Beyond Reviews

Software ate the world and left no crumbs. Yet it has never been harder to find something worth bringing into your daily life.

Support inboxes naturally skew toward the negative. When software works well, people move on with their day; they rarely write just to say thank you. That’s why, at every company I’ve worked at, we kept a dedicated space for sharing kind words from customers - a quiet source of motivation for the support team and beyond.

I see the same thing happening with writing about software online.

And I get it. When something fits naturally into your day, you don’t feel the need to stop and write about it. You just use it. It fades into the background, like a good chair or a familiar keyboard.

But that’s also the saddest part, because those quiet, everyday experiences are often the most interesting ones. Not polished reviews or launch-day impressions, but the small ways people shape their routines around software that helps them think, read, write, or simply stay organized. That’s where software becomes personal, and that’s the perspective we rarely hear.

Instead, most writing about software today comes from people whose job is to review it. And that creates a strange gap: we hear plenty about features, pricing, and updates, but much less about how these apps actually live alongside someone’s day-to-day life.

It’ll probably get worse, and in many ways it already has. Instead of writing about a piece of software and sharing real experiences online, people are vibecoding their own versions - and then asking an AI agent to post about it on Reddit, Moltbook, or wherever the conversation happens that week.

Is this the future of software? Yes. No? Maybe. Who knows.

I’m doing this the old way. If you’re not a productivity blogger or a reviewer, and there’s a piece of software you quietly enjoy - even just a small detail or a tiny habit you’ve built around it - hit reply below and tell me about it. I'm curious.

I’ll go first.

Following and learning from people you’re genuinely interested in has always worked well for me. Fifteen years ago, I did it by building a carefully curated follow list on Twitter, and it worked great. These days, I’m doing the same thing again - just using RSS and NetNewsWire.

It feels calm and unhurried: just you, a cup of coffee, and a chronological stream of posts from people you chose to follow on purpose. Thanks to Brent Simmons, NetNewsWire is completely free, so it’s easy to start the same way.