Pulling Back on Substack and Refocusing to My Other Blog
Just a personal note about this Substack
Based on the output I’ve been posting here, it’s clear I’m not really the Substacking type. So, I’m going to just go ahead and make it official that I’m shifting 99% of my focus in 2024 to my Wix site and will only repost here with the overviews covering what I’ve been doing over there. So expect the trickle to continue for a while…
This is frustrating because when I signed up here, I was expecting this to be my primary blog but clearly this format doesn’t contribute well to that. A lot of that had to do with me not fully understanding that this isn’t a blogging service and that blogs don’t really work in the email newsletter format unless you already have some kind of dedicated following. It reminds me of when I tried Medium for a year: it only works if you either a) have dedicated readers because you’ve been published somewhere else or b) are some kind of grind-monster who’s basically 24/7 selling yourself or your work. I’m neither a professional nor interested in working this beat as a side-hustle. I blog as a hobby since I already have a full-time job.
Simon Reynolds recently posted an opinion piece about blogging over at The Guardian and it captures a good deal of my own feelings on the subject. Blogging, he points out, is a bit of a relic held over from the 2000s. It’s been replaced by social media and podcasting and most readers put there attention over in those realms, rarely engaging with the community that once existed in the comments sections of those blogs. I certainly remember that period since it happened while I was in high school, then college, and then becoming a young professional (2002-2011). I even had a number of aborted blogs on Blogspot and Wordpress (each of them named Ars Nihil, by the way) but life always got in the way of really fleshing them out. I also had roughly the same problem I had with Medium and now Substack: it’s hard to comment effectively on someone else’s work if you don’t have the time, don’t believe you’re adding anything valuable, or feel like you’ve walked into a room with a hundred parrot-people screaming insults and inside jokes at each other. There’s too much going on in the real world - I never need that aggravation when I come online to escape it.
(And this isn’t even addressing that whole recent controversy this place has been dealing with lately…)
Like Reynolds, I like blogging since it allows me to channel my weirdness into something more productive. He summed it up nicely by writing:
I miss the inter-blog chatter of the 2000s, but in truth, connectivity was only ever part of the appeal. I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.
I enjoy writing but I’d also really love it if I could get more people to read it regularly without needing to pimp myself to achieve that. I get that The Grind basically requires you do that but I’m not here selling self-help seminars, muscle enhancers, or my questionable artwork. I write because I love it. I read because I’m interested in other people’s thoughts and takes. I learn because of these things. Connection should’ve been the purpose behind all of this but instead we’re still screaming and advertising.
At least with my Wix blog, I don’t have to deal with all that shit. I can just post whatever weird-ass thing comes into my orbit and hope that somebody else wants to learn more. Should I figure out how to do SEO better? Maybe, but I have little interest in monetizing. I have other plans for those goals that don’t involve me making posts about the 500 articles I’ve save in Pocket for four months or all sorts of random subjects (old dead poets, backgammon, eggs, disco, survivors of plane falls, pilcrows, etc.).1 I already hate how social media so focused on arguments and sales pitches - blogging’s supposed to be the respite from those things.
So, yeah, 2024’s posts are going to focus (almost) exclusively on my main blog and just getting back into the groove of posting there with more frequency. No guarantees I’ll be regular with those entries but I’ll keep trying. While I’m not deleting this Substack page (perhaps against better judgement), don’t expect anything more than just summaries directing you to the other place. I blog because I need to dump things from my brain and wish to share what I find. I can no longer do that through this place or its format of choice.
This isn’t a goodbye but rather a “Catch you on the flip side.”
Those particular eggs are going into the “I’m writing a novel” bucket, something I’m now getting more serious about after two decades of fits and starts.