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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 ele

by ghaff 1y 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.

HeinzStuckeIt 1y ago
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.
- biztos 11mo ago
  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.
  - ghaff 11mo ago
    >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.
    - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
      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.
      - ghaff 11mo ago
        There's certainly a general trend towards shorter. At my last company, I was involved with our content folks (and created a fair bit myself). In the course of my time there, longer (say 3,000 word) whitepapers basically went away and most of the other content such as video almost universally got shorter based on monitoring what content people viewed/read and for how long.
      - bluebarbet 11mo ago
        >If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing. As one should. The rando who spams a discussion thread with an impenetrable wall of text is like that guy who uses their "question" at the end of an in-person panel discussion to ramble incoherently for three minutes. Yes, here we can scroll past it, but it's still presumptious and annoying. This is not primary content (that's at the top). Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point.
        bccdee 11mo ago
        > This is not primary content In a forum, the discussion IS primary content. That's the problem: Reddit has shifted away from being a discussion forum toward an endless-scroll content feed. > Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point. Kind of an odd turn of logic. If being a nobody devalues your anecdotes or tangents, then it equally devalues your point. If, conversely, your point can be valuable in and of itself, then your anecdotes and tangents can be valuable in and of themselves too. > Yes, here we can scroll past it, but [...] This is not primary content (that's at the top). Incidentally, you don't have to scroll past anything to reach the content at the top of the page. It's at the top of the page.
  - carlosjobim 11mo ago
    > 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.
  - bthallplz 11mo ago
    > 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've been thinking lately about still posting things to various places like here and Reddit but compiling them later on and posting them to my website (likely with a link to where I posted them originally). That seems like a good middle ground for me and would enable me to build up a decent resource for myself and others, if I'm up for cleaning up the texts to provide or remove context as necessary. Much of this idea of mine is from a desire to archive and pull together more of the stuff I've put effort into that's spread all over the web.
SunlitCat 11mo ago
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.
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
  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.
  - ghaff 11mo ago
    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.
SoftTalker 11mo ago
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.
- bikelang 11mo ago
  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 :)
- johannes1234321 11mo ago
  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.

by ghaff 1y 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.

HeinzStuckeIt 1y ago

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.

biztos 11mo ago
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.
- ghaff 11mo ago
  >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.
  - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
    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.
    - ghaff 11mo ago
      There's certainly a general trend towards shorter. At my last company, I was involved with our content folks (and created a fair bit myself). In the course of my time there, longer (say 3,000 word) whitepapers basically went away and most of the other content such as video almost universally got shorter based on monitoring what content people viewed/read and for how long.
    - bluebarbet 11mo ago
      >If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing. As one should. The rando who spams a discussion thread with an impenetrable wall of text is like that guy who uses their "question" at the end of an in-person panel discussion to ramble incoherently for three minutes. Yes, here we can scroll past it, but it's still presumptious and annoying. This is not primary content (that's at the top). Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point.
      - bccdee 11mo ago
        > This is not primary content In a forum, the discussion IS primary content. That's the problem: Reddit has shifted away from being a discussion forum toward an endless-scroll content feed. > Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point. Kind of an odd turn of logic. If being a nobody devalues your anecdotes or tangents, then it equally devalues your point. If, conversely, your point can be valuable in and of itself, then your anecdotes and tangents can be valuable in and of themselves too. > Yes, here we can scroll past it, but [...] This is not primary content (that's at the top). Incidentally, you don't have to scroll past anything to reach the content at the top of the page. It's at the top of the page.
- carlosjobim 11mo ago
  > 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.
- bthallplz 11mo ago
  > 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've been thinking lately about still posting things to various places like here and Reddit but compiling them later on and posting them to my website (likely with a link to where I posted them originally). That seems like a good middle ground for me and would enable me to build up a decent resource for myself and others, if I'm up for cleaning up the texts to provide or remove context as necessary. Much of this idea of mine is from a desire to archive and pull together more of the stuff I've put effort into that's spread all over the web.

SunlitCat 11mo ago

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.

HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
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.
- ghaff 11mo ago
  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.

SoftTalker 11mo ago

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.

bikelang 11mo ago
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 :)
johannes1234321 11mo ago
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.