A possible future for Damn Interesting
damninteresting.com
damninteresting.com
I understand the aversion to self promotion, but it genuinely made it harder for me to hear about Damn Interesting. And I feel like my life has been poorer for it, because your site really is damn interesting.
Suggestion, I think you have at least 1k people who'd be willing to chip in to give you a "job."
FWIW, in this new age, patronage might be the only way. Allow people to pay on a sliding scale, with an uncapped upper end. And give them access to a tightly moderated, thoughtful community. Who knows, maybe there are Damn Interesting superfans out there who can chip in $1k/mo. You never know.
The modern economy of fan economics is strange. It's very much a whale phenomenon. People want community and belonging. And a community of people who like stuff that's damn interesting is pretty damn neat.
Also, you should consider turning some of these images into items people can buy. There's something funny, sweet and thoughtful about these, if you know the story,
https://damn-8791.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/disne...
https://damn-8791.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Bathy...
Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket. In the early days of Facebook we had a page with 20k+ followers, and we got a lot of engagement there, people followed us to be informed of when we published anything new. Then one day Facebook introduced 'boosting,' and overnight our posts were hidden from all but a fraction of our audience. Paying to boost each post would convert them into ads, which is not how we wanted to reach our readers. Our site traffic plummeted. I would have happily just paid FB a flat rate to retain access to our audience, but that option was not on offer.
I was already a proponent of the "own your platform" philosophy[1] (aka "Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms"[2]), but that misguided reliance on Facebook really cemented it. It's nigh impossible to own everything we rely on, but I'm reluctant to give any company that much power over my project again.
[1] https://www.chuck.is/platform/
[2] https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
Was the end of the "if you build it they will come" era. Around that time Google's enclosure of the web was well underway and the black hat SEO masterminds I knew were switching to AdWords.
So, while inevitable, I think it's still a good example of why one mustn't trust big corporations with one's work.
It's awful but true. I dropped out of large-scale web publishing around 2013 or so because I saw the writing on the wall.
The risk with Substack seems much lower though, since you get to keep their email addresses and could export to another system if you become unhappy with Substack's methods in the future.
With FB, you didn't have email addresses, or a way to export your follower list to another platform, so the consequence of the platform misbehaving was much worse (which perhaps made it more likely the platform would misbehave, knowing that there were no escape hatches).
I think the model is a good one but I’m fully on board without wanting to risk being beholden to them or maybe patreon or others.
If anything, they could probably construct a static site that costs a fraction of the amount to run.
Yea there's a reason I bin everything that comes from that site to my spam folder.
It's understandable that you thought so, though the opposite is usually the case. There are a lot of creators who poach our catalog; if you compare publication dates you'll usually find that ours was published first. While I'm out there scanning the microfiche, reading the dusty old books, filing FOIA requests, and hiring researchers at the National Archive, these lazy creators just yoink the gist and earn 100x more than I do. It's a lot to grapple with sometimes. But I enjoy doing it, so I ignore the parasites most of the time.
> FWIW, in this new age, patronage might be the only way. Allow people to pay on a sliding scale, with an uncapped upper end.
That's not far from what I'm attempting with this fundraiser experiment. There is a modest goal for the year, but no cap on contribution, so if someone(s) with vast resources is inclined to make a generous contribution, they are able to do so.
One problem is that I don't know how to reach such people apart from this omnidirectional signal. Another is that I would not be amenable to string attachments. Maybe I'm broken, but I'd rather shut down the site than allow a wealthy benefactor to call any shots, and most wealthy entities won't like that (I expect).
> And give them access to a tightly moderated, thoughtful community.
We kind of have that in our comments sections, but a more unified place might be an interesting exploration. I'll ponder that, thank you for the suggestion.
I’m not surprised people steal your stuff.
Blog spam origins are murky at best, but I don't recall it being a prevalent thing until nearer to 2010. But of course recollection is an unreliable narrator. I'm also assuming you are using "predates" as in "preceding" rather than "preys upon", heh.
It hasn’t ruined the fun stuff yet.
Good site, though.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/death-by-derivatives/ (the audio is somewhere around there, i'm sure)
No shade to DamnInteresting; I find it quite endearing.
The amount asked for is meager, and I was more than happy to throw some bucks at it.
It's funny you mention those three in particular. We've collaborated with Stuff You Should Know several times, and we almost worked with both 99PI and RadioLab on separate occasions (i.e., I pitched ideas that got some traction, though they didn't ultimately materialize). I still think my pitch for RadioLab is a good one, though it's a throwback to when they did episodes with three stories around a central theme (e.g., Blood).
> I was more than happy to throw some bucks at it.
Thanks! If this fundraiser works out, you're part of the reason we get to keep going.
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-martian-express/
Originally, in 2008, it was 100% Javascript, but a few years later I updated it to use CSS transitions for a much smoother animation.
That cycler simulator actually led to a very cool life experience. An administrator at NASA contacted me wanting to use it for a presentation. Of course I said yes! Then he invited me to be his guest to watch an early test of the SLS rocket that was happening about 90 minutes from my home. Of course I said yes!
I got to meet a bunch of astronauts, see a big rocket engine fire horizontally in the desert, and got a NASA SLS pin. The fellow ended up not using the animation, as that part of his talk got edited out, but nevertheless niftiness.
"An additional inconvenience is the flyby speed: as designed, the Cyclers would swing by Earth at approximately 15,000 miles per hour, and fly past Mars at 22,000 mph. In order to intercept such speedy Cyclers, the rocket-taxis would need to be capable of splitting a lot of lickety."
I’ve been reading (then listening) to DI forever. Not the full 20 years, because I remember reading through the entire back catalog when I first found it, but a very long time.
Happy to help. Donated.
Another valuable creator I follow on a different platform went through the same thing about a year ago. I strongly recommend you reach out to him for guidance - he’s a good dude and will share how he broke out of the same death spiral.
Fraser Cain of Universe Today on Patreon.
There is a way out of this and the quality of your content is easily good enough to sustain a susbscriber-supported model.
(Good golly, GoFundMe defaulted to a 17.5% tip. WTF?)
> This fundraiser is entirely separate from our Give a Damn donation system, which aims to cover Damn Interesting monthly expenses —web hosting, subscriptions, usage licenses, link curation, and that sort of thing. An amazing array of donors support us through that system, and those lovely people are the reason we survive to this day. This new experiment is specifically so I myself can afford to spend more time writing and running the site.
I'm left confused...
Why you don't run this experiment through that same system?
Why you don't pay yourself out of that system?
What will happen if this experiment fails?
[^1]: "Rider on the Storm" is very memorable - https://www.damninteresting.com/rider-on-the-storm/
There's also the fact that the 'Give a Damn' system is supporting the site, to the benefit of all of its contributors, not just me. Changing that dynamic could be detrimental to morale.
There are lots of other small things making it very difficult to just update the existing system, not least of which being the same time shortage this fundraiser is trying to relieve. I'd need to make a bunch of changes to a very sensitive money-handling chunk of code, which requires careful coding and testing.
> What will happen if this experiment fails?
I have a series of decreasingly appealing follow-up plans if this one falls too short. But it's already earned enough to get me through at least a few months, so I'll have a chunk of time to take some positive action. Maybe that means I only get 6 months off before I'll have to resume full-time work, but I'll take what I can get.
From what I gather that's been a fairly successful standard model for independent content creators.
The larger reason is just that I personally despise ads. I take great measures to eliminate them from my life--paying for YouTube Premium, using the SponsorBlock plugin, running aggressive ad blockers on every device, piHole, etc. It would be quite hypocritical for me to add ads to my own content, I don't think I could live with myself.
I know that some podcast providers wrap ads around everything anyway, but that's between the listener and their provider, there are absolutely ad-free alternatives.
All three legs are wobbling now. Hiring shifted to "full time or nothing", SEO is a mostly hostile environment, and AI has turned "writing" into something that looks abundant from 10,000 feet. The result is that the remaining high-effort indie sites end up in this weird funding gap: too small and stubborn to become a VC-scale "media brand", too big and polished to be a casual side blog.
So you get this old-school, almost embarrassingly direct solution: just ask readers to buy back the author's time. No growth story, no "community platform", just "I can make more of the thing you like if you cover what the labor market no longer will." In a way that's the most honest possible response to the AI slop wave: not "we'll use AI better", but "we'll opt out of that game entirely and see if real people care enough to pay for it."