I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years

https://resobscura.substack.com/p/why-i-have-been-writing-a-niche-history

by benbreen • 8 months ago

257 47 8 months ago

resobscura.substack.com

I also (then and now) have no appetite for short-form video content, and still less for the type of history explainer videos — “here’s a two hour deep dive into why this movie is historically inaccurate” or “everything you need to know about such-and-such famous person” — that seem to do well on YouTube.

100% agree.

Whats the difference between the sites "Blog Format" which apparently died in 2023, and what is happening now?

pixodaros2• 8 months ago

A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In the old days, you could make a bit of money just from views, and there were many more places to make money from writing and speaking offline. There were also more long-form musings about academic life which today would be snarky posts on Bluesky. As posting on microblog sites became sometimes professionally useful, academics put their energy into that and let their longform blogs fade (or just got older and busier and were not replaced by younger academic bloggers).

simonw• 8 months ago

Turns out I've linked to you five times since 2023! https://simonwillison.net/tags/benjamin-breen/

(A neat thing about having tags for people I link to is that it's easier to spot when I become a repeat-linker.)

peterspath• 8 months ago

I do the same thing on my blog... have a taxonomy for people, countries, trails I hike, and national parks. Custom taxonomies are a good way to organise your blog.

flir• 8 months ago

Tried that, ripped it all out. Too much hassle, too inconsistent. Now I just grep -r a pile of markdown.

N_Lens• 8 months ago

Just in time to be scooped up in AI training sets!

colesantiago2• 8 months ago

35 paying subscribers out of 8,000 seems to be very low, especially for 15 years.

Do most people actually pay and support most newsletters? Wouldn't it be more stable income to have sponsors or commercial sponsors?

emodendroket• 8 months ago

It doesn’t seem like making money Is the object.

ozim2• 8 months ago

What's with the "everything has to be monetized" or optimized for earning?

Why do people have to earn money on their hobbies?

Why a person can't just publish stuff for others to read?

Why should we be obligated to pay?

If someone has to make a living, maybe they should stick to a proper job not a hobby side gigs. Well I have a friend that makes living from basically making side gigs, but he is not looking to "make it big" - he just values freedom more and if he gets some money to just get by he is happy with it. He is not going to optimize conversion rate of paying supporters. But he is authentic that is why people who drop him some money do so - second he starts "revenue optimizing" I believe anyone who follows him will just drop it and move on.

LightBug1• 8 months ago

Care to share? Or at lease describe to what extent they 'offer the ability to pay'?

I think many would like to live in that world. Good to see what an n=1 example of it looks like in practice.

I mean, at it's extreme, he wouldn't even be on the internet. But dialing that back, it could be as simple as a 'buy me a coffee' link.

colesantiago2• 8 months ago

What's with the "everything has to be monetized" or optimized for earning?
Why do people have to earn money on their hobbies?
Why a person can't just publish stuff for others to read?
Why should we be obligated to pay?

The Author:

> Help support Res Obscura for its next 15 years…

Although you are not obligated to pay and nobody is forcing you, If this isn’t a problem for the author he wouldn’t be asking you for money.

But you do sound like this:

“Why do I have to pay for things?”

“Why can’t I consume things for free?”

Which sounds extremely entitled.

If someone has to make a living, maybe they should stick to a proper job not a hobby side gigs.

This guy is an associate professor in history, not a working SWE or AI engineer like most people on HN.

Have you not considered that this person has a family to feed or rent to pay and just needs extra money?

nephihaha2• 8 months ago

We can phrase that another way. Why do people do unpaid labour? If it is something they love, that is fine, but a lot of folk want free content which doesn't pay the bills.

manwithmanyface• 8 months ago

Okay

vasco• 8 months ago

For what its worth, when you use expressions like 'those halcyon days' you don't need to tell us you're a history PhD.

nspattak• 8 months ago

I guess that there are "content creators" who are not interested by video or click-bait as well as those "content consumers" who are looking for geniously interesting content written in a concise and clear way. Substack seems a good site for this but in general it seems to me that this is sth that is missing in today's internet.

camillomiller• 8 months ago

Sad that a long time self-hosted writer conceded to Substack. The tyranny of convenience and distribution strikes again.

nicbou• 8 months ago

It's getting harder and harder to get eyeballs on text. ChatGPT, AI summaries and social media algorithms all conspire to keep people on their platforms, denying any traffic to external source material.

komali2• 8 months ago

Switching over to a Substack newsletter, in the summer of 2023, revived my interest in writing online. It felt like rejoining an intellectual community — not quite the same as the golden age of blogging in the 2000s, but something equally as lively, in a way that I don’t think quite gets enough credit in the 2020s.

This makes me sad because I really want to be a part of such a community, but I really don't like how bloated and centralized Substack is, and how much control they take away. Seems that's a requirement for community formation these days though?

Cthulhu_• 8 months ago

That's the harsh reality, first (anecdotally / personal view) it became social media that linked to blog posts - especially Twitter was used as an aggregator for "I wrote a blog post about xyz".

Then Medium took off, and there was a vibe of blog posts being more authoritative if they were published on Medium. It was like the TED talks of blog posts. But also it mean that if you had a blog of your own and its contents were reposted on Medium, the latter would get more views.

I don't have the full picture of the whole issue. I suspect consumers generally want a single website to read stuff on, instead of the sometimes jarring style differences between blog sites - even if that means they have individual personality.

jmathai• 8 months ago

even if that means they have individual personality

Sadly I think that’s true. People like consistency. Lets them more easily trust. It’s what makes Starbucks and McDonalds so popular even if they aren’t the best options in their category.

I think Medium succeeded at first because it allowed minimal personalization while still signaling to users “this is a legitimate article and not some rando on the web”.

chemotaxis4• 8 months ago

The main thing is that no one wants the hassle of keeping up with 50 mildly-interesting blogs by visiting them regularly. You really need a "push" mechanism of some sort. Social media doesn't work for this because if someone subscribes to a content creator on X / Twitter, they most likely won't see most of the creator's posts. Instead, the algorithm will show them cat memes and other on-platform engagement bait.

Many other social venues are gone too. If you're lucky, you can reach your audience on HN, but it's about the only remaining, successful aggregator of this type. Reddit has grown a lot more insular and many subreddits don't allow outgoing links. Where else do you go?

In this reality, the most practical push mechanism is email, but sending email to thousands of recipients is hard. You pretty much need to pay someone for the privilege if you want to have a reasonable success rate. Substack will do it for you for free, and it also lowers the friction because it gives visitors a familiar UI with a pre-filled address and no concern about phishing / spam / etc.

Beyond that, I don't think Substack is actually that much of a community. They built a good brand by attracting (buying) a bunch of high profile writers, then had an issue with neo-Nazis where they took controversial stances... I don't associate the domain with anything especially good or bad, not different from blogspot.com or wordpress.com. I have a special hatred for medium.com because almost everything over there is aggressively paywalled, but that's another story.

And yeah yeah, RSS, but the friction for RSS is much higher.

BeetleB2• 8 months ago

Social media doesn't work for this because if someone subscribes to a content creator on X / Twitter, they most likely won't see most of the creator's posts. Instead, the algorithm will show them cat memes and other on-platform engagement bait.

That's an X/Twitter/Facebook problem, not a social media problem. If you're on Mastodon, you'll see all of them.

libraryofbabel3• 8 months ago

Ex-historian here, now an engineer. Ben is one of the few historians really thinking in depth about the implications of LLMs for historical research and teaching: both the good (wow, they are really great at transcribing difficult handwritten documents now; you can use Claude Code to vibe code up quick visualizations for your research or teaching that would have taken weeks of work before), and the bad (students submitting AI-generated essays). Highly recommended reading.

It's also nice to see a working historian who posts to HN. (If there are any others, please raise your hand!) Our community is richer for the wide variety of non-engineering professions represented here, from medical doctors to truckers to woodworkers to pilots to farmers. Please keep posting, all of you.

WesleyLivesay2• 8 months ago

I wouldn't call myself a historian, but I have been doing a history podcast since 2014.

I agree that Ben's writings on LLMs and how they impact the humanities/history are great reads. But I am also the perfect target market for that kind of discussion, dev by day amateur historian by night.

matthiaswh• 8 months ago

Oh you're that Wesley. Big fan of your podcasts!

libraryofbabel3• 8 months ago

242 Episodes on WWII and you're only up to 1940!

(I say that as a compliment, by the way. I love deep historical detail.)

mdani• 8 months ago

I write about Indian history as my side project.

https://a.co/d/guvUxgq

https://a.co/d/iSg4jKZ

waldohatesyou• 8 months ago

Oh wow, thank you for sharing

benbreen2• 8 months ago

Thank you! So glad people here are reading (I'm the author of the post). I'm doing student meetings and grading all day but happy to answer questions or discuss anything historical with the HN community in between!

libraryofbabel3• 8 months ago

Question: How would you characterize the response to LLMs across the historical profession as a whole? Do you expect LLMs to lead to major changes in how historians approach research in the next ~5 years, or do you think they will be used by just a minority of people?

zelphirkalt• 8 months ago

I always somewhat admire people, who can go through with one thing for that long. My own blogs mostly served as vehicles for learning another programming language or saw short-lived activity and then long inactivity, before I took them down. That said ... maybe I should make another blog, in which I document computer programming stuff and keep the topic vague, so that I can put basically anything there, so that I have enough stuff to write about.

sigbottle• 8 months ago

I don't know why, it's just an irrational form of first-principles admiration for me.

This is especially true in the age of LLM's (but the same can be applied to social media forums and the like). Sure, we should "just judge arguments on their merit" but there's something... suspicious. Like, a thought experiment: What if something came to a very reasonable seeming argument in 10 minutes, versus 10 hours? To me, I can't help but feel suspicious that I'm being tricked by some ad-hoc framing that is complete bogus in reality. "Obvious" conclusions can be obviously shaped with extremely hidden premises, things can be "locally logically correct" but horrible from a global view.

Maybe I'm way too cynical of seeing the same arguments over and over, people just stripping out their view of the elephant that they intuited in 5 minutes, then treating it as an authoritative slice, and stubbornly refusing to admit that that constraint, is well, a constraint, and not an "objective" slice. Like, yes, within your axioms and model, sure, but pretending like you found a grand unification in 5 minutes is absurd, and in practice people behave this way online.

(Point being that, okay, even if you don't buy that argument when it comes to LLM's, when it comes to a distributed internet setting, I feel my intuition there holds much stronger, for me at least. Even if everybody was truly an expert, argument JITing is still a problem).

Of course, in practice, when I do decide something is "valuable" enough for me to look at, I take apart the argument logically to the best of my ability, etc. but I've been filtering what to look at a lot more aggressively based on this criteria. And yes it's a bit circular, but I think I've realized that with a lot of really complicated wishy-washy things, well, they're hard for a reason :)

All that to say, is that yeah, the human element is important for me here :D. I find that, when it comes to consumption, if the person is a singular human, it's much harder to come to that issue. They at least have some semblance of consistence, and it's "real/emergent" in a sense. The more you learn about someone, the more they're truly unique. You can't just JIT a reductionist argument in 10 minutes.

IDK. Go small blogs!

jkmcf• 8 months ago

I love to support creators, but I wish there was something common between free and significant subscription price so that I could show appreciation more readily.

Examples I would use without thinking for worthwhile-to-me content:

  - "tip" options in the App Store
  - 10/year
  - 1/month

Similarly, I'm surprised these newsletter gatekeepers haven't implemented a tip jar where you put in $/year and it gets divided based on readership.

I know this has been tried in other ways, but I think Substack and Medium could make this work.

nout• 8 months ago

I know I'll get hated for this on Hacker News, but this has been solved quite well on the bitcoin & Nostr side of things. It's easy to tip couple cents or whatever amounts and there are many apps / websites that support that.

The main difference is that using the legacy dollar rails is super annoying for small amounts, since there are multiple banks/companies on the path between you and the author you are trying to tip. And each of these intermediators needs their $$$ from you.

chemotaxis4• 8 months ago

I'm surprised these newsletter gatekeepers haven't implemented a tip jar where you put in $/year and it gets divided based on readership.

I've seen a bunch of publication with a "tip" button, but I suspect it's not worth the effort. Very few people pay in the first place, so a random one-off payment of $1, $10, or even the "unicorn" $100 is not worth standing up the infrastructure and dealing with the tax paperwork.

On the flip side, if you find 100 people who really like your content and are willing to substantially support it on an ongoing basis with a subscription, you end up with recurring revenue that makes it a better deal.

pixodaros2• 8 months ago

My site has both subscription and one-time donations. The subscriptions bring in 90% of the revenue even though more people have Paypal accounts than accounts with specific crowdfunding services.

nephihaha2• 8 months ago

It is a shame that blog posts rarely seem to feature on search engines anymore. There is some genuinely interesting content on some of them.

I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years

Related Stories