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'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

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Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#12

Post by soneca »

yuyangchee98 wrote: post #5
pgt wrote: post #4

If you are an expert reading this considering writing a blog - whatever you do, please don't start publishing on a paywalled medium like Medium.

What alternatives do you recommend? I'm starting to write, and Medium seems like the best option to me because how else am I going to get readers?

Publishing on you domain (with a email capture to build an email list), and republishing it on Medium kind of give you the best of both worlds.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#13

Post by joelrunyon »

I've been on this train for a long, long time.

If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content.

Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog.

We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#15

Post by bpodgursky »

kirubakaran wrote: post #7
yuyangchee98 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternatives do you recommend? I'm starting to write, and Medium seems like the best option to me because how else am I going to get readers?

Static website (Hugo/Jekyll) that you host yourself and share on Twitter, relevant subreddits, and Hacker News?

This is a far less pleasant and high-variance process than you make it out to be.

- Posting on Twitter just begs the "get an audience" question. You can't just GET followers, it takes months or years of constant content creation, tagging, hashtagging, etc to get an audience.

- Subreddits are very hit-or-miss, and a lot of them will flat-out ban you for posting your own blog content, even if it's non-monetized OC (been there)

- Hacker News is a single-stream audience, and while occasionally you'll get onto the front page, more often content dies with a few dozen views. And it's not an especially differentiated audience.

For someone whose job is content creation, this might be realistic, but you're asking experts in a field -- whose primary job is research, and being an expert, not social media outreach -- to spend a huge portion of their time on audience generation and self-promotion. That's not realistic.

I hate Medium, for a ton of reasons, but it succeeds at making it easy for one-off or two-off writers to get a large audience without investing years of work on it. Sure, the audience isn't WORTH a lot to them (they can't monetize it, and it could get pulled from under them at the drop of a hat), but if the goal is to spread a message or get a post read, sorry, it's still a very viable outlet for doing that.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#17

Post by imglorp »

joelrunyon wrote: post #13

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#18

Post by ThreeFx »

askafriend wrote: post #16

You can bring them back, but I don't have time or attention span for 100 blogs. I still like Twitter for getting a broad range of thoughts quickly. I view it as a very rough pulse of public consciousness. Not a research paper or word from God.

You don't have to, with RSS you have your own feed.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#19

Post by faitswulff »

imglorp wrote: post #17
joelrunyon wrote: post #13

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

Speaking for myself, Wordpress's theme ecosystem is unbeatable, even if you just want a static site.
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