before social media took off at jet speed across the lake creating wakes destroying many a peaceful habitat, there was blogging.
and just like how we have an entire industry created around coaching for social media, there was and still is one for blogging.
blogs were SO COOL.
and we could only read so many at a time or keep up with a limited number. we had to bookmark them or sign up for newsletters or get really technical and create an rss feed.
it was manageable.
social media today is overwhelming in both helpful and depressing ways. it’s amazing to have so much access to information and people across the world! at the same time, too much of a thing can induce feelings of overwhelm which can feel like depression.
especially when we see so many evils around the world so far away and at times feel powerless to stop them or help their victims. but there are things that can be done right now, today, never forget that. a small step by an individual can feel like it doesn’t matter, but multiply that by how many people are in the world (minus the evil ones) and the impact is tremendous.
community is necessary for change.
bringing it back to blogging…it also came at a cost. website hosting is expensive. free blogs are limited. when you can’t put ads anywhere by default, you have to pay the toll. social media is free because we pay the cost of being products and target markets.
to illustrate, this blog is hosted at a very reasonable price but it’s still a few hundred dollars for three years at the renewable price. when i was using bluehost years ago, they wanted to charge me almost 700 dollars to renew for just a year or two. once you are in, you’re in. a lot of companies take advantage of that which is not ethical, especially if it’s over and beyond their cost+.
of course i didn’t pay that and signed up for a new hosting provider, but it is such a pain setting up a new site!
so unless this blog is making hundreds of dollars, which it’s not, i’ve never made $1 blogging (excluding substack once upon a time), it’s an expensive project or journal.
so why then?
well, i’ve been struggling to find something that really works for me off social media. substack is a nice platform, but there are things that rub me the wrong way about it.
it’s a tech bro platform again which doesn’t feel great because they always descend to the same level of hell as the others that came before.
it’s not owned by me so substack can decide to randomly email my subscribers with marketing materials if they chose and that’s super annoying. while some might see it as substack makes it easy for you because they are sales-y for you, i don’t like it because i don’t want that energy associated with anything i publish or create online. i’m over it. it’s not me and i really hate when i come across that sales-y content myself.
especially when substack pushes heavily on the paid subscription models since they get a steep cut of that.
as to the feed and community side of substack, it’s starting to feel performative (read corporate) instead of human. with all the content out there, headlines have become a competetive space. substack has a feature now where you can test out different headlines to see which one will work best, then you go with that one. it feels sales-y again and very grabby for attention.
i’ve gone through that, with substack titles and youtube headlines, trying to make them as attractive as possible. and it feels disingenuous. it feels like treating readers, audiences, subscribers as wells of clicks and likes to run dry. to gain as much as possible so we get what? $1 for every 1,000? or $1 for every 100,000?
breadcrumbs.
if you can game the system and if you look the right way, dress the right way, talk the right way, maybe you do it for a slice of bread or a loaf while corporations are sitting on an entire bakery with millions of loafs in the freezer.
anyways, i didn’t have an outline for this post, clearly and not sure where it’s going or what the main point is. something about blogging lol.
maybe it was just that it might be nice to blog again…
🙂