Background Image
 

Tedium. The newsletter all your other newsletters look up to.

Since 2015, Ernie Smith's Tedium has been hunting for the end of the long tail, and we've yet to find it. But we'd sure love it if you followed us on our journey. Especially now that we're ten friggin' years old and we're still using a Street Fighter II slogan as our subscribe button. Validate the use of obscure video game slang as a successful subscription strategy. Click the button.

 

 Check out our latest attention ploys 

The Worst Spam Emails
The Latest

The Worst Spam Emails

Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they’re just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job.

By Ernie Smith • September 11, 2026
 About  Archives  Sponsor Us Support Us On Ko-Fi
Follow Us
Mastodon Bluesky Twitter

Automattic Minus Matt

Matt Mullenweg takes an involuntary leave of absence from Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Let’s hope he uses his time away thoughtfully.

By Ernie Smith • September 10, 2026

Second Quest

In a normal culture, a company as gray-haired as MapQuest would not be having a straight-on cultural revival in 2026. But our culture is not normal.

By Ernie Smith • September 2, 2026

Can Self-Hosting Be Simple?

You can go into the deep end way too easily with a self-hosting project. But is a less-is-more approach possible? Here’s what my attempt to build a “third-place” box taught me.

By Ernie Smith • August 26, 2026

The Negative Option

In the 1980s and 1990s, Columbia House could do no wrong—it was a great way to get 12 CDs for a penny. But its business model kind of set the stage for a lot of bad e-commerce.

By Ernie Smith • August 24, 2026

Card Sharks

The 1980s proved surprisingly fruitful for licensed greeting card mascots. It turns out American Greetings understood the Marvel playbook before Marvel did.

By Ernie Smith • August 12, 2026

Vibe-Coded Flattery

I’ve seen a strange problem in my inbox that I haven’t been able to put into words. A saga involving a botched app release helped me figure it out.

By Ernie Smith • August 9, 2026

The Earnest Era Ends

When we lost Glen Hansard last week, his work still fresh and lively, it was a reminder that the world has changed more than we think it has.

By Ernie Smith • August 6, 2026

Put A Tag On It

The pricing gun should have been a dead technology years before it actually was. But state laws artificially kept it around as a shield against the scary barcode.

By Ernie Smith • August 1, 2026

Fa Fa

My brain-breaking trick for weaning off of Facebook involved creating a fake URL for Google News. Blame the home row.

By Ernie Smith • July 27, 2026
Want more? Check the archives! ⮕