A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In the old days, you could make a bit of money just from views, and there were many more places to make money from writing and speaking offline. There were also more long-form musings about academic life which today would be snarky posts on Bluesky. As posting on microblog sites became sometimes professionally useful, academics put their energy into that and let their longform blogs fade (or just got older and busier and were not replaced by younger academic bloggers).

I do the same thing on my blog... have a taxonomy for people, countries, trails I hike, and national parks. Custom taxonomies are a good way to organise your blog.

It doesn’t seem like making money Is the object.

What's with the "everything has to be monetized" or optimized for earning?

Why do people have to earn money on their hobbies?

Why a person can't just publish stuff for others to read?

Why should we be obligated to pay?

If someone has to make a living, maybe they should stick to a proper job not a hobby side gigs. Well I have a friend that makes living from basically making side gigs, but he is not looking to "make it big" - he just values freedom more and if he gets some money to just get by he is happy with it. He is not going to optimize conversion rate of paying supporters. But he is authentic that is why people who drop him some money do so - second he starts "revenue optimizing" I believe anyone who follows him will just drop it and move on.

That's the harsh reality, first (anecdotally / personal view) it became social media that linked to blog posts - especially Twitter was used as an aggregator for "I wrote a blog post about xyz".

Then Medium took off, and there was a vibe of blog posts being more authoritative if they were published on Medium. It was like the TED talks of blog posts. But also it mean that if you had a blog of your own and its contents were reposted on Medium, the latter would get more views.

I don't have the full picture of the whole issue. I suspect consumers generally want a single website to read stuff on, instead of the sometimes jarring style differences between blog sites - even if that means they have individual personality.

The main thing is that no one wants the hassle of keeping up with 50 mildly-interesting blogs by visiting them regularly. You really need a "push" mechanism of some sort. Social media doesn't work for this because if someone subscribes to a content creator on X / Twitter, they most likely won't see most of the creator's posts. Instead, the algorithm will show them cat memes and other on-platform engagement bait.

Many other social venues are gone too. If you're lucky, you can reach your audience on HN, but it's about the only remaining, successful aggregator of this type. Reddit has grown a lot more insular and many subreddits don't allow outgoing links. Where else do you go?

In this reality, the most practical push mechanism is email, but sending email to thousands of recipients is hard. You pretty much need to pay someone for the privilege if you want to have a reasonable success rate. Substack will do it for you for free, and it also lowers the friction because it gives visitors a familiar UI with a pre-filled address and no concern about phishing / spam / etc.

Beyond that, I don't think Substack is actually that much of a community. They built a good brand by attracting (buying) a bunch of high profile writers, then had an issue with neo-Nazis where they took controversial stances... I don't associate the domain with anything especially good or bad, not different from blogspot.com or wordpress.com. I have a special hatred for medium.com because almost everything over there is aggressively paywalled, but that's another story.

And yeah yeah, RSS, but the friction for RSS is much higher.

I wouldn't call myself a historian, but I have been doing a history podcast since 2014.

I agree that Ben's writings on LLMs and how they impact the humanities/history are great reads. But I am also the perfect target market for that kind of discussion, dev by day amateur historian by night.

I write about Indian history as my side project.

https://a.co/d/guvUxgq

https://a.co/d/iSg4jKZ

Thank you! So glad people here are reading (I'm the author of the post). I'm doing student meetings and grading all day but happy to answer questions or discuss anything historical with the HN community in between!

I don't know why, it's just an irrational form of first-principles admiration for me.

This is especially true in the age of LLM's (but the same can be applied to social media forums and the like). Sure, we should "just judge arguments on their merit" but there's something... suspicious. Like, a thought experiment: What if something came to a very reasonable seeming argument in 10 minutes, versus 10 hours? To me, I can't help but feel suspicious that I'm being tricked by some ad-hoc framing that is complete bogus in reality. "Obvious" conclusions can be obviously shaped with extremely hidden premises, things can be "locally logically correct" but horrible from a global view.

Maybe I'm way too cynical of seeing the same arguments over and over, people just stripping out their view of the elephant that they intuited in 5 minutes, then treating it as an authoritative slice, and stubbornly refusing to admit that that constraint, is well, a constraint, and not an "objective" slice. Like, yes, within your axioms and model, sure, but pretending like you found a grand unification in 5 minutes is absurd, and in practice people behave this way online.

(Point being that, okay, even if you don't buy that argument when it comes to LLM's, when it comes to a distributed internet setting, I feel my intuition there holds much stronger, for me at least. Even if everybody was truly an expert, argument JITing is still a problem).

Of course, in practice, when I do decide something is "valuable" enough for me to look at, I take apart the argument logically to the best of my ability, etc. but I've been filtering what to look at a lot more aggressively based on this criteria. And yes it's a bit circular, but I think I've realized that with a lot of really complicated wishy-washy things, well, they're hard for a reason :)

All that to say, is that yeah, the human element is important for me here :D. I find that, when it comes to consumption, if the person is a singular human, it's much harder to come to that issue. They at least have some semblance of consistence, and it's "real/emergent" in a sense. The more you learn about someone, the more they're truly unique. You can't just JIT a reductionist argument in 10 minutes.

IDK. Go small blogs!

I know I'll get hated for this on Hacker News, but this has been solved quite well on the bitcoin & Nostr side of things. It's easy to tip couple cents or whatever amounts and there are many apps / websites that support that.

The main difference is that using the legacy dollar rails is super annoying for small amounts, since there are multiple banks/companies on the path between you and the author you are trying to tip. And each of these intermediators needs their $$$ from you.

> I'm surprised these newsletter gatekeepers haven't implemented a tip jar where you put in $/year and it gets divided based on readership.

I've seen a bunch of publication with a "tip" button, but I suspect it's not worth the effort. Very few people pay in the first place, so a random one-off payment of $1, $10, or even the "unicorn" $100 is not worth standing up the infrastructure and dealing with the tax paperwork.

On the flip side, if you find 100 people who really like your content and are willing to substantially support it on an ongoing basis with a subscription, you end up with recurring revenue that makes it a better deal.

My site has both subscription and one-time donations. The subscriptions bring in 90% of the revenue even though more people have Paypal accounts than accounts with specific crowdfunding services.