Writing is networking for introverts

I see writing slightly differently: it's a way to present your ideas without any performance-related anxiety getting in the way.

To prepare a good conference talk generally takes a long time, and an otherwise solid talk can be made less engaging by poor delivery.

Writing a comparable article can take the same amount of time, but it's much easier to get feedback on it, and it's far easier to track updates. There's no single moment where you can really screw it up.

The biggest challenge is getting people to read what you wrote, and care enough to respond.

I started a blog recently where I want to write notes for my writing practice and explore different subjects I'm interested in. Of course it'd be nice if someone had actually read it, for my personal vanity, and all those conversations and opportunities people claim blogging leads to.

But it's not the kind of project it would make sense to drive ads to, or even to niche down and grow an audience around a specific topic, since the whole point is to write whatever "gratifies my intellectual curiosity". But you can't really submit this kind of thing to reddit or to forums, they ban "blogspam" for very good reasons. There's no obvious way to promote it and put it in front of people.

Instead of blogging I could try engaging in conversations here and on reddit (and maybe on discord or twitter), and that, at least HN and reddit, works amazingly well for having good discussions (if not for making personal connections).

But the biggest problem with engaging in social media is that it quickly becomes extremely unhealthy and addictive (in the way that blogging doesn't). I want to write, and I want to talk to people, but I don't want to get addicted to refreshing my profile page to look for upvotes and comment notifications (I do have a big problem with the internet addiction).

I'm not sure what the right solution to that would be. Does anyone have good ideas? How do you make actual human connection over the internet and engage in intelligent conversations, without getting your dopamine hijacked and skinnerboxed by the social media algorithms?

Maybe there's a space for a platform that would encourage thoughtful discussion somehow, and limit the immediate rewards that make social media so addictive. But then nobody would use that platform, right?

Maybe someone somewhere will come up with a NLP based solution which will cluster people with similar ideas (by means of their blogs) so that you may find people who share your interests within the cluster or explore other idea clusters. Would be a great way of making friends if nothing else.

Integrate it with ActivityPub and make an account on a service like Mastodon/Plerona/Misskey/etc so you can federate with everyone else. Then, when you publish a new blog post it can be automatically pushed onto other people's feeds if they're following you. I do this, but I also don't really have that big of a desire to find thousands of readers at once. I'm mostly contented with sharing my writing to a few friends and technologically sophisticated peers, so ymmv.

Depending on the kinds of videos he makes, people may have spend more hours focused on his face, and paying attention to his mannerisms, than some friends of theirs.