One Glorious Year of Posting Into the Void

So it’s been a little over a year since I’ve started this blog, and almost a year since I started pledging money on keeping this blog regularly updated. Since then I’ve (almost) completely managed to stick to my pledge, writing a post once a week at first and then once every two weeks, with a few breaks. And what do I have to show for my diligence? Well…

My blog has at least a few readers (and a lot of AI scrapers), though as far as I know no one has found the blog without already having encountered me in some form either in real life or online. I got around to registering my own domain name, now that I have something to host on it. And I have something to point to, something that shows that with some structure and clear deadlines I can overcome my inertia and write down the idle thoughts in my brain, or at least something resembling them, and turn them into something more.

I’ve been online from a definitely too-young age, but I’ve always been a lurker. Somehow I managed to avoid the impulse for dumb posting all these years, sticking to mostly small and semi-public online communities and flitting between them silently. This lack of impulse has done me a good job at keeping me away from the most rancid and conflict-ridden sites¹ but it does make my online life a rather sad (at times) and diasporic one. Recently I’ve tried to pivot my life more towards doing things with other people in the real world, and this blog is also a way of trying to think independently of the perverse (in multiple ways) incentives of the current internet.

I guess I’ve made my peace with the uncertainty of releasing my thoughts to the open internet. I haven’t been yelled at by anyone yet, which may be what was keeping me from posting before, but outside of the readers I know in real life I haven’t gotten any positive or neutral comments either. If a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox, it’s (at least with my approach) an extremely slow one. Clearly I could be doing much more to share my posts, but then it starts feeling like the like-chasing numbers game I’ve managed to dodge all my life.

Where does this blog go from here then? I’m going to keep writing of course, but I’ll relax my posting pledge to one post per month. Forcing consecutive posts out on a tight schedule a la Inkhaven is a great way to start if you have the time and energy, but I’ve been running dry on post ideas (and honestly, a little burnt out on certain topics) and this seems like a good time to recover a bit of Slack. Pushing more posts out doesn’t seem like the thing to optimise for anymore. I’m not sure what is, but at its heart this whole endeavour is about putting out the contents of my mind in a form others can recognise and understand and not about maximising some metric, however useful they can be to get you started.