Not Going Viral, Not Making Money

Great thoughts on the recent trend of every blog having a paid newsletter and rando bloggers essentially panhandling from ‌Greed is ruining the web:

Great content usually lives in odd corners of the web, seen only by a few people a year, created because someone was passionate about something. It will not generate money, it will not make someone famous. And that’s OK. ​​I think way too many people nowadays approach the web with a financial mindset.

Also, a related Pinboard tweet storm:

We have this debate any time there’s a new gravy train for online writing, and it’s getting exasperating. Every new platform will reward a set of star writers in a POWER CLAW distribution, the early will cash in, and discovery is the unsolvable problem.

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What rankles me in the Great Wheel of Online Publishing is not that we repeat the same debates about it each time, but that when these bloated platforms inevitably disappear they take entire communities and comment histories with them. And those have more value than the writing.

I’m ok not going viral and making money at my day job.