All true. 25 or 30 years ago I would manually visit specific people’s web sites to see what new stuff they posted. That was not as inconvenient as you might think. The density of information I wanted on the 100 or so sites I had bookmarked was higher than now by far. Blogs used to handle notifications well.

Now, I basically depend on X and even on Facebook to shout out when I have a new book or open source project I want people to check out. This is far from perfect, but requires little of my time. For me to keep producing reading and code content, I feel like I need about 1000 to 2000 ‘true fans’ and I think I have that so I am happy.

For most young people starting to build a web presense, I think it must be much more difficult to get started. Still, I notice some young people creating amazing open source projects and they can create a living pretty quickly. I enjoy reading code as much as the words people write.

Good article, but the 'use newsletters' advice at the end is bunk. Email is mostly dead as a way of reaching people, especially anyone under 30. You might as well collect names and addresses and mail out brochures.

Nobody likes promotional emails, so even if they don't go to spam they tend to just pile up unread until someone does a purge and unsubscribes. Once again, spammers and oversharers ruin things for everyone by forcing others to post less good content more often, or risk being swamped in others' feeds. The only actionable advice I can think of is to mute people on social networks who post more than some threshold of comfort, because some people just cannot shut up. It's a pity there isn't an easy way to filter by 'standard deviations of normal engagement' to only see the greatest hits of high-volume posters.

This follow/subscription problem is worst for musicians and video artists, unless they're naturally aggressive self-promoters. Social network dynamics are fascinating but also demoralizing to watch.

There is a comic by The Oatmeal about this https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021 It came up when Facebook convinced news organizations to "pivot to video" then throttled their traffic.

> I’ve recently heard of TikTok stars with millions of followers struggling to get even 5,000 views on their videos — a conversion of just 0.5% to people who explicitly opted in to following you!

That’s not a bad thing. Many social media “stars” are fads, I’ve seen many a highly followed account gone to shit because they can’t or can’t be bothered to come up with original ideas any more, or they have annoying promos in every piece after they got popular, or they have simply sold their account, etc. These accounts tend to bleed followers whenever they actually “convert” — people hit unfollow after they see the boring shit enough times. So, instead of boring you until you unfollow, TikTok simply shows you something else you may actually like.

Following friends and family is different from following content creators you don’t know. While some may want to see everything from their friends and family no matter what (and TikTok does have a friends feed for bidirectional relationships — it shows me everything, but I don’t have many friends so I’m not sure what happens if you have hundreds of them), content creators are interchangeable 99% of the time.

Now, if you have an example of a consistently high quality content creator struggling to get 5k views despite millions of followers, we can talk.

Wow I actually subscribed to this newsletter as the first newsletter I ever subscribed to because I thought he made a compelling point.

…five minutes later I get an email saying I’m also subscribed to another newsletter as well?

> You subscribed to Untangled with Charley Johnson by Charley Johnson because it was recommended by 12 Challenges

No thank you!