I see a lot of complaints, often justified, about the dominance of the big social media companies, but not nearly as many people deciding to go their own, off those sites.
I still highly recommend it though. Your social media account comes and goes, but your own little website will be there however long you want it to be, display whatever info about you you want it to display, and it can look however you want it to look.
Seems like this might depend on the objective. Spamming social media and aiming for search rank might be necessary for ad revenue, self-promotion, or other conversions, whatever those might be. But it is not strictly necessary. Doing your own thing and making something cool can be 100% the end in itself.
The issue I have leans the other way. I'm hesitant to self-publish anymore primarily because I don't want my work to get sucked up into the commercial machinery of the Big Tech Web. I have no interest and gain no benefit from feeding AI, scrapers, aggregators, or other "creators" who do surf around for other people's work they can mill into their own hash for their own purposes.
I'd love it if I could somehow publish only for other end-user humans, but I don't see how I can do that without paradoxically engaging with some aspect of the commercial apparatus. It's like a Foucaultian nightmare. There's no way not to be part of the system. Rejecting it requires first embracing it.
To wit: here I am on HN complaining about giving away my work for free
If your blog is readable by and interesting to humans, it will be exploitable by leeches.
I was "famous" enough that ChatGPT now definitely knows about me. If you ask it very nicely it'll without a doubt refer to me in particular, by my full name, but every single detail it'll tell you about me is wrong. Where I'm from, what do I do, everything. And it's all just slightly, but demonstrably incorrect. No, I'm not from Serbia, I'm from Bosnia, and no, I'm not an infosec guy, but a devops guy, those kinds of errors. And of course, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. I already get to live that shitty future you fear, my work has been used already, but in the worst way imaginable.
Needless to say, I haven't actually posted anything in quite a while (excluding HN and Mastodon), and if I ever do so again, I'll do my best to block every single AI user agent I find. I'll also switch to CC BY-NC (only non-commercial purposes) and pretend like that actually means anything.
It also doesn't have to be self serving. I've thought of writing articles because I see a lot of misconceptions on various topics I've seen on certain language subreddits. But the roadblock is in the effort to make my "research" (toy projects) into these things suitable for public consumption, not any particular fear that it won't do something for me. If it helps even one person, awesome.
- I never write with the goal of gaining traffic.
- I only share things organically when it makes sense.
If I were on Reddit and someone was talking about Foo, and I'd written something relevant about Foo, I'll send them the link. I've I write something and then realize people here might think it's interesting, I'll submit it. In short, I want to participate in the conversation, not make the conversation all about me.
I firmly believe the best content on the Internet is not necessarily the stuff optimized for search engines and audience-building. We shouldn’t really care about that.
If you're blogging and worrying about "how will readers find me" you're doing it wrong, and are basically doomed to fail.
You blog because you like to write, and readers will slowly accumulate over time. Comments and/or a small forum can work wonders, too, as long as you're protected from spam.
I wonder — in absolute terms, is the number of people you can reach smaller today? It's surely proportionally smaller because the internet is much bigger.
In books about writing, I like:
How Fiction Works
Reading Like a Writer
Writing With Style
There are many others of course. Perhaps the most important part is finding an editor. (I wound up marrying one, which is not uncommon.) I've seen recs for Sasha Chapin: https://www.sashachapin.com/