Comment by ghaff
Comment by ghaff a day ago
Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.
Comment by ghaff a day ago
Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.
My blog is probably more detrimental to my “brand” than helpful. I also couldn’t care less about the self-promotion or monetization aspect or anything of that sort. I find writing and the act of creating to be a type of catharsis. I write exclusively for me.
If you feel the occasional urge to blog - maybe just be self indulgent about it? I get a strange sense of satisfaction from twiddling with the CSS on a rainy afternoon. Just my random 2p that nobody asked for :)
To have notable income from blogging requires a very different frequency and posts which attract a broader audience (unless I go really deep and paywall it for experts) That turns blogging from keeping notes and sharing experience to a Job in itself. A Job I for one wouldn't like.
I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.
Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention.
I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.
And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.
Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.
>I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere
That's been true of me. A paragraph or three that I would once have done as a blog now slip neatly and easily into social media of various sorts. Going to try to do something about that next year but this year ended up crazy for various reasons.
Social media might be getting less attractive for that, though. Compare Reddit now to ten years ago, and you can see that even on more serious subreddits, everyone’s comments have become very short, often little more than a single line. If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.
> And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.
There are other ways to monetize, which doesn't depend on a lot of eyeballs. If you write high quality niche content and sell related products or services, then each eye ball can be worth a lot.
That's a trend I've noticed as well over the past few years. It somehow feels like it's becoming increasingly “important” to make money from whatever you do on the internet. The idea that you can just create things because you enjoy it, or because you want to share what you've made with others in the hope that they might like it and offer interesting feedback, seems to be fading away.
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.
I have seen it said in hacker circles that people in their teens and twenties now are not just more reluctant to share stuff for free like FOSS, but they are even outright suspicious of such endeavors. To a generation who grew up on platforms and apps that maximize engagement for maximum profit, a community that doesn’t do that looks like a bunch of weirdos, maybe a cult.
I'm not sure I've seen that personally although most of the tech folk I know are at least somewhat older.
In fairness, I do think "side hustles" and the like have become much more normalized as the default. And even if the odds are poor, there are least enough anecdotes of Substack authors, influencers, and the like making enough money to perk many people's interest.
I suppose if I were younger that might be of interest. I'm not looking for opportunities at this point. I live in a small town, I have probably one of the best (local) tech jobs I've ever had, not strictly on pay but the pay is enough and the overall chill level and quality of life is something I would not give up.
I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not interested in promoting myself or my "brand" and I can't write about anything that someone else with much deeper expertise hasn't already written about.