I'm done with coding

I'll just survey the landscape, and then say it ultimately comes down to personal preference.

So the basic idea is to get an audience and then monetize it. For that, there are different ways. In my opinion it's easier to buy something that gets traffic through this and then monetize it, then to buy a whole business, at least for the purposes of this conversation. Why? Because it's much easier to verify something is getting the traffic a platform's stats confirm, and then build a business on top of that, then to extrapolate correctly from a business someone is selling with a thousand moving parts.

With that being said: plenty of people buy complicated Internet businesses and achieve great results with them.

Also to reiterate from my earlier comment: if you can buy an account (some platforms do allow this) and start with traffic that's already earning a trickle of dollars, psychologically I believe that's 100 times easier than starting from nothing and painfully waiting months to earn a dollar. I recommend it whenever possible.

So without further ado here's how I rank the ways to get traffic. Notice how fractured this landscape this is; most people specialize in one, or perhaps two.

Google SEO: avoid avoid avoid. Not only is it saturated but the search arm of Google is a hard taskmaster. The most frustrating and abstruse of all the ways to make money online imo. I would only do this if I started by buying a niche content website business (aka one with prebuilt traffic).

YouTube: much more appealing than Google SEO but still a grind. However what you will learn here is all useful and the YouTube algo is, in a sense, a great marketing teacher. Unfortunately it takes so long to get off the ground that I'd also only enter this by buying a channel with traffic.

FaceBook: said to be lucrative but I don't know it. This is a great example of what I was saying about secret knowledge. How many people do you know who are enthused about creating FaceBook groups and attracting traffic to them? Yet this is, based on the available evidence, a solid business, maybe even the best of the ones listed here.

Instagram: seems tougher than YouTube in my opinion.

Pinterest: the new hotness, and currently being overrun by AI content lol. But AI + mass producing content is a viable strategy, and your North Star as someone looking to make money online is viable straegies.

TikTok: for profit, most likely better than Insta, and even YouTube. I just don't know enough about specific strategies for it unfortunately.

Newsletters: a good niche but kind of opaque (not easy to learn about and getting crowded). But said to be good.

When I was younger, I had "attitude problems" as well. I like to think though it was because I was passionate about what we were doing at Apple — how we were being perceived by the public.

I think I eventually just stopped giving a shit and instead more or less kept my head down. And perhaps that's too bad.

I think my biggest ongoing frustration was how much time I was expected to read and reply to emails; on my first day one of the first things I was instructed to do was to use their internal email filtering system (the name of which I can't remember), because if you didn't you'd have literally thousands of emails going into your main inbox. Mostly alerts, lots of cross-team announcements that weren't relevant to me, some Radar updates on tickets that I wasn't assigned to IIRC.

Even when I got the filters more or less under control, I would still have to spend a lot of time replying to emails throughout the day, or risk getting in trouble for letting them pile up.

It was pretty depressing, and I remember the first time I pushed back I ended up kind of yelling at my boss's boss about it when I said something like "You know, during the interview you asked me a lot of really hard computer science questions, I thought that's why you hired me, but maybe we should revise the process to just be a fucking endurance test of replying to emails for two hours and see how they do." He didn't like this suggestion, for whatever reason.

So I don't completely blame them for saying I had a bad attitude, and frankly I don't think I was a good fit for the AMP team of Apple; I am far too unorganized.

I mean, a post on Reddit had a fresh 21 year-old out of college making a TC of $120,000/year - 2x the median annual salary of ~$60,000/year. So, yes. You're lucky

Yeah, I think most people end up learning the hard way that there's no equivalent to "attorney client privilege" in regards to coworkers and managers.

I like all my current coworkers, I think they're nice and smart people, and I don't think they're assholes at all, but I don't really say anything to them that I wouldn't be fine with HR hearing about, even during off hours. They're not bad people, and I don't think that they'd be overly vindictive, but I've been burned enough by coworkers that I have trouble trusting them.

Personally it's pretty hard to get me to tattle on people [1], in no small part because I think that most people don't need to be reminded six times for one mistake. I also just think that unfeeling bureaucracies are capable of unspeakable evil but that's far more of a tangent that I'm not going to get to in this message.

[1] With obvious exceptions, if I were to see outright abuse or fraud or something then I'd probably tell someone.