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.
[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/death-by-derivatives/ (the audio is somewhere around there, i'm sure)
Good site, though.
No shade to DamnInteresting; I find it quite endearing.