When I saw that Venkatesh Rao, was “retiring” his blog of 17 years, Ribbonfarm and moving to Substack, it solidified my plan to try building audience there as well.
Here’s my first post there: Forget Cognitive Dissonance.
I’ve been writing in this space, hosted one way or another for just about 25 years now. The early days were exciting and we built up each other in a blogging community for a few years. Then with the rise of social media and commercialization of websites with ad driven clicks, blogging died a quiet death for all but a few high profile public intellectuals. I get traffic here from what I think is a small group of regulars plus some pages that Google serves up in the first page or two on note taking tools and camera equipment.
At least for right now, Substack feels a lot like a 2024 version of that early blogging environment with easy interaction with writers and low barrier to entry. Of course the monetization is a big problem with the balance between free and paid content varying wildly between creators.
For now, I wouldn’t think of charging for content as I’m after some more engagement than one gets at a site like this. I’m putting myself on a once a week schedule there with. more frequent notes here.
My other motivation, besides engagement, is to work on writing for a general audience to develop the ideas I’ve put into my manuscript. That’s put aside for the moment, but I know that the next edit should be an effort to be clear and systematic in exposition of ideas. I’m also curious about what subjects a general readership is interested in besides tools for thinking so that I can focus my next big writing project on something that might be more broadly read.
