The biggest challenge is getting people to read what you wrote, and care enough to respond.
I started a blog recently where I want to write notes for my writing practice and explore different subjects I'm interested in. Of course it'd be nice if someone had actually read it, for my personal vanity, and all those conversations and opportunities people claim blogging leads to.
But it's not the kind of project it would make sense to drive ads to, or even to niche down and grow an audience around a specific topic, since the whole point is to write whatever "gratifies my intellectual curiosity". But you can't really submit this kind of thing to reddit or to forums, they ban "blogspam" for very good reasons. There's no obvious way to promote it and put it in front of people.
Instead of blogging I could try engaging in conversations here and on reddit (and maybe on discord or twitter), and that, at least HN and reddit, works amazingly well for having good discussions (if not for making personal connections).
But the biggest problem with engaging in social media is that it quickly becomes extremely unhealthy and addictive (in the way that blogging doesn't). I want to write, and I want to talk to people, but I don't want to get addicted to refreshing my profile page to look for upvotes and comment notifications (I do have a big problem with the internet addiction).
I'm not sure what the right solution to that would be. Does anyone have good ideas? How do you make actual human connection over the internet and engage in intelligent conversations, without getting your dopamine hijacked and skinnerboxed by the social media algorithms?
Maybe there's a space for a platform that would encourage thoughtful discussion somehow, and limit the immediate rewards that make social media so addictive. But then nobody would use that platform, right?
I took my love of gaming and parlayed it into a YouTube channel. It’s been a fantastic experience.
Making videos is hard work and the learning curve is steep if you don’t have a background in video and (more importantly) audio. But to your point about an audience: on YT, if you build it, they will come. Most interactions in the comments have been pleasant and interesting.
If you’re at all that way inclined, I recommend you consider it or - even better - try it.
EDIT: Forgot to add, although it might have been clear from the context - I’m heavily introverted.
I relate to this. I'm writing whatever scratches my itch, and most of the value comes from the writing itself.
But, of course it'd be nice if some people read what I wrote? When I post to reddit or hn I get good traffic and some discussion, but that has all the problems you discuss.
There are probably only a few dozen people who enjoy regularly reading this sort of content, they probably write too. I'd love to find them and start a private chat server where we could read each other's pieces.
Maybe someone somewhere will come up with a NLP based solution which will cluster people with similar ideas (by means of their blogs) so that you may find people who share your interests within the cluster or explore other idea clusters. Would be a great way of making friends if nothing else.
I think that subreddits work extremely well for finding people with similar interests, they're basically the perfect tool for that. Discord servers too. If anything, the issue is that they're too good, so I get addicted, and have to force myself to stop.
There could be some kind of solution, based on NLP, or maybe even just finding patterns and clusters in links. But it'd suffer from the same problem subreddits and google do - instantly getting hijacked by the spammers and SEO people trying to promote their stuff.
To the degree that having a popular blog is valuable, people will be motivated to find ways to promote it. And when people want to promote stuff, they'll try game whatever system is available. And so the system will have to implement the anti-spam measures, leading to moderation and probably banning most of the blogs.
Hmm... Maybe that's why we ended up with HN comments and subreddit text-posts working so well. Yes, you can't get the "networking" value out of them (because nobody cares about your username, and there's no such thing as subscribers), but it's not a bug, but a feature - without the personal value there's no incentive to game the system, so you just have people posting for the sake of the conversation.
But that would also mean that becoming even a "micro" celebrity will always be at least somewhat difficult - to the extent that it's valuable, there will be people trying to game the system, and measures trying to stop that, and competition.
I think this could be achieved by indexing only tags on blog posts. Aside from having to groom the tag corpus (maintaining sets of synonyms would probably be a big part), this would seem to be a fairly pain-free way of deriving some of these associations. It could be extended into "hmm, what other things are the people I share this with also interested in," which happens to be just about where I think the entire field of recommendation engine research should have ended. But I digress.
Yes, you would have to use tags to participate if you weren't already, but that just makes it opt-in.
I feel very similarly. I like longform essays -- reading them, and writing them -- as well as SSC-like blog posts. Most of that is too long for the typical internet user. Also, I too hate the feeling of my writing contributing to my internet addiction by causing me to be hyper-attuned to online performance indicators.
I don't have an internet-based solution for you, short of trying to get your stuff published in publications. They say that building an online audience is hard, and the best time to start was five years ago.
This being said, my favorite solution and suggestion is to join a local writer's workshop if you haven't already. Many workshops concentrate on fiction, but there is a growing interest in "creative non-fiction" as well. That's where I've found a decent level of discussion about both the content and form of my writing. A second suggestion would be to take a non-fiction writing class through a local university extension. I've gotten a ton out of doing that; there are few things like a small community of supportive writers and readers.
Integrate it with ActivityPub and make an account on a service like Mastodon/Plerona/Misskey/etc so you can federate with everyone else. Then, when you publish a new blog post it can be automatically pushed onto other people's feeds if they're following you. I do this, but I also don't really have that big of a desire to find thousands of readers at once. I'm mostly contented with sharing my writing to a few friends and technologically sophisticated peers, so ymmv.
> But you can't really submit this kind of thing to reddit or to forums, they ban "blogspam" for very good reasons.
As long as your tasteful about sharing, like you already participate in the community idk if you should feel bad or feel like your blog spamming.
3rd party sites are often just a better format for something long form. Blog spam is just drive by dumping shit on a message board expecting likes, follows etc
... With no participation and the content being shared is low quality
I started a blog recently where I want to write notes for my writing practice and explore different subjects I'm interested in. Of course it'd be nice if someone had actually read it, for my personal vanity, and all those conversations and opportunities people claim blogging leads to.
But it's not the kind of project it would make sense to drive ads to, or even to niche down and grow an audience around a specific topic, since the whole point is to write whatever "gratifies my intellectual curiosity". But you can't really submit this kind of thing to reddit or to forums, they ban "blogspam" for very good reasons. There's no obvious way to promote it and put it in front of people.
Instead of blogging I could try engaging in conversations here and on reddit (and maybe on discord or twitter), and that, at least HN and reddit, works amazingly well for having good discussions (if not for making personal connections).
But the biggest problem with engaging in social media is that it quickly becomes extremely unhealthy and addictive (in the way that blogging doesn't). I want to write, and I want to talk to people, but I don't want to get addicted to refreshing my profile page to look for upvotes and comment notifications (I do have a big problem with the internet addiction).
I'm not sure what the right solution to that would be. Does anyone have good ideas? How do you make actual human connection over the internet and engage in intelligent conversations, without getting your dopamine hijacked and skinnerboxed by the social media algorithms?
Maybe there's a space for a platform that would encourage thoughtful discussion somehow, and limit the immediate rewards that make social media so addictive. But then nobody would use that platform, right?