I found Damn Interesting because of an orbital mechanics simulation the author coded in javascript as a one-off for an article about iirc cyclers. Crazy amount of effort for what's probably about 10 seconds of eye-candy for the average reader. I found it a really neat implementation and while the articles are a bit long for me, it got me hooked on their podcast. There seem to be few projects as thorough and long-lived as this one.
A possible future for Damn Interesting
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've come across your site before, but I didn't realize just how well researched your articles were until now. I thought you were recycling other folks / were blogspam. (oops) I understand the aversion to self promotion, but it genuinely made it harder for me to hear about Damn Interesting. And I feel like my life has been poorer for it, because your site really is damn interesting. Suggestion, I think you have at le…
Yea - I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term as they make it super easy to pay $8-15/mo which the best readers won’t even miss!
https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/ is a persuasive argument for the opposite
Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've come across your site before, but I didn't realize just how well researched your articles were until now. I thought you were recycling other folks / were blogspam. (oops) I understand the aversion to self promotion, but it genuinely made it harder for me to hear about Damn Interesting. And I feel like my life has been poorer for it, because your site really is damn interesting. Suggestion, I think you have at le…
> I thought you were recycling other folks / were blogspam. It's understandable that you thought so, though the opposite is usually the case. There are a lot of creators who poach our catalog; if you compare publication dates you'll usually find that ours was published first. While I'm out there scanning the microfiche, reading the dusty old books, filing FOIA requests, and hiring researchers at the National Archive,…
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Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting
#24I found Damn Interesting because of an orbital mechanics simulation the author coded in javascript as a one-off for an article about iirc cyclers. Crazy amount of effort for what's probably about 10 seconds of eye-candy for the average reader. I found it a really neat implementation and while the articles are a bit long for me, it got me hooked on their podcast. There seem to be few projects as thorough and long-live…
Ah, you must mean the one embedded in this article:
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-martian-express/
Originally, in 2008, it was 100% Javascript, but a few years later I updated it to use CSS transitions for a much smoother animation.
That cycler simulator actually led to a very cool life experience. An administrator at NASA contacted me wanting to use it for a presentation. Of course I said yes! Then he invited me to be his guest to watch an early test of the SLS rocket that was happening about 90 minutes from my home. Of course I said yes!
I got to meet a bunch of astronauts, see a big rocket engine fire horizontally in the desert, and got a NASA SLS pin. The fellow ended up not using the animation, as that part of his talk got edited out, but nevertheless niftiness.
Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting
#25Can't remember the last time I read a DI article, but I've definitely read them before and value the non-AI content[^1]. Donated. (Good golly, GoFundMe defaulted to a 17.5% tip. WTF?) > This fundraiser is entirely separate from our Give a Damn donation system, which aims to cover Damn Interesting monthly expenses —web hosting, subscriptions, usage licenses, link curation, and that sort of thing. An amazing array of d…
There are a few considerations. One is that the 'Give a Damn' system only aims to collect about $1,800/month, an approximation of our monthly expenses (not just hosting, but author payments, subscriptions to archives, research expenses, etc). And most months it barely collects the target amount. I've tried nudging the goal upward to see if I can slowly push it into actually-make-a-living territory, but it seems to have plateaued; increasing the goal there just means we usually miss our goal.
There's also the fact that the 'Give a Damn' system is supporting the site, to the benefit of all of its contributors, not just me. Changing that dynamic could be detrimental to morale.
There are lots of other small things making it very difficult to just update the existing system, not least of which being the same time shortage this fundraiser is trying to relieve. I'd need to make a bunch of changes to a very sensitive money-handling chunk of code, which requires careful coding and testing.
> What will happen if this experiment fails?
I have a series of decreasingly appealing follow-up plans if this one falls too short. But it's already earned enough to get me through at least a few months, so I'll have a chunk of time to take some positive action. Maybe that means I only get 6 months off before I'll have to resume full-time work, but I'll take what I can get.
Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting
#26I found Damn Interesting because of an orbital mechanics simulation the author coded in javascript as a one-off for an article about iirc cyclers. Crazy amount of effort for what's probably about 10 seconds of eye-candy for the average reader. I found it a really neat implementation and while the articles are a bit long for me, it got me hooked on their podcast. There seem to be few projects as thorough and long-live…
Ah, you must mean the one embedded in this article: https://www.damninteresting.com/the-martian-express/ Originally, in 2008, it was 100% Javascript, but a few years later I updated it to use CSS transitions for a much smoother animation. That cycler simulator actually led to a very cool life experience. An administrator at NASA contacted me wanting to use it for a presentation. Of course I said yes! Then he invited…
This is a beautiful turn of phrase - the likes of which is unlikely to ever be generated correctly and in appropriate context by an LLM:
"An additional inconvenience is the flyby speed: as designed, the Cyclers would swing by Earth at approximately 15,000 miles per hour, and fly past Mars at 22,000 mph. In order to intercept such speedy Cyclers, the rocket-taxis would need to be capable of splitting a lot of lickety."
Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket. In the early days of Facebook we had a page with 20k+ followers, and we got a lot of engagement there, people followed us to be informed of when we published anything new. Then one day Facebook introduced 'boosting,' and overnight ou…
Was kinda inevitable though. Before that everybody was making huge amounts of money off Facebook... except Facebook. Really spammy "publishers" like Zynga were cleaning up. Was the end of the "if you build it they will come" era. Around that time Google's enclosure of the web was well underway and the black hat SEO masterminds I knew were switching to AdWords.
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Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting
#28What I like about this is that it quietly exposes how broken the "creator economy" narrative has been for text on the web. For 20 years the model was: have a normal job, let the internet subsidize the rest with cheap distribution and a bit of ad/support money. That worked as long as (1) part-time/contract engineering was plentiful, (2) search sent humans to long-form, and (3) nobody was flooding the commons with infinite free derivative text.
All three legs are wobbling now. Hiring shifted to "full time or nothing", SEO is a mostly hostile environment, and AI has turned "writing" into something that looks abundant from 10,000 feet. The result is that the remaining high-effort indie sites end up in this weird funding gap: too small and stubborn to become a VC-scale "media brand", too big and polished to be a casual side blog.
So you get this old-school, almost embarrassingly direct solution: just ask readers to buy back the author's time. No growth story, no "community platform", just "I can make more of the thing you like if you cover what the labor market no longer will." In a way that's the most honest possible response to the AI slop wave: not "we'll use AI better", but "we'll opt out of that game entirely and see if real people care enough to pay for it."
Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket. In the early days of Facebook we had a page with 20k+ followers, and we got a lot of engagement there, people followed us to be informed of when we published anything new. Then one day Facebook introduced 'boosting,' and overnight ou…
Was kinda inevitable though. Before that everybody was making huge amounts of money off Facebook... except Facebook. Really spammy "publishers" like Zynga were cleaning up. Was the end of the "if you build it they will come" era. Around that time Google's enclosure of the web was well underway and the black hat SEO masterminds I knew were switching to AdWords.
It's true that some kind of monetization change was inevitable, but I wished at the time they had executed differently. I just wanted fans who wished to see our posts to see our posts, no more, no less. The only options FB gave were to reach far fewer people (do nothing), or to push ourselves on an unwilling audience (boost posts into ads). No option to just pay a monthly fee to have it like it was.
So, while inevitable, I think it's still a good example of why one mustn't trust big corporations with one's work.
Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea - I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term as they make it super easy to pay $8-15/mo which the best readers won’t even miss!
> I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket. In the early days of Facebook we had a page with 20k+ followers, and we got a lot of engagement there, people followed us to be informed of when we published anything new. Then one day Facebook introduced 'boosting,' and overnight ou…
> Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket.
The risk with Substack seems much lower though, since you get to keep their email addresses and could export to another system if you become unhappy with Substack's methods in the future.
With FB, you didn't have email addresses, or a way to export your follower list to another platform, so the consequence of the platform misbehaving was much worse (which perhaps made it more likely the platform would misbehave, knowing that there were no escape hatches).