I did that. It was a pain.
In my case most of engagement happened on social media, and I saw little benefit from my website; so eventually I stopped updating my webpage and started posting directly to social media platforms.
Own your work
41–50 of 113 posts
Re: Own your work
#42Yes please. It's quite surprising to see a company like Netflix and Airbnb using Medium for their tech blogs. They have the world's best web engineering teams and they use Medium for their tech blogs ? Just why ? I hate their font sizes their font heights. Just looks so amateurish.
Re: Own your work
#43Everyone tends to give this advice of owning your own work through a central location and syndicating everywhere else. In other words, building your own platform. But generally speaking, sometimes you have to leverage platforms that have the current attention of the world as that is where you will drive engagement to your platform. It is fairly rare to just win organic search traffic especially starting out so you ha…
I think POSSE [0] solves this. [0] https://indieweb.org/POSSE
You have to tailor content for each platform archetype. That’s the only thing missing in this wiki.
Re: Own your work
#44The underlying truth behind all such discussions is that too many people focus on the mechanics of content hosting and delivery but have nothing special to actually share. So they will spend all their time engineering the perfect blog site from scratch or moving from platform to platform looking for an ideological fit while no one really cares about consuming any of their output. My advice is always to forget about t…
> ”If there is value in what you write then the readers will be there”
I don’t think that’s true anymore. Of course, it depends on how you define “value”, but I think having something “special” to share not always attract readers. Controversial takes, click bait, hate bait, exaggerated praising to a specific niche, all of this works better than “value” in your writing to get readers. Even if you stick to “value”, you have to do it for months or years to get readers. So consistency seems to be more effective than said value too.
I think that’s similar to SEO. 5 to 10 years ago the common advice was that you should just do white hat SEO because Google would always catch you because they were so smart, thousands of the smartest engineers on earth against your silly tricks. Google would always won. But, now, it seems clear to me that black and grey hat SEO beats Google most of the time.
Re: Own your work
#45The underlying truth behind all such discussions is that too many people focus on the mechanics of content hosting and delivery but have nothing special to actually share. So they will spend all their time engineering the perfect blog site from scratch or moving from platform to platform looking for an ideological fit while no one really cares about consuming any of their output. My advice is always to forget about t…
I've been running a blog on a Perl/flatfile static site generator (with MySQL bolted on later for search) since 1999. Made a few tweaks over the years, but the core of the same. Had lots of people over the years suggest better ways to run a blog, but none of them were getting the traffic I got (well, used to get), and none of their options are nearly as easy to use.
If you do use a third party, please regularly download backups of your work. One of the reasons my blog was so popular was because it also has an archive of articles that I shamelessly copied from other sites (with attribution), most of which have since gone defunct, their content otherwise lost.
Re: Own your work
#46When i write, i write a gist.
Re: Own your work
#47I mostly agree with the article. I use social media to promote what is on my website, my books, etc.
I do use Blogger though. Twice I have switched to self hosting on my domain, and on my web site using Jeckal. Both times I switched back for convenience.
Re: Own your work
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
and curious what you currently think on this topic too. Specifically about solutions. At any level. Individual or societal.
I liked the first half more than the second half. I think you establish the problem very effectively, but in the second half your own indignation shines brighter than inquisition. I've yet to see an answer that satisfies me here. Many times, inquisition is indeed used as a plausibly deniable mask for ideology. Similarly, I don't think you or I will ever reasonably be free of our own personal ideologies. If I had a go…
beautiful:) your answer is an essay in itself.
I think I found a temporary shortcut/patch for myself that I can apply on the personal level.
If I see something outrageous online I bring it and discuss in person with few people and we have more nuanced conversation and I see that questions are asked and it’s not as crazy as online.
And it calms be down and relaxes and gives me hope back. Because old dynamics - of asking questions and having nuanced conversations - they still work.
Re: Own your work
#49The best solution is what the Indieweb folks called POSSE: Publish on your Own Site , Syndicate Elsewhere: https://indieweb.org/POSSE For instance, I might publish a clip on my own site first, then mirror it to places like YouTube, TikTok and Reddit so more people find it. Or post an article on my own site first, then repost it on Medium and Substack (with a canonical saying my own version is the original if possible…
https://prose.sh employs this tactic. You control all the source files and then upload them to use. You get to keep all your content and you are welcome to host your site elsewhere.
Re: Own your work
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it makes you feel any better, a more significant portion may come from Bing/OpenAI's way soon.
Or it'll get even better at ingesting all their content and providing the answers and points itself, never leading the user to their site.
Yeah, this strikes me as the end goal that Google, Bing, etc. are working towards and envisioning. Why redirect users elsewhere when we can just lock them into our AI-generated "search engine"? "Reveal original source URL(s)" will become a paid feature :)