MattDemers

I've failed at "creating content as a side gig" multiple times over the course of my career, and I'm working on providing more structure in my life so I can give it another go. Over the last little bit I've been getting my sleep, diet and exercise in order, and doing more reading about how ADHD and dopamine have affected my brain.

Unfortunately, I can feel the momentum and enthusiasm slowing down after a couple weeks of this. I'm tired, but I'm still trying to write goals and give myself some foundation for my work (Substack, and Twitch, pretty separately). I'm pretty happy with this "elevator pitch", which is something I've never really been able to do:

"I'm writing about the relationships people have with the Internet, and how it changes over time. I want to focus on the effects of fandom on marketing, creativity, competition, and personal identity. The Internet has been an enabler of dreams for a lot of people, and I want to explore how people use that for better or worse."

It also helps that it is extremely rare to see a manga have a rotating creative team, so you get a much more consistent story and tone, the whole way through.

Having a creator come onto an American comic with a specific enthusiasm for one specific character, theme or trope, and have that dominate for years of that creators' tenure, is really annoying. Also, that creator needing to be aware of previous history (or choosing to ignore it entirely) means you're getting a mixed bag.

I lost interest in Western comics after DC rebooted their universe ("Which time?" you ask? New 52) and it became clear that unless your favourite character was marquee (Superman, Batman, etc), it was completely out of control what was going to change or be ignored about their history. I ended up thinking "if comics aren't going to respect me as a reader, why am I staying around?"

This, of course, got worse with the advent of the MCU and its imitators. Western comics are mostly just idea factories for films now; the "big name" creatives of the past are largely retired, or writing for TV/movies, and the people replacing them have nowhere near the vision (or freedom from Marvel or DC) to create compelling stories.

Manga is completely demolishing Western comics' sales at every turn, and Oda being able to craft twenty years of a narrative (while making me feel rewarded for investing) is an amazing feat.

I remember how exciting it was to be in my college dorm and having people be like "Man, this new browser is amazing!"

It's kind of surreal because I'm not sure desktop software really does that anymore; maybe apps, but they seem to fizzle out really weirdly. It's very crazy to consider Chrome's influence on the Internet, and how most browsers are just skinned Chromium now.

Adorable. Save that in case she ever gets married.

You end up having a cyclical problem, though:

No one uses it because no one posts > No one posts because they don't expect interaction > No one expects interaction because no one uses it

And then brands or influencers don't join because there's no potential to make money.

Part of the history of these big incumbents is that people were discovering a more user-friendly way to use the web through them; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube all were "Hey, we can now do something we could do before, much easier, in a more accessible way that I can show to my normie friends/my parents."

Alternatives that DO come up, like 500px or Vimeo, end up needing to become more for enthusiasts (people who care about fidelity, rather than novelty), turning away normies in the process. That's fine for them, as long as their goal isn't to "be an alternative YouTube/Flickr."

"In order to be loved, I must be me, plus something else."

Like if you're hosting a party, it's easy to obsess about there being enough entertainment, food, booze, etc, far beyond what's actually needed.

Canadians loved Rdio, trust me.

It depends what the "primary" place is. If poeple go to Patreon to receive a product, and Discord is a sidebar to that, then yeah, keep it to Patreon. If a Discord community is funded with a Patreon, this can be a replacement.

I mostly dislike how this is adding nothing new to Discord syncing subscriber status from Twitch or Patreon; doing that assigned the subscriber who connected their accounts a role, which could then be used for permissions to access content. This is all that a Discord Subscriber gets (role access to exclusive channels), besides "Premium Emotes", which is nebulous in value.

Discord are streamlining the process that wasn't particularly complicated to begin with. I'm imagining someone went "wait, why aren't we getting a piece of that pie?", and this is what they arrived at: make fans and communities need to choose where they put their subscription money to, and hope that enough people decide that Discord is the central venue they experience a community.

For Twitch streamers, this might not be as successful as they'd like it to be, if there's more value associated with being a Twitch sub than a Discord sub. Streamers really need to be leaning hard on a Discord-specific product in order to justify a second (or well, primary) subscription, and I don't see a ton of people doing that.

Rentry and Txti.es have similar issues. Love those sites for giving me markdown-friendly alternatives to Pastebin for writing FAQs and guides and stuff, but man I cannot imagine what their spam/moderation is like.

I mean, that just introduces another level of crap as sites clamour to be on the "not garbage" list; it'll end up like the issues Twitter has/had with verification.

It's surprising how often I'm just adding "site:reddit.com" to get some semblance of a human answer to questions.

Just to add, Freetube has support for comments, timestamp segments, and other things that goes beyond RSS.

I love Freetube, and try to contribute to people directly if I'm going to use Freetube.

It'll truly become killer when I can save multiple playlists, like I can on Newpipe. Sadly right now you're stuck with one playlist of "Favourites", and then copy-pasting a playlist link from YouTube to queue things up.

Unfortunately, this style of writing makes the article perform better on Twitter and Reddit (where it benefits to wrangle the scared or passionate) or aggregates like HackerNews, where people get to tear it apart.

Your choice is this, or SEO farm bot posts (perhaps ironically).

I don't have Venmo in my country, but I think they mean sending a micro-invoice using Venmo to say "Hey, pay for the salsa you ate that I ordered for the table."

>"Folks who grew up in affluent households will venmo for the salsa."

Means "folks who grew up affluent won't hesitate to ask for people to pay for the thing they ordered for the table, and don't know how that makes them look." Like another comment said, you'd think that salsa is complimentary? Or like, if you ordered salsa, YOU would be the one eating it, not sharing it? I don't know how these things work in the context they're saying.

“Look, we’re all sitting around this table at this taqueria together, therefore we are equal!”

It’s their version of “I don’t see color,” because they never really had to.

"I'm not realizing how, as a rich person, asking people to pay for something incidental when I could just let it go, is ignorant"? Maybe? They grew up rich, rather than becoming rich, so they wouldn't have the context of the rudeness behind asking for people to pay for communal stuff?

The fact we're having this speculation about the semantics/meaning indicates that it could have been phrased a lot better.

Apple does this with email forwarding aliases on your phone; I can sign up using a generated Apple relay, which then pushes to your main email. I don't like it that much, mostly because you're still kind of locking into the Apple ecosystem, though.

Garbage. I'm looking for marketing/communications/social media work. Those industries aren't really hiring right now, and despite changing/improving my resume/cover letter three times now (with help from a hiring manager friend, and a career coach), I'm still not getting any kind of non-automated response. Been searching for 6 months now.

Strangely, I had one place basically self-flagellate at how bad they were at their response time (again, in an automated response), and never followed up again.

I feel like part of my problem is that I worked in an industry previously that inflated my titles. I'm applying to entry-level/associated positions with "Director" on my resume, mostly because I'm trying to upskill things I didn't get to learn, in an environment where I'm not managing the whole department.

It's disheartening to see LinkedIn say "Yeah, want to see how you stack up against the 100+ other applicants?"

Advocating for this is the equivalent of going "Yeah man, it's not a big deal that you don't 'own' those movies/games/books on a digital service, and a company can decide to rescind them without refund if they didn't like the post you made on Twitter."

That's where this is going to head.

This is going to be like farmers voiding their tractors' warranties in order to get free software updates from some CIS country jailbreaker, isn't it?

Yeah definitely; the "+" alias is built in to most emails (like, it works on Google/Proton at least). I'm more just saying that if you pay for ProtonMail (and therefore care about privacy more than the average person) you get another service for free that doesn't expose your "real" email if someone cared to look.

Someone can look at joe+spam@joeschmo.com and figure out Joe's "real" email address. Something like SimpleLogin (sorry, not a shill for them, I swear) gives you a completely new email/domain (and lets you set up your OWN domains), which then forwards to your proper inbox.

Isn't it great that nothing can make our lives easier unless we're giving up proportionally more in data, privacy, or liberty?

Why is this written like an SEO farm blog post?

>Some extras: use unique email addresses per site if you can. Some setups allow infinite aliases. Then you can blackhole one that gets leaked, and you can know where it got leaked from.

If you pay for ProtonMail, you get a SimpleLogin Premium for free, which makes the creation of dummy/alias emails a lot easier. They're owned by the same company.

> Either that or pay for them to attend remedial journalism school.

You're assuming that journalism school is teaching things that are preventing this from happening.

The shareholders must be satified. The amount of satisfaction can never reach an upper limit, so everything is on the table in the name of infinite scaling.

The ones that have from mine are just using their accounts to complaining about Twitter. Which doesn't create sustainable communities on Mastodon instances that survive this kind of spike in activity.

Hey man, I know this might seem patronizing, but I'm proud of you for recognizing what happened and why, and I hope you can give yourself some compassion (especially because well, you were young. It happens).

You've learned from it, and it shouldn't be a continued weight on your shoulders. You did nothing wrong.

TinyTinyRSS, Matomo (Google Analytics alternative) and Joplin (note-taking software). Also, since someone mentioned bots, I'm running Redbot for Discord, and PhantomBot for Twitch/Discord.

You're definitely not too late.