Riddance is now completely free

What we learned after three months on Substack

Riddance is ending paid subscriptions. If you’ve been a paying subscriber, thank you. Your support means the world to us. But we’re refunding your money for remaining yearly subscriptions, and cancelling future payments.

We’re still all-in on Riddance. So what are we doing?

First of all, our paid subscription was not supposed to be a donation. Riddance is a for-profit company, not a nonprofit newsroom. Second, we don’t want to put posts behind a paywall. We underestimated how difficult those decisions would be, so we only paywalled one post to date. That’s not fair to paying subscribers.

Riddance’s mission is to help people figure out what’s real on the internet. We do that by:

1. Creating media literacy and educational content. We think we’re exceptionally good at this. Riddance and the JeremyFindsAI social media pages are part of this effort.

2. Covering inauthentic AI content at scale. We have a huge database of AI media and inauthentic accounts. Our internal tools help us find this content quickly.

We built a robust technology stack for our reporting, and frankly, it’s working better than we initially imagined. As a result, we need to shift our role in the information ecosystem and prioritize getting harmful content offline.

Many investigations uncover content that doesn’t violate the Terms of Service of any platform but still deserves a report. Other times, the content is very inappropriate or harmful, and platforms need to know that right away. Even when it’s newsworthy, holding harmful content for writing and editing feels selfish.

To be clear, we will still report on harmful trends, but hopefully this is after they are known and under control. It’s very common to report on ongoing risks in the cybersecurity industry. AI video has turned video platforms into a more accessible surface for manipulation and scams, so taking inspiration from cybersecurity reporting makes sense.

Whether you were a paying subscriber or someone who just wants to help us on this mission, here’s how you can:

• Stay subscribed so you can receive articles and media literacy guides.

• If you’re part of an organization’s Trust & Safety team, or know someone who is, we would love to hear from you.

• No matter who you are, send us an email at hi@riddance.ai and just say hi. We chose that address for a reason!

Thank you for your support.