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.
Comments
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.