Hey there 👋
This one’s a little different.
No tech breakdown today.
After more than a year of explaining technology here, and the better part of a decade doing it everywhere else, I want to use this one post to talk about SK NEXUS itself.
Where we are, what’s changing, and why.
If you’re new here, the short version: almost none of this affects you.
Most of what we publish stays free, and you can keep reading exactly as you have been.
If you’ve been with us for a while, this is the one I’d really like you to read to the end.
Some context first; SK NEXUS is old, by internet standards. It started around eight years ago as a blog about tech, and it has lived on Facebook Groups, Medium, Wix, a custom-built site, and now Substack.
The platforms kept changing.
The job never did: explain what tech actually means, not what marketing says it means.
Today it’s three of us. I edit and write, and two contributors research and write alongside everything else going on in their lives.
Between us, this publication takes 70 to 80 hours a month. More than a hundred articles on this site, readers in 65 countries, and every word of it free since day one.
I’m laying that out so the rest of this post has its shape.
This is a small, stubborn thing, older than half the platforms it has lived on, run by people who do it because they love it.
The Work That Gets Scraped
Some of you may be familiar with our Deep Dives.
When we publish one, the kind where we trace a company’s whole arc or take a technology apart piece by piece, that single article can take a month, sometimes more.
Researching it, sourcing it, checking it, rewriting it until it actually makes sense to a normal person.
These are the pieces we’re proudest of: the story of the one Dutch company every advanced chip on earth depends on, the month-long trace of how NVIDIA went from a gaming-chip company to the backbone of AI, the full arc of how computers became the thing in your pocket.
Go read any of them and you’ll find something you won’t get easily on an internet drowning in listicles and hundred-word pages dressed up as articles.
Here’s what happens to that month of work.
An AI scrapes it. The summary gets served to someone who never visits the page. The impressions climb, and almost nobody reads the real thing.
That chip-monopoly piece has been shown in search results more than forty-seven thousand times.
Forty of those turned into actual visits.
Forty.
And I can see the same story in our own logs: the AI engines crawl us constantly, and on a good day they send back one or two visitors. The scraping only goes one way.
And it’s not us having a bad quarter. Independent tracking found that scraping of tech and consumer-electronics content more than doubled over the past year, making it the single most scraped category on the internet.
Our exact lane.
The State of the Feed
There’s a second half to this, and it’s the platform itself.
That month of work goes out into a feed where newsletters publish AI-written filler every single day. Generic, churned out without anyone really thinking it through. And promoted anyway, because the system mostly rewards whoever switched on a paid button and kept posting.
For a while I wondered if I was imagining it.
Then someone measured it. An independent analysis ran AI detection across the top bestselling publications on Substack, and technology came out as the most AI-flooded category on the platform. Roughly one in four top tech posts showed heavy machine generation. The category we write in is the one drowning fastest.
And then there are badges.
The bestseller badges here are earned with paid subscribers, a hundred of them for the first one. The leaderboards rank publications by paid revenue and paid subscriber growth.
Go look for a free publication on any of them; we haven’t found one. As far as we can tell, most of the discovery machinery runs on paid subscriptions, which tracks, because a cut of paid subscriptions is how the platform earns.
I’m not blaming Substack, it’s a business making rational choices. But it means a free publication is close to invisible to that machinery, no matter how careful the work is.
The Problem With Free
There’s a third thing I’ve had to admit to myself, and this one’s about me.
When everything you make is free, people treat all of it the same. And the assumption attached to free is that it can’t be worth much. I caught myself doing exactly this not long ago. I paid for a workshop, real money, and I sat through it taking notes, valuing every minute. The same material offered to me for free, I’d probably have half watched and forgotten. Paying changed how I treated it.
That’s just how people work.
Before a price tag is ever about money, it’s a signal that says this is worth your attention. Right now our deepest work goes out free into a feed where free reads as disposable, and gets mistaken for the same filler we’re trying so hard not to be.
Lost Patience
And one day, it just ticked me off.
I haven’t lost interest in tech, or in writing about it.
We’ve got something like thirty pieces in the pipeline right now, and every one of them gets reviewed and edited until it’s the best we can do at the time. I myself write across more than four surfaces on a regular basis.
What I’ve lost patience with is the growth game.
Chasing numbers on a platform that buries careful work under a daily flood of the careless kind.
I wrote recently on my personal blog about how every metric eventually rots into a vanity metric. Followers can be bought. Engagement can be botted. Somewhere in the last year, my math changed.
I would rather write for one person who genuinely cares what we think than a hundred who tap a like and scroll on without really reading.
A smaller room of people who value the work beats a big number that doesn’t.
The Decision
You’ve probably read a dozen going-paid posts by now.
They follow a script: a wall of reasons, a pricing table, a paragraph of feelings.
So I’ll give you the part that script usually skips.
This took most of this year to decide.
And what finally settled it was noticing what the current setup was doing to us: the work we care most about getting treated as disposable, and the three of us slowly learning to care a little less about making it.
That’s the thing being protected here, more than any revenue line: the will to keep doing this properly.
So here’s the change, and we’re rolling it out as we go.
The switch flips on with this post. The rest gets handled over the coming weeks: sorting the mechanics, working back through the archive, catching the edge cases. I’d rather start straight with you and adjust than wait for everything to be perfect.
Deep Dives go paid. That’s the certain part. They cost the most to make, and they’re the work I least want to see treated as disposable, so that’s where the paid tier begins.
For series, we’re trying a split. Part 1 stays free, so you can read the opener and decide if it’s for you. The later parts go to paid subscribers. You always get a real piece of every series for free, and the deeper installments help fund the work behind them. This one’s more of a judgment call than a rule, and we’ll see how it feels in practice.
Paid subscribers also get Substack Chat, where we share rougher thoughts and what we’re digging into before it becomes an article.
Where the support goes is simple: paying the team fairly, covering the tools, and buying the room to go deeper. This is still a passion project. It just needs to become one that can sustain itself.
What’s Not Changing
Every standalone article in the categories you already read us for stays free: consumer education, emerging tech, industry highlights, gaming, everyday security, and before you buy.
Those are the core of SK NEXUS, and they stay open. The entire back catalogue stays free too. Nothing already published gets locked up after the fact. If we add new, more specialized formats later, those might land on the paid side, but the categories you already come here for will not move.
And the free side is going to get better, not thinner. We’re going to be more active on Notes, post more often, put out more of the short, useful stuff.
Nobody here is trying to starve the free reader into paying. The deep work goes on a pedestal where it stops getting mistaken for filler, and the everyday work, which is growing, stays open to everyone.
To Wrap Up
We write for the everyday curious person, whether they’re in Karachi or Dubai. And I know that in a lot of the world, the price of a subscription is not a rounding error. It’s a real decision, weighed against real things.
If that’s you, hear me clearly: the free side of SK NEXUS was built for you, on purpose, and it is not a consolation prize. Most of our articles, the entire archive, every Note, the comments, all of it stays open, and there will be more of it than before.
Stay, read, push back in the comments, send a piece to a friend. That counts as support too. It always has.
In the end, depending on who you are, this goes one of two ways.
If you just found us, none of this should worry you. Most of what we do is free, you’ve got more than enough articles to dig through without paying a cent, and the conversation’s open. Read, comment, stick around.
If you’ve been here for a while, reading, replying, sending our stuff to a friend, then this one’s basically for you, and I’ll just say this - Thank You!
Genuinely.
You’re the reason there’s anything worth making sustainable in the first place.
This wasn’t an easy call. It’s the kind of decision you only make because the ground shifted under you, the scraping, the flood of machine made filler, the way good work gets buried now.
We’d rather meet that honestly, with you, than let the thing wind down without ever telling you why. And if going paid doesn’t work, you’ll hear that from me too.
A while back we ended our Year in Review by saying independent media survives on reader trust.
I still believe that.
But now I’ve just learned the other half: trust is what you build on.
It doesn’t pay the writers or fund the next big step by itself.
Sustainability is what turns the trust into something that lasts.
We’ve spent a year earning yours. If you’re in, you can support the work.
If you’re not there yet, keep reading. The door stays open either way.
See you in the next one.
Saqib Tahir
Founder and Editor
SK NEXUS