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Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

> Spencer Draper—best known as the Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader on YouTube, where he reviews the technical and historical aspects of digital releases with a rigor usually reserved for scholarly peer review

I will occasionally think about various topics "I'm really into <thing> but is anyone else in to <thing>??"

And then I read a quote like the above and I realize that, for lack of a better phrase, "it's a big world out there" and people have many varied interests.

Plus, if folks are REALLY into <thing> then they want different perspectives about <thing> even if it's a sub-topic that has been covered before.

In other words, write blog posts and make videos. Someone will consume that content and you never know where that leads.

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This is what the early web was all about: people sharing their obscure hobbies and obsessions with everyone else, building small communities across the world. It was beautiful. It is still out there, to a degree, but unfortunately the socials have sucked the air out of publishing on external websites. Back in the day, this guy would have had his own blog or specific AV/cinephile forum, and now he's just another guy on youtube.

More otimistically, there were far fewer obsessive niches online then as the technical requirements were so large to set a site up. Even if the ones that existed were great.

There are a lot more obsessive YouTube channels and newsletters in a lot more varied niches today by comparison. I'm delighted regularly by new discoveries.

If you were obsessed with cinema and films, chances are you were already adjacent enough to the internet to blog about it. If you were obsessed with woodworking, probably you needed to wait for the smartphones and YT boom.

Unless you were one of the few people lucky enough to live in New York most of us never had access to movies beyond what you could find in a second tier Blockbuster on a Friday night. Or worse: cable television.

Nah. phpbb was a thing. Every niche crafting hobby imaginable had at least on "authoritative" forum-based online community before smartphones were a thing.

Quantity != quality.

I'd rather take fewer niche authors over a mass of posers more interested in making the number go up for their monetization than about what they are covering.

Kagi has a cool app called Small Web around this

As someone who is also into <thing> but maybe not other <thing>, it's really great to sometimes delve into the deep world of <thing> for an hour or so to broaden ones perspective and get a general feel for what other people choose to spend their consciousness budget on.

Definitely one of the better sides of the information age is how easy this is now.

In other words: "A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox" [1]

[1] https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query

I forget who said this but very similar idea:

"Writing online is a way to show people the 'wrinkles' of your brain. If you write enough, people can see how closely your winkles match their wrinkles. If the wrinkles match closely enough, you start to get followers who like the way you think. Those people can become friends and that leads to future life opportunities and experiences."

I have had a lot of things just kind of _happen_ by virtue of writing blogs and publishing software. These things all have very strange second lives that exist beyond your own initial conception of them that is consistently surprising.

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