I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years

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.)

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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Tried that, ripped it all out. Too much hassle, too inconsistent. Now I just grep -r a pile of markdown.

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protocolture 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>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?

	▲	pixodaros 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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).

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nspattak 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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N_Lens 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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camillomiller 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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vasco 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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colesantiago 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

	▲	ozim an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	emodendroket 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It doesn’t seem like making money Is the object.

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manwithmanyface 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Okay