: The Dignity and Meaning of Out of Print Silent Night, Upgrade Night. My Fear Of, Your Missing Out. Decentralized Publishing: The YouTube of Printed Media Stocks have IPOs, Tokens have ICOs, Books Need IBOs 💈 Reflections on the Hong Kong Deadly Fire: Today’s Newspapers and Magazines, Tomorrow’s Cultural Heritage 💈 Thanksgiving to the Preservers of Culture: Airdropping ETH and LIKE Acting as a Human ATM: The Price Scare on LikeCoin v3 Launch Day and My Rookie Mistake A Big Question for Creatives: Should You Publish in Print or Digital? Upgrade to LikeCoin v3 and Share a 10,000,000 LIKE Incentive Pool (Full Tutorial Included) LikeCoin v3 Upgrade Countdown: 5 Days Left. See You at the Launch Party on November 3rd. LikeCoin v3 Whitepaper Officially Submitted for Community Vote Imperfectly Completed: New Book “The Dao of Games” Embedded Wallets: The Account is the Wallet, Bringing Web3 to 5 Billion Netizens A Soft Resistance Against iPhone’s Dominance: I Switched to a Black-and-White Phone LikeCoin v3 Whitepaper in Plain English Financial Freedom (14) The One Thing Bitcoin Holders Need to Do in the Face of the Quantum Computing Threat Privacy: A Feature for the Virtuous, or a Bug for the Wicked? Please, Just Take the Money: My 8-Year Struggle to Give Away Web3 Red Packets Celebrating the Year of the Horse: 188 USDC Red Packets Giveaway 💈 The Underlying Logic of Queuing Gangs: Proof of Work💈 From Gaming Clans to Web3 Guilds: Venturing into the Base Chain World A Guide for Base “Immigrants”: Start Your Base Chain Life in Three Steps Both sides now: Coinbase = COIN + Base 💈 The Eight Great Misconceptions About Money: Cryptocurrency Edition 💈 💈 Eight Misconceptions About Money: The Fiat Currency Edition 💈 💈 One Last Gift, Part 3: Avoiding Single Point of Failure with Social Recovery 💈 💈 One Last Gift, Part 2: Summoning Shenron and Finding the Dragon Ball Guardians 💈 💈 One Last Gift: A Decentralized Plan for Your Cryptocurrency Inheritance 💈 Five Years of “The 5-Minute Sovereign Account” Democracy (6) Instagram Removing End-to-End Encryption: Not a Feature Adjustment, but a Precision Harvest 💈 The price of privacy? HK$100k and 1 year in prison. 💈 💈 Legitimacy Beyond Legality: On DAOs and Association, from the NASU Referendum 💈 Substance Over Form 💈 A Decade for Ether, A Century for Humanity: Ethereum’s 10th Anniversary, Part II 💈 💈 A Decade for Ether, A Century for Humanity: Ethereum’s 10th Anniversary 💈 Diary (6) 💈 Imperfectionism: Ship First, Let the World Help You Improve 💈 Bitcoin Pizza Day | eMPF | Sandy Lam’s Resonance The Premier Hub for Mega Events, The Worst Hub for Ticketing Shino Lin “Tempting Heart Coordinates” Concert 2026 Main Quest: Books and Push-ups 2025 Report Card p.s. Looking back, freedom turns out to be right there, where the lights grow dim.

## Publication Information

- [DHK dao](https://paragraph.com/@dhk/): Publication homepage
- [All Posts](https://paragraph.com/@dhk/): More posts from this publication
- [RSS Feed](https://api.paragraph.com/blogs/rss/@dhk): Subscribe to updates
- [Twitter](https://twitter.com/dhkdao): Follow on Twitter