I think YouTube is the counter argument to this - long form content from passionate people has taken off pretty good there. Perhaps it's just me, but it seriously makes the rest of social media look like an absolute trashfire by comparison.
If you’re a grouchy mechanic and do boring videos of exactly how to do brakes on every car, that’s incredibly useful, but not subscribeable (unless your grouchiness becomes a meme).
I feel bad for the one guy that did 1 perfect video on how to fix&overhaul my garage door opener. But he won’t see a cent even as YouTube puts ads on it anyway and takes 100%.
Meanwhile on blogs etc with Adsense, you could monetize immediately. That’s how i started out and figured out what worked. Went from $2/month, to 20 to 200 to 2000 for a while. Lots of random articles. Didn’t care to become a “platform” (new users that visit and never come back are the best ad-clickers).
Probably something like ko-fi.com. I have it on my sites, but no one has ever tipped (besides my girlfriend, haha). I imagine other people do get tips via kofi, though.
Even the long-form content is a minefield. The line between educational, informative long-form content (Clickspring, Tech Ingredients, Ox Tools, Matthias Wendel, Alan Millyard, etc) and "lifestyle entertainment" (Matt Armstrong, Cleetus McFarland, Matt's Offroad Recovery, etc) is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), and you might not notice you've crossed it until too late.
Don't even get me started on the videos that contain a vital piece of information that could be written in one paragraph, but spread it over 10 minutes. A lot like the online recipe site disasters.
> is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), a
Where would you place "This Old Tony" in that regard?
I find YouTube to be a much better experience when logged in. There is targeting in both cases, but it tends to be better aligned with what I want when I am logged in.
And I second the extension, I use "Youtube-shorts block" which also exists for Chrome. On the topic of YouTube specific extensions, I also recommend SponsorBlock.
This has downsides on its own. Nowadays there are tons of YT videos that convey useful info in which the same useful info could be conveyed in a 200 words written piece. But no, you have to skip through a 20 minutes video where the signal to noise ratio is extremely low to get the really useful bits.