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A possible future for Damn Interesting

damninteresting.com

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Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting

#31

Post by MBCook »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #13
areoform wrote: post #10

Earlier 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,…

DI basically predates blog spam doesn’t it?

I’m not surprised people steal your stuff.

Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting

#32

Post by apparent »

lightedman wrote: post #16
newppc wrote: post #12

Earlier 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!

Spamstack? The site where people can just sign you up without you knowing until you get your inbox flooded with garbage? Yea there's a reason I bin everything that comes from that site to my spam folder.

Weird, I never get spam from Substacks. I do get them from beehive or whatever it's called. Even asked to have my work email blocked, since if I ever signed up it would be from a personal address. They claimed to have done it, but I still get spammed.

Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting

#33

Post by MBCook »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #14
newppc wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

You can do the same thing without them, others have, though I can’t remember any off the top of my head.

I think the model is a good one but I’m fully on board without wanting to risk being beholden to them or maybe patreon or others.

Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting

#34

Post by DamnInteresting »

MBCook wrote: post #31
DamnInteresting wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

DI basically predates blog spam doesn’t it? I’m not surprised people steal your stuff.

> DI basically predates blog spam doesn’t it?

Blog spam origins are murky at best, but I don't recall it being a prevalent thing until nearer to 2010. But of course recollection is an unreliable narrator. I'm also assuming you are using "predates" as in "preceding" rather than "preys upon", heh.

Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting

#35

Post by MBCook »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #34
MBCook wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DI basically predates blog spam doesn’t it? I’m not surprised people steal your stuff.

> DI basically predates blog spam doesn’t it? Blog spam origins are murky at best, but I don't recall it being a prevalent thing until nearer to 2010. But of course recollection is an unreliable narrator. I'm also assuming you are using "predates" as in "preceding" rather than "preys upon", heh.

Heh. Yeah. My memory (also unreliable) is that people weren’t churning out blog spam articles for the Adsense when I found DI, or at least maybe only on obviously popular topics like cars or whatever.

It hasn’t ruined the fun stuff yet.

Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting

#36

Post by areoform »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #14
newppc wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

Or, you could use Stripe and work with an agent to roll your own. It's overkill for this, but Claude Fable and Codex 5.6 Sol are surprisingly good at checking their work. So much so that they can be trusted with typesetting and image plating.

If anything, they could probably construct a static site that costs a fraction of the amount to run.

Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting

#37

Post by PaulHoule »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #29
PaulHoule wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 inevita…

From their viewpoint, Google and Facebook are not in the business of giving anybody traffic for free. Of course businesses divide into categories including ones that are trying to sell something directly who can pay more and those that are trying to get attention to place their own ads from the viewpoints of the platform that is an arbitrage play that they'd like to eliminate.

It's awful but true. I dropped out of large-scale web publishing around 2013 or so because I saw the writing on the wall.

Re: A possible future for Damn Interesting

#38

Post by scrame »

DamnInteresting wrote: post #5

Heavens to Betsy. My server alerted me that traffic was far exceeding a median Thursday. For the record, I am a fairly active user on HN, but I was not responsible for sharing this link here, directly or otherwise. I have little stomach for self-promotion (probably to my detriment).

Your podcast episode on the history of commodities trading[1] was awesome! I, sadly, don't visit your site as much as I used to, because, well, honestly I can't really keep track of the stuff I do visit regularly, but I'm glad you're still at it. I'll see if i can support your efforts in some way.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/death-by-derivatives/ (the audio is somewhere around there, i'm sure)

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