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 least 1k people who'd be willing to chip in to give you a "job."
FWIW, in this new age, patronage might be the only way. Allow people to pay on a sliding scale, with an uncapped upper end. And give them access to a tightly moderated, thoughtful community. Who knows, maybe there are Damn Interesting superfans out there who can chip in $1k/mo. You never know.
The modern economy of fan economics is strange. It's very much a whale phenomenon. People want community and belonging. And a community of people who like stuff that's damn interesting is pretty damn neat.
Also, you should consider turning some of these images into items people can buy. There's something funny, sweet and thoughtful about these, if you know the story,
https://damn-8791.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/disne...
https://damn-8791.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Bathy...
> 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, these lazy creators just yoink the gist and earn 100x more than I do. It's a lot to grapple with sometimes. But I enjoy doing it, so I ignore the parasites most of the time.
> FWIW, in this new age, patronage might be the only way. Allow people to pay on a sliding scale, with an uncapped upper end.
That's not far from what I'm attempting with this fundraiser experiment. There is a modest goal for the year, but no cap on contribution, so if someone(s) with vast resources is inclined to make a generous contribution, they are able to do so.
One problem is that I don't know how to reach such people apart from this omnidirectional signal. Another is that I would not be amenable to string attachments. Maybe I'm broken, but I'd rather shut down the site than allow a wealthy benefactor to call any shots, and most wealthy entities won't like that (I expect).
> And give them access to a tightly moderated, thoughtful community.
We kind of have that in our comments sections, but a more unified place might be an interesting exploration. I'll ponder that, thank you for the suggestion.
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.
I would support this Patreon. Particularly to the extent that something like that allows the funding vehicle to remain behind the scenes / separate from the main publication you’ve so lovingly polished and shared with the world over all these years.
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 our posts were hidden from all but a fraction of our audience. Paying to boost each post would convert them into ads, which is not how we wanted to reach our readers. Our site traffic plummeted. I would have happily just paid FB a flat rate to retain access to our audience, but that option was not on offer.
I was already a proponent of the "own your platform" philosophy[1] (aka "Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms"[2]), but that misguided reliance on Facebook really cemented it. It's nigh impossible to own everything we rely on, but I'm reluctant to give any company that much power over my project again.
[1] https://www.chuck.is/platform/
[2] https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
[dead]
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.
https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/ is a persuasive argument for the opposite
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.