In defense of
slow reading.

The web was supposed to make us better readers. We were going to hyperlink our way to wisdom, follow a thread from one idea to another, build a commonplace book out of the whole internet. For a brief moment, early in the aughts, that's what RSS felt like.

Then came the feed. Not a feed — a specific technology with a quiet grammar — but The Feed. An infinite, ranked, notification-fed river optimized for engagement. We stopped subscribing to writers and started subscribing to platforms. We stopped reading and started scrolling.

Cubic is an argument that this trade was not worth it.

We think the sensible unit of reading is the article, not the post. We think a reader should know who wrote what they're reading. We think chronological order — the order things happened in — is a more trustworthy surface than any algorithm's guess at what you want next.

The internet didn't make us impatient. The software did. We can write different software.

So we made a reader with no algorithm. No recommendation engine trained on what other users clicked. No notifications designed to manufacture urgency. No dark patterns, no streaks, no leaderboards. No tracking — we literally cannot see what you read; your history is encrypted on your device.

What we made instead are blends. A blend is a stack of feeds, assembled by editors who know a particular beat — software, or business, or essays, or world affairs. A blend is a considered recommendation from one human to another. You can clone it, edit it, save it as your own. It's closer to a playlist than a timeline.

We're not trying to rebuild Twitter. We're trying to rebuild the reading habit we had before we spent every evening scrolling.

If that sounds like you — if you still open long articles in a tab intending to read them later and they pile up — Cubic was made for you. Open a blend. Read two articles. Close the app. Come back tomorrow.

— The Cubic team
Brooklyn & Lisbon · April 2026

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