Maybe it's just me, but every app eventually reaches the same awkward phase in life. You know, the one where it looks in the mirror and decides it no longer wants to be itself.

Spotify desperately wants to be TikTok. Instagram has spent years trying to convince us it's YouTube. LinkedIn has somehow evolved into the internet's largest group therapy session where everyone is simultaneously "honored," "grateful," "humbled," and inexplicably announcing promotions with the emotional intensity of a Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Writing platforms aren't immune either.

They don't just help you write anymore. They help you manage the experience of being a writer. Which, if you think about it for a second, is a very different job.

I've been spending the last week bouncing between Leaflet and Substack. Not abandoning one for the other—I plan to keep using both—I'm just curious. The internet always has another corner to poke around in.

What caught me off guard wasn't some revolutionary feature that made me think, well, this changes everything. It was the opposite. Or rather, the lack of it.

There's something strangely comforting about opening a platform and instinctively knowing where everything lives. No archaeological expedition through three different settings pages. No muttering, "Where on earth did they hide the website editor this time?" while opening menu after menu like you're trying to unlock bonus levels in a game you never intended to play.

Sometimes I genuinely wonder whether product teams mistake complexity for sophistication.

Substack deserves its reputation. Honestly, it does. Independent publishing would look very different without it. It turned newsletters into legitimate careers, convinced people they could own an audience instead of endlessly chasing algorithms, and for that alone it deserves credit.

But somewhere along the journey—quietly, almost politely—it also developed what I can only describe as chronic featuritis.

Every update feels like the result of a meeting where somebody says, "Hear me out... what if we added just one more thing?"

Silence.

Nods.

Standing ovation.

Shipped.

I nearly sure that software companies experience physical discomfort when they leave a product untouched for longer than three months.

Imagine buying a plain notebook because you miss journaling.

The cashier smiles.

"Excellent choice. We've just rolled out Notebook 4.2."

"What changed?"

"It now tracks engagement, offers productivity insights and sends you a weekly recap of your handwriting."

No.

Please.

I don't need my writing software convincing me I'm running a venture-backed media company.

I don't particularly care that someone in Ohio clicked on my essay at 2:17 a.m., stayed for nineteen seconds, scrolled halfway down, sneezed—probably—and left.

What I need for starters is embarrassingly simple.

A blank page.

A blinking cursor.

A place where sentences can arrive before dashboards do.

Maybe—and this is the mildly uncomfortable part—we did this to ourselves.

Writers kept asking for custom domains. Then SEO. Then referral systems. Memberships. Branding. Audience analytics. Integrations. Automation. AI tools. Growth dashboards. More graphs. More metrics. More ways to measure everything except whether the writing actually said something worth reading.

And the platforms simply listened. So we are on the same boat I guess.

Now opening a writing app occasionally feels less like beginning an essay and more like your first day at a corporate job where someone hands you fourteen login credentials and tells you to "explore the ecosystem."

Feature creep doesn't happen dramatically. It accumulates.

It's the digital equivalent of that kitchen drawer every family has—the one containing dead batteries, birthday candles, takeaway menus from restaurants that closed six years ago, mystery keys, rubber bands, three chargers for phones nobody owns anymore, and exactly the thing you're not looking for.

Software ages the same way.

Leaflet isn't perfect. It's still in beta, and you can feel that in places. There are rough edges. There are features I'd happily steal from Substack tomorrow morning.

But I hope it hangs onto one thing for as long as possible.

Restraint.

Because somewhere along the way, the internet became convinced that every problem can be solved by adding another button.

Sometimes the better design decision is deleting one.

Maybe even ten.

I don't need another dashboard. I don't need another acronym—SEO, GEO, AEO, whatever new three-letter combination Silicon Valley invents next Tuesday.

I just want to write without feeling like I accidentally enrolled in a product management course.

Perhaps that's an unfashionable opinion in 2026.

Or perhaps writing platforms have become so busy building for creators that they've forgotten the quiet person who opened the app for one reason alone: To write.

Is that asking for too much?