Is blogging just failing in public?

Although I’ve had several false-starts when it came to blogging, I definitely feel that I’ve gotten into a good rhythm of it. I’ve been watching a lot of creator centered media, and something that I find really interesting is that a lot of the stuff is bad before it’s good.

A lot of the time, people took a while to find their niche, or find the things that they were/are good at. Ezra Klein for instance blogged for years, screamed into the void, before he really grew into being one of the NY Times’ best columnists. Overnight successes are really interesting in the way that they often take decades.

Blogging, like other forms of creatorship comes with predictable upsides, and downsides. The big upside is that over time your audience grows, provided you continue to provide good content. The bad thing is that as your audience grows, you tend to become both captured by your audience and you fail publicly, a lot.

Most of blogging seems inescapably tragic- few people read. Many people who read rarely read blogs. Those reading blogs have very good blogs to read, meaning it’s hard to squeeze into someone’s queue. So, if your goal is eyeballs on your work, you’re probably SOL for quite some time.

Worse, it seems like one of the best ways of becoming known is to be slightly parasitic to a fringe ideology, and then “reform”, allowing you to get loads of attention, some of which sticks. Rinse and repeat.

There also seems to be an interesting intellectual tension that goes on when it comes to writing in that to learn, you need to be criticized. But, to be read, you need to be appearing good. Finally, in this culture, you can only be criticized so much before problems arise. Presuming you didn’t pop out of your mother’s womb on par with Shakespeare, it seems your shelf-life as a freemium intellectual is stunted, and may quickly expire.

I was born in 2000, and it’s crazy to think that the internet just became a part of life. I’ve heard a lot that the Dot-Com bubble was where people believed that creating a website would make early adopters rich. While that hasn’t born out, a few of the innovators online have seemed to pop-off, whereas others come and go.

It also doesn’t really seem that blogging is a medium that’s easy to stay on-top of. I read an article a while back ago about the short shelf life of public intellectuals, where when the unique insight that you bring is being integrated into the world, it’s extremely fashionable to be on top. But, unless you can continue to revolutionize understandings of many areas, or you’re limitlessly charismatic, you need time to really think through intellectual innovations. Having enough good output to regularly be worth reading seems impossible in the long haul.

A credit to people like Scott Alexander who’s writing is consistently good, is widely read by smart people who love correcting others, and is rarely knocked down intellectually, while keeping up a psychiatry gig. I wish I had his fortitude, academic credentials, and general codex-ism.