Small b blogging
tomcritchlow.com
tomcritchlow.com
It indicates a hierarchization of communication: you can only reach those you already "won".
A somewhat related problem for blogs nowadays is that policing spam takes a lot of time and effort -- you depend on the big platforms for that if you don’t have a lot of time. The web became a much more hostile place, to the big players’ benefit. That removes low-overhead communication among peers from the benefit of blogs.
I don‘t believe this will happen. The effort to write a high quality article is the same whether you post it on your own small b blog or on Medium. So why not opt for the larger audience if it has so few disadvantages.
There was a little window in time when there were no gatekeepers and the technical savy could reach a large and quickly growing audience. But this is over and the gatekeepers will never go away again.
[1] Like the Juggling Information Service. How many hours did I spend on this site? I don’t know, but fun times...
Also, it's a canard that Medium gives you a larger audience. Even if everybody is there, everybody isn't going to be reading what you wrote.
Bottomline: smaller targeted audience > larger unfocused audience. Step 1: write about what you find interesting. Step 2: find your homies and show it to them. They're hard to find, but they aren't captive to any single gatekeeper.
First, stability: Blogging and maintaining a web site are big time commitments, and most people who make a great site or a great blog fade as their interests and commitments change. Sites like Reddit or Hacker News tend to have a longer useful life than sites built by an individual or a handful of individuals.
Diversity: A blog can have guest contributors, but if you want real dissent, you have to go to the comments, and that's something blogs don't do well. Reddit and Hacker News have their orthodoxies and groupthink, but various opposing viewpoints are present as well. In addition, there are diversities of perspective, back end versus front end, social media startup versus Wall Street finance, that increase the range of discussion.
Efficiency: A successful blogger or website creator knows that they have to give their visitors a complete experience, as well as regular updates. That can translate into a lot of fluff. You can't just say the new thing you learned. You have to create context, make a few jokes, draw out your point so it has time to sink in before your readers move on. On Reddit or Hacker News, effort goes towards the opposite: boiling down your point to make it quickly understandable in the context of the discussion. This comes naturally to most people — it's a lot like oral conversation in groups - so you don't need to have special writing skills (or the time, taste, and expertise to insert stock photos and periodically refresh your site design) like you do for blogging. That reduced barrier attracts participation from people who don't have the time or inclination to make a blog post but might drop a quick experience bomb in a comment.
Different tools for different purposes: A blog or niche web site used to be a platform for publishing short writing, a place for readers to discover new things, and a forum for community discussion. Now, Twitter and sites like Reddit and HN are where we discover things, and Reddit and Hacker News are where we discuss them. As a result, you don't even need a consistent place to publish your thoughts. You can publish them anywhere that can render them in a readable way to people who follow links from Twitter or HN. People who used to use a blog as a way of cultivating a durable identity on the web have various social media platforms to choose from.
I think blogs and niche web sites will continue to exist, because people will still have needs that they meet best, but I think overall we benefit by letting them be replaced by a loose collection of specialized services.
I have 6 years of college. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for a time. I was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project at one time. I was a moderator on Cyburbia at one time. Those last two gigs helped me attend related conferences affordably, though I was a homemaker and student.
My blogging has led to no serious career traction, in spite of being interviewed by reporters repeatedly regarding one of my projects. Most of those interviews never published. The one that did misgendered me and outright made up specious quotes.
After 8.5 years on HN, I have exactly zero strong personal connections here. There are like 3 people who email occasionally. I have zero actual friends here. I have zero serious professional connections.
I was not homeless when I joined. At that time, I had a corporate job and an apartment. So, no, that doesn't really explain it.
I do get hit on by men who know of me through HN. But that is about it.
When I comment that 99% of men have only one reason they would ever really talk to me, it gets described as an offensive exaggeration. [1] I am not claiming 99% of men do this to all women. Just me. It is firsthand testimony regarding my own life. It is not an exaggeration. Think how offensive it feels to me to be treated that way to begin with. Now add in dire poverty that I cannot solve and then being told I am offensive for remarking on the reality of my life.
So I find myself unable to draw any conclusion other than "sexism is alive and well." I wish I could find another explanation.
The only thing I need to make my life work is a middle class income. That's it. But that simply isn't happening and no amount of effort or other virtue from my end is resolving the issue.
So my feeling at this point is "Maybe that (little b blogging to network) works if you are a guy. It sure as hell has not worked for me and I very strongly suspect that my gender is a significant factor in that undesirable outcome."
I assume that means it doesn't work for most women. I assume that in part because I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the HN leaderboard. If there are scads of women here successfully networking via HN and/or little b blogging to further their career goals, please speak up. Toss me a clue. (Email is fine. You don't have to say it publicly.)
Given my background, I remain dumbfounded that this problem remains so intractable. I don't think it should be this hard to turn my knowledge and skills into an adequate income. But I consistently find that it backfires to tell people "No, I actually am that competent" and no one ever seems to conclude it on their own, much less vouch for me or promote me. I see men promote other men here all the time. I don't get any of that. It just doesn't happen.
Asking for help has not worked. Patiently waiting for 8.5 years to be noticed has not worked. Complaining about my poverty gets ugly reactions to the effect of "Shut up and go away." Trying to figure out how to turn my work into income gets routinely pissed on. My favorite: some jerk on Metafilter said I was panhandling the internet for trying to figure out how to earn a living online.
If someone would just show me the secret handshake, that would be awesome.
Same with HN. It's a ghost town. I commented here with another account for a few years. Never made a connection with anyone beyond someone replying to a comment. It's too big for users to encounter eachother on a regular basis, so you never get to know anyone. It's just a bunch of strangers.
No, this is not true. Patio11 and tptacek were business partners at one time. People get work through here, make friends, make business connections. At least, men do.
Lots of evidence of HN being a career maker for people right here in this discussion from 4 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16409768
My highest traffic piece has over 40k page views. That is a lot more than the figures in the article. No, it didn't do anything at all for me professionally.
I have tried figuring out how to write for the HN crowd. For example, this piece about how HN works:
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/08/hacker-news-...
It gets no traction, though I routinely see stuff like that posted here. Here is a discussion of a similar piece from just yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973
It is a self post by the author. It has hundreds of upvotes and lots of good discussion.
I largely stopped self posting. It got me all kinds of bullshit personal attacks that were usually not rebutted by other members of the community. People do not vouch for me the way they do for guys here who have made the leaderboard.
I have done everything in my power to try to make this work under difficult circumstances. I don't need anyone's pity. I don't need to hear anymore bullshit explanations about how it just cannot be done -- because the guys here do it all the fucking time.
I need respect. I need to be taken seriously as a professional. I need people vouching for me, reaching out to me as a professional and cluing me as to how it's done.
I get compliments in comments. People tell me publicly that I write well. But no one ever hits me up with an email asking if I would write something for them for pay.
And I am ready to spit nails. How can 100k+ people all stand idly by and do not a goddamned thing to help me succeed professionally while pretending they aren't being sexist jerks? How do you casually watch a chronically ill homeless* woman starve and feel okay about what a good guy you are?
This boggles my mind. I don't get it.
* I am no longer homeless. But I was for a long time.
I can't get hired without pretending to be a guy? How does that work when it comes time to pay me? Assuming I can manage to actually get paid while pretending to be male, what happens when someone finally says "Let's do lunch"?
The cure for sexism is not for women to pretend to be men. That fixes nothing.
Thanks.
A slightly better one would be to use a nonspecific handle, because, as you're saying, it shouldn't matter.
If your writing stands out (and if you have the stats you claim, it must), using a gender neutral pseudonym (because you've identified discrimination is what's stopping you from eating well), and having clients pay an LLC could work.
Also, I work a shitty, barely above minimum-wage job at a gas station, and buy and sell old used crap on eBay and Craigslist, while (literally simultaneously, some nights), building my company. Curious to know if there's something comparable you're doing. Always interested in others' hustle.
I am medically handicapped and I don't work full-time. I don't need a lot of money. I do need better per hour/item pay. Getting taken more seriously would help.
I wouldn't say the problem is discrimination per se. That isn't how I would characterize it.
The problem is that most men seem incapable of having a private conversation with me without mentally framing it as personally intimate, aka romance. When men on HN take an interest in each other's work, they routinely move from public discussion on HN to private discussion, usually via email. They also make friendly chit chat as part of the process of establishing trust.
When I make friendly chit chat, men routinely interpret that as a romantic opening. When I try to move things to a private discussion, most men interpret that as a romantic opening.
I honestly don't think it has anything to do with thinking "I would never hire a woman." I think when I talk about sexism that's what people think I mean and I don't mean that. I mean my gender is a barrier to success, yes. I don't mean "Because people are all sexist pigs."
I don't think we really have the language and mental models to make the distinctions that exist in my mind. I blog at times about such things, but the framing of the problem space in my mind is not a framework I see out in the world.
Because of how I frame it, I don't see trying to hide or obfuscate my gender as a solution. I see that as trouble I don't need.
When men get excited about each other's ideas or whatever, they don't interpret that as sexual excitement. When they get excited about my ideas or whatever, that seems to be what they do.
My feeling is that establishing a professional relationship on the idea that I am not a woman would be like a bait and switch operation. We have the expression that when people work closely together and are heavily invested, they are in bed together. And metaphorically I feel like if I hide my gender, then at some point some man wakes up "in bed" with me and realizes I am a woman and reacts to that differently than if I were male. To me, that sounds like trouble that I don't want. I also don't see myself successfully pulling off that kind of deceit to begin with.
I think the world needs some means to help people more clearly distinguish work relations from romance. I think the lack of such fuels a great many problems, including sexual harassment at work.
I have been celibate for medical reasons for more than 12.5 years. I don't harp on that constantly, but I am quite open about it. I am also 52 years old, chronically ill, and spent nearly 6 years homeless. I only got off the street a few months ago.
Being homeless put a damper on romantic interest in me. I think men were afraid that I would just empty their bank account. But the rest of those details seem to not put much of a damper on such interest. And I don't get it. It sounds incredibly unattractive to me. Who the hell in their right mind interprets toothless gray haired poverty stricken sickly old hag as "hottie -- I'd hit that!"
A recent incident: Some guy exchanging emails with me invested significant effort into trying to figure out how to get next to me and actively hid from me his age, marital status and intentions. After it became clear that his agenda was romance, I learned he was in his late twenties. I am literally old enough to be his mother. My adult sons are similar in age.
So I am at wit's end. Even men so much younger than me that I would never in a million years frame them as date material cannot be assumed to be viewing me in strictly platonic terms.
As baseline, I've been commenting on HN for four and half years, 3813 karma as of this writing. In that time, I've been emailed once with a question about a project I've worked on, and once asking me to put some code on GitHub. Zero offers for jobs, or offers for help. And that's totally what I expect.
A lot of your comments here, as are many of mine, are about what it's like to live in America, outside the valley bubble. That's not the kind of things that gets you job offers when compared with "How I used $HOT_TECHNOLOGY to save $HOT_COMPANY 10 million dollars."
Congratulations! You've found a marketing approach that you've proven doesn't work out for you! Now you just have to find something that works.
I've found that what looks from the outside like a secret club is really just that when people work with someone competent for a while, they want to hire them / work with them in the future. Every single one of my new clients in the past fifteen years has showed up because someone worked with me before on a project in the past.
People rarely trust someone just because the've read something they wrote. It really takes working with someone on a project where you are in the trenches together.
You site says you are a copywriter / community manager? Can you do volunteer community management for an organizations some tech organization? Can you somehow finagle some volunteer resume copywriting for Stanford graduates through some organization? You'll never get anything from the graduates you help, but it's the people in whatever non-profit you are working with that will remember your skill and drive. Or anything that gets you working with people who can hire you later. It snowballs from there.
As an aside, your site also looks a bit dated and very unfocused.
Best of luck!
I just answered questions for free for a YC company this week and informed them I do the kind of writing they need. They can't be arsed to so much as reply to my email with an acknowledgement that they have it.
I need income, not more opportunities to improve the lives of others for free, get pats on the head and told to piss off about my sad sack story that I can't afford to eat at the end of the month.
I have tried endless suggestions of what works for the guys. Email people and ask for feedback. Email top people here who routinely talk about gender parity in tech and have magnanimous invitations to email them any time. Buy a .com domain to be taken more seriously. Put together some kind of portfolio.
I have been asking for advice for literally years on how I can turn my skills and expertise into earned income and I get mostly pissed all over and bullshit excuses.
I've only given away work for free twice - once before I was a software developer and once volunteering two or three days a week for six? years for a NGO. Other than that, I charge everybody full price, including friends or family, for anything related to my day job. It sets up bad working relationships.
Again, good luck.
I assumed geeks would be the last kind of people to be sexist, but no.
I don't really have a solution, although things do seem slightly better than 50 years ago.
The only thing that seems to make a difference is women shouting to be heard and telling their kids to be less sexist.
It clearly takes generations to change.
Not that that helps you. But I do at least respect your comments.
HN is the least worst space I have found. Most geeks are mostly guilty of just engaging in habits that society taught them. Very few people here are deeply committed to making sure women remain barefoot and pregnant. This makes them possibly our last, best hope, in spite of their failure to be perfect.
The only thing that seems to make a difference is women shouting to be heard and telling their kids to be less sexist.
I don't agree. I made it to the leaderboard by avoiding trouble, giving respect, and doing my best to not shout. You cannot begin to imagine how far I have gone to prove myself to the men here.
It is the end of the month. I am nearly broke and very stressed about it. I'm frustrated and fed up and angry and there are times when shouting is appropriate. But, most of the time, I feel the angry feminist types are just cutting their own throat. I blog about that at times, not that any women care what I think.
Yes it's entirely possible that I haven't expressed this correctly. Perhaps it's more along the lines of the women who pushed the boundaries of what was capable. I think it does take women speaking out when they see that things are wrong. From what I witness I don't see men willing to change the status quo anytime soon.
I honestly think such change on a large scale takes mothers and fathers who won't accept the same level of sexism that their parents put up with and putting this into their children.
Happy to corrected on my points.
As for your comments, personally I upvote them because you add something to the conversation. You have an interesting point of view.
Men are also fucked over by historical gender roles. It is not true that they get all the benefits and women pay the price. Men get maimed and killed by their well paid jobs. Men have a shorter average life expectancy. Most homeless people on the street are male in part because if you can't pull your weight as a man, society basically says fuck you.
The way forward is to start by acknowledging that fact and speaking to the need to improve the lives of both men and women. Simply being angry that women have less money and taking that anger out on men doesn't work.
I am not simply angry that I am poor. I am angry that I am willing to work for a living and the entire world makes that an uphill battle in a way it does not do to the men. I am angry at listening to people talk about what good people they are while either actively ignoring my pleas for help or actively being in my way.
Perhaps having a cow about that will get me banned or shunned or otherwise shut out of any hope of getting what I need from HN. But after 8.5 years, it is clear to me that being polite and patient isn't opening doors. So I am dead in the water anyway.
I get very frustrated when women try to support my position on HN. In most cases, they are only undermining 8.5 years of very hard won progress on my part.
When women make comments to me rife with their manhating personal baggage while positioning themselves as on my side, I feel both used and pissed on. It looks to me like I am being taken advantage of.
If you have such admiration for me, you can stop being part of my problem. You can follow me on twitter. You can email me. You can read my blog writing and promote my blog writing, sharing it socially. You can leave a tip or support my Patreon. And maybe in a couple of years you will have learned enough to be able to make useful productive comments on HN about solving gender parity instead of making comments that make me want to tear yours to pieces just to distance myself from the blatant misandry.
This is an overwhelmingly male forum. A lot of the men here are well heeled movers and shakers. Sharing your opinion that men are just assholes who don't want the status quo to change is a case of putting out the fire with gasoline. And it makes me extremely sympathetic to why so many men don't try harder.
Keep your day job. Don't try to pretend to be a diplomatic ambassador in the peace accords between the sexes. You aren't qualified.
I still want no association with it. All it does is screw me over and my situation is plenty shitastic without such.
And if you are male, maybe go look in the goddamned mirror for living proof that your accusation that men don't want change is blatantly untrue.