Small b blogging

http://tomcritchlow.com/2018/02/23/small-b-blogging/

by topcat31 • 8 years ago

35 22 8 years ago

weinzierl• 8 years ago

I‘m torn about this. I really wish there was a renaissance of the blog or even better, the niche website [1].

I don‘t believe this will happen. The effort to write a high quality article is the same whether you post it on your own small b blog or on Medium. So why not opt for the larger audience if it has so few disadvantages.

There was a little window in time when there were no gatekeepers and the technical savy could reach a large and quickly growing audience. But this is over and the gatekeepers will never go away again.

[1] Like the Juggling Information Service. How many hours did I spend on this site? I don’t know, but fun times...

akkartik• 8 years ago

He's not really talking about where you write. He's just talking about changing expectations for writing. They're independent ideas.

Also, it's a canard that Medium gives you a larger audience. Even if everybody is there, everybody isn't going to be reading what you wrote.

Bottomline: smaller targeted audience > larger unfocused audience. Step 1: write about what you find interesting. Step 2: find your homies and show it to them. They're hard to find, but they aren't captive to any single gatekeeper.

dkarl• 8 years ago

I feel some nostalgia for the days when I visited individual blogs and web sites, but I think there are practical reasons they aren't a focal point for community any more.

First, stability: Blogging and maintaining a web site are big time commitments, and most people who make a great site or a great blog fade as their interests and commitments change. Sites like Reddit or Hacker News tend to have a longer useful life than sites built by an individual or a handful of individuals.

Diversity: A blog can have guest contributors, but if you want real dissent, you have to go to the comments, and that's something blogs don't do well. Reddit and Hacker News have their orthodoxies and groupthink, but various opposing viewpoints are present as well. In addition, there are diversities of perspective, back end versus front end, social media startup versus Wall Street finance, that increase the range of discussion.

Efficiency: A successful blogger or website creator knows that they have to give their visitors a complete experience, as well as regular updates. That can translate into a lot of fluff. You can't just say the new thing you learned. You have to create context, make a few jokes, draw out your point so it has time to sink in before your readers move on. On Reddit or Hacker News, effort goes towards the opposite: boiling down your point to make it quickly understandable in the context of the discussion. This comes naturally to most people — it's a lot like oral conversation in groups - so you don't need to have special writing skills (or the time, taste, and expertise to insert stock photos and periodically refresh your site design) like you do for blogging. That reduced barrier attracts participation from people who don't have the time or inclination to make a blog post but might drop a quick experience bomb in a comment.

Different tools for different purposes: A blog or niche web site used to be a platform for publishing short writing, a place for readers to discover new things, and a forum for community discussion. Now, Twitter and sites like Reddit and HN are where we discover things, and Reddit and Hacker News are where we discuss them. As a result, you don't even need a consistent place to publish your thoughts. You can publish them anywhere that can render them in a readable way to people who follow links from Twitter or HN. People who used to use a blog as a way of cultivating a durable identity on the web have various social media platforms to choose from.

I think blogs and niche web sites will continue to exist, because people will still have needs that they meet best, but I think overall we benefit by letting them be replaced by a loose collection of specialized services.

DoreenMichele9• 8 years ago

I do this and I have for years. I don't feel it has accomplished much of anything.

I have 6 years of college. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for a time. I was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project at one time. I was a moderator on Cyburbia at one time. Those last two gigs helped me attend related conferences affordably, though I was a homemaker and student.

My blogging has led to no serious career traction, in spite of being interviewed by reporters repeatedly regarding one of my projects. Most of those interviews never published. The one that did misgendered me and outright made up specious quotes.

After 8.5 years on HN, I have exactly zero strong personal connections here. There are like 3 people who email occasionally. I have zero actual friends here. I have zero serious professional connections.

I was not homeless when I joined. At that time, I had a corporate job and an apartment. So, no, that doesn't really explain it.

I do get hit on by men who know of me through HN. But that is about it.

When I comment that 99% of men have only one reason they would ever really talk to me, it gets described as an offensive exaggeration. [1] I am not claiming 99% of men do this to all women. Just me. It is firsthand testimony regarding my own life. It is not an exaggeration. Think how offensive it feels to me to be treated that way to begin with. Now add in dire poverty that I cannot solve and then being told I am offensive for remarking on the reality of my life.

So I find myself unable to draw any conclusion other than "sexism is alive and well." I wish I could find another explanation.

The only thing I need to make my life work is a middle class income. That's it. But that simply isn't happening and no amount of effort or other virtue from my end is resolving the issue.

So my feeling at this point is "Maybe that (little b blogging to network) works if you are a guy. It sure as hell has not worked for me and I very strongly suspect that my gender is a significant factor in that undesirable outcome."

I assume that means it doesn't work for most women. I assume that in part because I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the HN leaderboard. If there are scads of women here successfully networking via HN and/or little b blogging to further their career goals, please speak up. Toss me a clue. (Email is fine. You don't have to say it publicly.)

Given my background, I remain dumbfounded that this problem remains so intractable. I don't think it should be this hard to turn my knowledge and skills into an adequate income. But I consistently find that it backfires to tell people "No, I actually am that competent" and no one ever seems to conclude it on their own, much less vouch for me or promote me. I see men promote other men here all the time. I don't get any of that. It just doesn't happen.

Asking for help has not worked. Patiently waiting for 8.5 years to be noticed has not worked. Complaining about my poverty gets ugly reactions to the effect of "Shut up and go away." Trying to figure out how to turn my work into income gets routinely pissed on. My favorite: some jerk on Metafilter said I was panhandling the internet for trying to figure out how to earn a living online.

If someone would just show me the secret handshake, that would be awesome.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389666#16394963

TPPOW0020• 8 years ago

Sorry to hear that. I can sort of relate. Ran a blog once for a niche topic, and put in effort to promote it. Some of my things got read, but so much felt like I was talking to an empty room.

Same with HN. It's a ghost town. I commented here with another account for a few years. Never made a connection with anyone beyond someone replying to a comment. It's too big for users to encounter eachother on a regular basis, so you never get to know anyone. It's just a bunch of strangers.

DoreenMichele9• 8 years ago

It's too big for users to encounter eachother on a regular basis, so you never get to know anyone. It's just a bunch of strangers.

No, this is not true. Patio11 and tptacek were business partners at one time. People get work through here, make friends, make business connections. At least, men do.

Lots of evidence of HN being a career maker for people right here in this discussion from 4 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16409768

My highest traffic piece has over 40k page views. That is a lot more than the figures in the article. No, it didn't do anything at all for me professionally.

I have tried figuring out how to write for the HN crowd. For example, this piece about how HN works:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/08/hacker-news-...

It gets no traction, though I routinely see stuff like that posted here. Here is a discussion of a similar piece from just yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973

It is a self post by the author. It has hundreds of upvotes and lots of good discussion.

I largely stopped self posting. It got me all kinds of bullshit personal attacks that were usually not rebutted by other members of the community. People do not vouch for me the way they do for guys here who have made the leaderboard.

I have done everything in my power to try to make this work under difficult circumstances. I don't need anyone's pity. I don't need to hear anymore bullshit explanations about how it just cannot be done -- because the guys here do it all the fucking time.

I need respect. I need to be taken seriously as a professional. I need people vouching for me, reaching out to me as a professional and cluing me as to how it's done.

I get compliments in comments. People tell me publicly that I write well. But no one ever hits me up with an email asking if I would write something for them for pay.

And I am ready to spit nails. How can 100k+ people all stand idly by and do not a goddamned thing to help me succeed professionally while pretending they aren't being sexist jerks? How do you casually watch a chronically ill homeless* woman starve and feel okay about what a good guy you are?

This boggles my mind. I don't get it.

* I am no longer homeless. But I was for a long time.

danielvf2• 8 years ago

Hey, _I_ know you on HN. I've upvoted a ton of your comments. We've also commented quite a few times on each other's comments when we disagree with each other. :)

As baseline, I've been commenting on HN for four and half years, 3813 karma as of this writing. In that time, I've been emailed once with a question about a project I've worked on, and once asking me to put some code on GitHub. Zero offers for jobs, or offers for help. And that's totally what I expect.

A lot of your comments here, as are many of mine, are about what it's like to live in America, outside the valley bubble. That's not the kind of things that gets you job offers when compared with "How I used $HOT_TECHNOLOGY to save $HOT_COMPANY 10 million dollars."

Congratulations! You've found a marketing approach that you've proven doesn't work out for you! Now you just have to find something that works.

I've found that what looks from the outside like a secret club is really just that when people work with someone competent for a while, they want to hire them / work with them in the future. Every single one of my new clients in the past fifteen years has showed up because someone worked with me before on a project in the past.

People rarely trust someone just because the've read something they wrote. It really takes working with someone on a project where you are in the trenches together.

You site says you are a copywriter / community manager? Can you do volunteer community management for an organizations some tech organization? Can you somehow finagle some volunteer resume copywriting for Stanford graduates through some organization? You'll never get anything from the graduates you help, but it's the people in whatever non-profit you are working with that will remember your skill and drive. Or anything that gets you working with people who can hire you later. It snowballs from there.

As an aside, your site also looks a bit dated and very unfocused.

Best of luck!

DoreenMichele9• 8 years ago

I have given away my time and expertise for literally years. I have done tons of volunteer work. People tell me all the fucking time they value what I do. But they will not pay me. This never leads to paid work. Ever.

I just answered questions for free for a YC company this week and informed them I do the kind of writing they need. They can't be arsed to so much as reply to my email with an acknowledgement that they have it.

I need income, not more opportunities to improve the lives of others for free, get pats on the head and told to piss off about my sad sack story that I can't afford to eat at the end of the month.

I have tried endless suggestions of what works for the guys. Email people and ask for feedback. Email top people here who routinely talk about gender parity in tech and have magnanimous invitations to email them any time. Buy a .com domain to be taken more seriously. Put together some kind of portfolio.

I have been asking for advice for literally years on how I can turn my skills and expertise into earned income and I get mostly pissed all over and bullshit excuses.

icc973• 8 years ago

Yes sexism is alive and well. I always assumed it would die with my dad's generation. But no.

I assumed geeks would be the last kind of people to be sexist, but no.

I don't really have a solution, although things do seem slightly better than 50 years ago.

The only thing that seems to make a difference is women shouting to be heard and telling their kids to be less sexist.

It clearly takes generations to change.

Not that that helps you. But I do at least respect your comments.

DoreenMichele9• 8 years ago

I assumed geeks would be the last kind of people to be sexist, but no.

HN is the least worst space I have found. Most geeks are mostly guilty of just engaging in habits that society taught them. Very few people here are deeply committed to making sure women remain barefoot and pregnant. This makes them possibly our last, best hope, in spite of their failure to be perfect.

The only thing that seems to make a difference is women shouting to be heard and telling their kids to be less sexist.

I don't agree. I made it to the leaderboard by avoiding trouble, giving respect, and doing my best to not shout. You cannot begin to imagine how far I have gone to prove myself to the men here.

It is the end of the month. I am nearly broke and very stressed about it. I'm frustrated and fed up and angry and there are times when shouting is appropriate. But, most of the time, I feel the angry feminist types are just cutting their own throat. I blog about that at times, not that any women care what I think.

ArneBab• 8 years ago

This sounds like blogging to a specialized audience -- which only works to your professional benefit when you blog for the ones who pay you (maybe indirectly by blogging to your professional peers).

It indicates a hierarchization of communication: you can only reach those you already "won".

A somewhat related problem for blogs nowadays is that policing spam takes a lot of time and effort -- you depend on the big platforms for that if you don’t have a lot of time. The web became a much more hostile place, to the big players’ benefit. That removes low-overhead communication among peers from the benefit of blogs.

Small b blogging

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