/s, in case it isn’t obvious

I try to avoid ranting all that much on the blog because there’s enough hot takes out there already. While rants perform better than therapyposting about how great MS is, there’s zero monetization on CC, so it makes no real difference to me. 

I’m free to talk about how listening to a Trampled by Turtles song makes me a better churner. I’m not ESPN laying off actual journalists to give people like Pat McAfee and Stephen A. Smith an even bigger platform to yell even louder from.

But I was pretty taken aback by an email that I received today and it got me thinking about the direction of this hobby as an “industry” and how we’re not safe from enshittification anywhere we turn. 

The email in question is from Going, which many of you may remember as the rebranded name of the former Scott’s Cheap Flights. 

I was a huge fan of SCF back in the day. I booked my pre-churning international trips thanks to the alerts. I talked to Scott on reddit. Hell, I applied for a flight searcher job there in 2018 (in reviewing my application doc just now, I’m not surprised I didn’t get the job since I sent a 3 layover itinerary to get to Tanzania). 

And I get it – most businesses that are adjacent to travel or finance in 2026 are going to gradually morph into an affiliate business. There’s way more money to be made in talking about credit cards than there is cheap cash fares. 

But I take umbrage at this slimy used car salesman style of MySpace bulletins “fwd this or ur cursed for 30 years” and LinkedInLunatics-esque typing. like. this. all over an extra 10 or 20k URs in an attempt to squeeze some final referral money out of the promo period. At least the readers that take advantage of it will get one extra night at the Hyatt Place in Lubbock over those that apply on July 31. 

I know we’re all desensitized to opening new cards, but to the average person on the mailing list, that’s another hard pull, another credit line, another sky-high interest rate. It’s not the kind of thing that should be done on an impulse unless you know what you’re doing. 

Direct response copywriting is among the best advertising out there when done correctly. But if you’re going to try and skip the marketing funnel (i.e. ‘Why the Chase Sapphire Preferred is the best low annual fee travel card” for awareness or “The Chase Sapphire Preferred vs. the Citi Strata Premier” for consideration), it better not be phrased that you will “lose 100k points” as a result of not opening the email. 

And I don’t have an inherent problem with affiliate links. It turns out that maintaining a community is a lot of work, and I’m ok with creators earning referral income in return for their work. But that’s for original content that is helpful, not manufactured urgency. 

Anyway, I’m sure the referral money is flowing as a result of the email so I’m the idiot here, but it still feels weird to see referral farming being done so shamelessly by a brand that I used to really trust for travel. Apparently you don’t even need to be purchased by Red Ventures to sell out these days. To me, this is such a human hobby centered on human interests of travel and financial independence and the commoditization of it is really lame. 

So if you need to apply for a new card today, ask a friend for a referral link. Don’t have a churning friend? Go to a meetup. Buy someone a drink. Chat about what works for you and discover something new. All of that is going to get you way farther than shilling for the banks, and you don’t even have to lose your editorial freedom to do it. 

Juejue!

Pictured: some future affiliate bloggers discuss Fortnite the CSP