Where The Kettle Essay Went
Where The Kettle Essay Went
On 3 March 2024 I published a piece called The Kettle Is Not The Problem. It is about repair, about the four hours I spent fixing a kettle worth eleven euros, and about the specific pleasure of understanding an object you had been using blindly for years. It is 2,200 words and it is the most widely read thing I have written. This page is the ledger for it. Every copy I made, where it went, when, and what happened there. I started keeping it because I had a vague sense that some of the copies did something and most did nothing, and a vague sense is not worth much.
"A copy is only worth making if it can be traced back. The ledger is not bookkeeping for its own sake. It is the part that makes the copies mean something.
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What the ledger actually taught me
The two destinations with the largest numbers, Hacker News and Lobsters, produced a single day of traffic each and almost no continuing readership. The two with the smallest numbers, the Dutch newsletter and one forum thread, are still sending people in 2026. I would not have believed that without the table, and I would have kept optimising for the wrong day. The email is its own category. Sixty-one percent of 214 is a smaller number than any of the others on this page and it is the only one that produced conversations that are still running.
How each copy points back
Every copy above carries a pointer to the original, and the ones that matter carry it as a link rather than as a name. The forum quote is the proof of why: somebody quoted three paragraphs in 2024 in a thread I have never posted in, and because the quote carried a link, that thread has been the best source of readers for two years. If it had said only my name, that would have been the end of it.
Keeping the ledger honest
Two things in the table are guesses and I have marked neither, so here they are: the Dutch newsletter figure does not exist because I never asked, and the 40 readers a month is a rounded average across the first half of 2026 rather than a figure from any single month. Everything else is a number I actually have.