Poll: Tell me about your online reading habits
Help a brother out with some research & let me know how you get at your Substacks.
A couple of articles this week, along with the news that Twitter (X, whatever) is going paid, has me thinking about the online writing, publishing, and marketing/discovery game.
From 2007 up to let’s say Musk’s Twitter buy-out last year, traffic was on easy mode. (If you didn’t mind being a carnival clown on Twitter etc.)
Now it’s getting harder, and nobody seems to have any good ideas about how to get seen when you have no audience or want to grow what you have. This is the norm, not the exception, in the history of sharing and spreading ideas.
But we still have this internet thing, even if the walled gardens are fading in cultural relevance.
I once had a large audience, but that was back in Internet 1.0 when we used message boards and I wrote about much different topics. Today, to be candid about it, I don’t know up from down as far as writing to fascinate and delight an audience. For principled reasons I don’t want to play “entertain the algorithm”.
I detest the algorithm. I want to talk to people. Which has left me writing about whatever is on my mind, inspired by the books I’m reading.
My intuition tells me that in this situation of fragmentation plus uncertainty, the smart game is to diversify.
There may be no single channel that can connect you with 100 new readers, but there sure well are 100 channels that can each bring you one.
I haven’t been too good about that and I’d like to up my game.
I’m curious as to gritty details of how you find and read interesting people, ideas, and writing on the internet.
Here’s a tidy poll that you can use:
Let me know what you think and I’ll send you a free like on your comment.
(Also there’s a biggish piece coming out tomorrow in the usual Friday for me, Thursday for you slot.)
Thanks for reading.
-Matt
P.S. By all means share this around so that others can contribute.
It's a 50-50 split between inbox reading and RSS, for me. For discovery, I rely on recommendations from the publications that I read. Far better signal to noise ratio than any social media algorithm.
I get a few newsletter and sbustacks I read in my inbox and usually click through to read original articles at the source. I also have four or five sites bookmarked that I read (or at least scan) almost every day.