He makes a pretty good case that partnering with Electrify has not damaged the quality of the channel's videos so far. They've made multiple videos now under this arrangement, and they've maintained a high standard. I am not confident that it will remain that way indefinitely--capitalism will come for its pound of flesh--but for now it is holding on.
Among my circle of friends, many have a tradition of playing multiplayer games after the kiddos are asleep and the presents are prepared. It makes me wonder whether this has increasingly become a common tradition, and as a consequence the hug this year is more than even Steam could bear. This is pure speculation, of course.
Since I'm indulging in luxurious speculation: maybe Valve has taken Steam down to prepare to announce Half Life 3 tomorrow.
Oh, you can't reach the items on the higher grocery shelves no matter how hard you stretch? That's just a deficit of tall-power. I also experience items on high shelves. No, you shouldn't use a stepping stool to grab those items; just stretch more, and grow taller, like me! Look how good I am at being a bit taller than you! Your failure to be slightly taller is a character flaw, feel bad.
Some of us actually enjoy writing code, and wish to preserve the skill, so we have no motivation to offload the task to an LLM. Do LLM coding evangelists also badger illustrators, asking why they don't just embrace machine learning image generation? Do they tell people they shouldn't have human friends because chatbots exist? Do they insist that musicians slough off their creativity like a molting snake, and just let a computer generate their songs?
There is also a big, uncomfortable truth regarding "AI" coding tools: They are trained on open-source code, yet they ignore the licenses attached to that code. If it's unethical for me to copy-and-paste MIT licensed code without including the license text, then it's unethical to let an LLM do it on my behalf.
LLMs are paving the way to a dystopia where there's no motivation for humans to create, and that world sounds miserable.
My long-running website damninteresting.com and its affiliated projects (e.g., omiword.com) earn me a combined ~$700/month profit on average. Donations have been declining, however, so I don't know if I'll be piping up in next year's thread.
I love your website. I stumble upon it again every other year and I'm always amazed by the quality of the content and writing. I was reading your articles on my Windows Mobile phone, ages ago!
Have you also had a decline in traffic in the last 18 months? It seems like the entire independent web is getting strangled out.
Thanks! We had our 20th birthday earlier this year, so we've certainly been around for some vintage devices. Over the years our primary audience moved from desktop web browsers to mostly mobile readers, and now our largest audience is podcast listeners.
Site traffic is indeed down in recent years. The largest decline was when Facebook introduced "boosting," and stopped showing our posts to 90%+ of our Facebook followers overnight. I despise advertising, so I was unwilling to cave to their demand to "boost" our posts into ads. I'd have been happy to pay a reasonable monthly fee to reach our audience there, but that option was never available.
That big dip in traffic came with a big dip in donations, and as a consequence I eventually had to move from a part-time day job to full-time. The sharp reduction in free my time led to a sharp reduction in original content on Damn Interesting, which further shrunk the pool of people willing to donate.
This is a spiral that some would classify as "death," if I were willing to let it die. But it settled into an equilibrium where it pays for itself, makes a modest profit, and remains rewarding. Frankly I'd probably still do it even if donations dried up entirely, the research and writing give me a sense of purpose that would be difficult to replace.
I used to hope that a wealthy benefactor would discover us, and decide to fully fund our project for a few years, giving us space to realize more of the project's potential. But such offers come with strings attached, and I don't have the stomach for most of those. Perhaps I am broken.
I love this site - have you considered monetizing with like e-books or other offline offerings, if you don't already?
Also, your traffic might not be counting those of us like myself who use an RSS feed (a la Feedly) - those links don't go to your site, they just go to, well, the link. =)
Thanks! We do indeed have a sort of e-book monetization; donating above certain thresholds gives one access to download an e-book version of our entire catalog.
And true enough that RSS traffic is largely uncounted, but there are many other indications of reduced visitor count--server-side logs, comment count on original content, number of email subscribers, and that sort of thing.
This is how I fear my own website will be if the trend continues. Platforms gave, and now they're taking away.
At least what you have built will endure. Even if your invested just enough to keep the lights on, you would still have a trove of fascinating content. It's something to be proud of.
The critics weren't ever the brightest lights in the sky, but this was horribly naive even for that time. It is as if you took the whole lot of human literature, took a dump on it and honestly believe you would know better.
A couple of years ago I deleted reddit and other social media and news apps from my phone. The only remaining distractions it offers are email and books. It's been wonderful, I've been reading about 2 novels per month. Highly recommended.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oligopoly
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