I've been blogging on wordpress.com since 2006 and think writing for the Internet still underrated (a point Patrick Collison and many others have also made). At some point I got a custom domain, which I then thought I'd renewed but hadn't (ambiguous emails from Wordpress) and switched to a different custom domain.
I see a lot of complaints, often justified, about the dominance of the big social media companies, but not nearly as many people deciding to go their own, off those sites.
Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility). So, even with your own little website, you're still completely at the mercy of big tech.
I still highly recommend it though. Your social media account comes and goes, but your own little website will be there however long you want it to be, display whatever info about you you want it to display, and it can look however you want it to look.
Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility).
Seems like this might depend on the objective. Spamming social media and aiming for search rank might be necessary for ad revenue, self-promotion, or other conversions, whatever those might be. But it is not strictly necessary. Doing your own thing and making something cool can be 100% the end in itself.
The issue I have leans the other way. I'm hesitant to self-publish anymore primarily because I don't want my work to get sucked up into the commercial machinery of the Big Tech Web. I have no interest and gain no benefit from feeding AI, scrapers, aggregators, or other "creators" who do surf around for other people's work they can mill into their own hash for their own purposes.
I'd love it if I could somehow publish only for other end-user humans, but I don't see how I can do that without paradoxically engaging with some aspect of the commercial apparatus. It's like a Foucaultian nightmare. There's no way not to be part of the system. Rejecting it requires first embracing it.
To wit: here I am on HN complaining about giving away my work for free
I get it, a decade or so ago I happily blogged around on my own and plenty of other websites, my posts were released under CC BY-SA whenever I could get away with it. I was quite happy to do that! It brought me all-expenses-paid conferences, TV interviews, you name it! (Not a lot of tech bloggers at the time in this part of the world, I got cool opportunities simply for existing.)
I was "famous" enough that ChatGPT now definitely knows about me. If you ask it very nicely it'll without a doubt refer to me in particular, by my full name, but every single detail it'll tell you about me is wrong. Where I'm from, what do I do, everything. And it's all just slightly, but demonstrably incorrect. No, I'm not from Serbia, I'm from Bosnia, and no, I'm not an infosec guy, but a devops guy, those kinds of errors. And of course, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I already get to live that shitty future you fear, my work has been used already, but in the worst way imaginable.
Needless to say, I haven't actually posted anything in quite a while (excluding HN and Mastodon), and if I ever do so again, I'll do my best to block every single AI user agent I find. I'll also switch to CC BY-NC (only non-commercial purposes) and pretend like that actually means anything.
Definitely for the first paragraph. I've got a little blog and to be honest, I could careless if anyone ever reads it. I do it because I want to. If someone stumbles upon it and finds something useful, great! Otherwise its mostly for me. The only somewhat 'promotion' I do is, if I get a lot of the same technical questions over and over, I'll write a blog post. So next time someone asks, I just give them the link to the blog post. Im still active in my University's discord. Lots of people every semester get confused by pointers in C on their first encounter. So when those questions get asked, I paste the link in there and that clears up all the confusion. I can help others, but I don't need to constantly have the same conversation every 6 months.
Charge something like $.05 to get access. Will get rid of worries around feeding the AI, scrappers, and aggregators. Not sure how to limit the (human) plagiarism angle.
I don't know why posting it on social media is considered "spamming". Putting an article on forums or a subreddit where people might find it interesting seems reasonable, likely will garner some views, and possibly some interesting conversation.
It also doesn't have to be self serving. I've thought of writing articles because I see a lot of misconceptions on various topics I've seen on certain language subreddits. But the roadblock is in the effort to make my "research" (toy projects) into these things suitable for public consumption, not any particular fear that it won't do something for me. If it helps even one person, awesome.
I agree with you, at least in principle. I've shared things I've written to various sites, including this one. My guidelines:
- I never write with the goal of gaining traffic.
- I only share things organically when it makes sense.
If I were on Reddit and someone was talking about Foo, and I'd written something relevant about Foo, I'll send them the link. I've I write something and then realize people here might think it's interesting, I'll submit it. In short, I want to participate in the conversation, not make the conversation all about me.
I keep stumbling upon these small blogs or personal websites, sometimes it's just someone's mastodon account with a link to a github page. They're incredibly valueable gems not just for their content but also because they tend to cite or link others in their domain of expertise.
I think the biggest issue today is it's hard to find blogs and other tiny websites via search engine. You almost have to be on social media for people to find your website.
I have to admit, I have never really understood this need to be found and this focus on discoverability. Unless you are monetizing your audience, why does it matter whether 10, 1000 or 100,000 people read your blog? If I write something on the Internet, or release some open source program, or post a video, I’m not making any money off of views: I’m doing it for myself. So I don’t really ultimately care how many people read it or view it.
I firmly believe the best content on the Internet is not necessarily the stuff optimized for search engines and audience-building. We shouldn’t really care about that.
When people were blogging because it was fun for them, the world was full of various content. Once a few got rich (or at least well-to-do and famous) from it, it all went to hell.
If you're blogging and worrying about "how will readers find me" you're doing it wrong, and are basically doomed to fail.
You blog because you like to write, and readers will slowly accumulate over time. Comments and/or a small forum can work wonders, too, as long as you're protected from spam.
It was hard to get your blog discovered 15 years ago, too. Recall "blogrolls", where blogs would link to other blogs — networking to securing such links would be the analogue to making yourself visible on social media today.
I wonder — in absolute terms, is the number of people you can reach smaller today? It's surely proportionally smaller because the internet is much bigger.
If you ever come across it - I'd love to find the "MkDocs-Material of Photo Gallery". Structured folders of photos - run one command - a slick, static-HTML site is built. A feature where you could put full-size photos in there, and the tool would automatically generate web-friendly sizes... Keep an eye out (or share here if you know a good one!)
There are many others of course. Perhaps the most important part is finding an editor. (I wound up marrying one, which is not uncommon.) I've seen recs for Sasha Chapin: https://www.sashachapin.com/
Comments
I've been blogging on wordpress.com since 2006 and think writing for the Internet still underrated (a point Patrick Collison and many others have also made). At some point I got a custom domain, which I then thought I'd renewed but hadn't (ambiguous emails from Wordpress) and switched to a different custom domain.
I see a lot of complaints, often justified, about the dominance of the big social media companies, but not nearly as many people deciding to go their own, off those sites.
Even if you do your own thing and make something super cool, nobody's gonna stumble upon it randomly. You either have to spam it on social media or aim for high ranking in search results (while that's still somewhat of a possibility). So, even with your own little website, you're still completely at the mercy of big tech.
I still highly recommend it though. Your social media account comes and goes, but your own little website will be there however long you want it to be, display whatever info about you you want it to display, and it can look however you want it to look.
Seems like this might depend on the objective. Spamming social media and aiming for search rank might be necessary for ad revenue, self-promotion, or other conversions, whatever those might be. But it is not strictly necessary. Doing your own thing and making something cool can be 100% the end in itself.
The issue I have leans the other way. I'm hesitant to self-publish anymore primarily because I don't want my work to get sucked up into the commercial machinery of the Big Tech Web. I have no interest and gain no benefit from feeding AI, scrapers, aggregators, or other "creators" who do surf around for other people's work they can mill into their own hash for their own purposes.
I'd love it if I could somehow publish only for other end-user humans, but I don't see how I can do that without paradoxically engaging with some aspect of the commercial apparatus. It's like a Foucaultian nightmare. There's no way not to be part of the system. Rejecting it requires first embracing it.
To wit: here I am on HN complaining about giving away my work for free
I get it, a decade or so ago I happily blogged around on my own and plenty of other websites, my posts were released under CC BY-SA whenever I could get away with it. I was quite happy to do that! It brought me all-expenses-paid conferences, TV interviews, you name it! (Not a lot of tech bloggers at the time in this part of the world, I got cool opportunities simply for existing.)
I was "famous" enough that ChatGPT now definitely knows about me. If you ask it very nicely it'll without a doubt refer to me in particular, by my full name, but every single detail it'll tell you about me is wrong. Where I'm from, what do I do, everything. And it's all just slightly, but demonstrably incorrect. No, I'm not from Serbia, I'm from Bosnia, and no, I'm not an infosec guy, but a devops guy, those kinds of errors. And of course, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I already get to live that shitty future you fear, my work has been used already, but in the worst way imaginable.
Needless to say, I haven't actually posted anything in quite a while (excluding HN and Mastodon), and if I ever do so again, I'll do my best to block every single AI user agent I find. I'll also switch to CC BY-NC (only non-commercial purposes) and pretend like that actually means anything.
Definitely for the first paragraph. I've got a little blog and to be honest, I could careless if anyone ever reads it. I do it because I want to. If someone stumbles upon it and finds something useful, great! Otherwise its mostly for me. The only somewhat 'promotion' I do is, if I get a lot of the same technical questions over and over, I'll write a blog post. So next time someone asks, I just give them the link to the blog post. Im still active in my University's discord. Lots of people every semester get confused by pointers in C on their first encounter. So when those questions get asked, I paste the link in there and that clears up all the confusion. I can help others, but I don't need to constantly have the same conversation every 6 months.
Charge something like $.05 to get access. Will get rid of worries around feeding the AI, scrappers, and aggregators. Not sure how to limit the (human) plagiarism angle.
"AI" had no issue pirating books (books3 and all that).
If your blog is readable by and interesting to humans, it will be exploitable by leeches.
I don't know why posting it on social media is considered "spamming". Putting an article on forums or a subreddit where people might find it interesting seems reasonable, likely will garner some views, and possibly some interesting conversation.
It also doesn't have to be self serving. I've thought of writing articles because I see a lot of misconceptions on various topics I've seen on certain language subreddits. But the roadblock is in the effort to make my "research" (toy projects) into these things suitable for public consumption, not any particular fear that it won't do something for me. If it helps even one person, awesome.
I agree with you, at least in principle. I've shared things I've written to various sites, including this one. My guidelines:
- I never write with the goal of gaining traffic.
- I only share things organically when it makes sense.
If I were on Reddit and someone was talking about Foo, and I'd written something relevant about Foo, I'll send them the link. I've I write something and then realize people here might think it's interesting, I'll submit it. In short, I want to participate in the conversation, not make the conversation all about me.
I keep stumbling upon these small blogs or personal websites, sometimes it's just someone's mastodon account with a link to a github page. They're incredibly valueable gems not just for their content but also because they tend to cite or link others in their domain of expertise.
The internet is still plenty open, people just prefer the path of least resistance
I think the biggest issue today is it's hard to find blogs and other tiny websites via search engine. You almost have to be on social media for people to find your website.
I have to admit, I have never really understood this need to be found and this focus on discoverability. Unless you are monetizing your audience, why does it matter whether 10, 1000 or 100,000 people read your blog? If I write something on the Internet, or release some open source program, or post a video, I’m not making any money off of views: I’m doing it for myself. So I don’t really ultimately care how many people read it or view it.
I firmly believe the best content on the Internet is not necessarily the stuff optimized for search engines and audience-building. We shouldn’t really care about that.
When people were blogging because it was fun for them, the world was full of various content. Once a few got rich (or at least well-to-do and famous) from it, it all went to hell.
If you're blogging and worrying about "how will readers find me" you're doing it wrong, and are basically doomed to fail.
You blog because you like to write, and readers will slowly accumulate over time. Comments and/or a small forum can work wonders, too, as long as you're protected from spam.
Hacker news is how I find things worth reading these days. If this place didn't exist my internet consumption would be cut in half (at least).
You could try Marginalia's small web / blogosphere modes at https://search.marginalia.nu/
It was hard to get your blog discovered 15 years ago, too. Recall "blogrolls", where blogs would link to other blogs — networking to securing such links would be the analogue to making yourself visible on social media today.
I wonder — in absolute terms, is the number of people you can reach smaller today? It's surely proportionally smaller because the internet is much bigger.
I've got a blog on my own domain, and I'd love to be able to write as well as you one day. So far I've mostly stuck to photos (⌒_⌒;).
Ooh! I want to start publishing photos online. What do you use? I looked at your website but it doesn't seem familiar.
If you ever come across it - I'd love to find the "MkDocs-Material of Photo Gallery". Structured folders of photos - run one command - a slick, static-HTML site is built. A feature where you could put full-size photos in there, and the tool would automatically generate web-friendly sizes... Keep an eye out (or share here if you know a good one!)
That is sort of what I have now, a script using pillow and osxphotos to export my albums.
It's just hugo with a custom theme. I run my script to export photo albums from iPhoto, then I add some discussion in markdown.
I'm very old school. I still have a Flickr Pro subscription.
You can do it! https://writeofpassage.com/
In books about writing, I like:
How Fiction Works
Reading Like a Writer
Writing With Style
There are many others of course. Perhaps the most important part is finding an editor. (I wound up marrying one, which is not uncommon.) I've seen recs for Sasha Chapin: https://www.sashachapin.com/