None of the incentives changed. We really just need someone egalitarian to make the craigslist of blogs and never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs for quick monetization. The blogging space is too long-term for that short sighted nonsense

> never be tempted to stab the goose who's laying the golden eggs

Isn’t the whole point that there are no golden eggs? People don’t want to pay and people don’t want ads. Where would you get income for the authors and for the platform itself?

Write a book or become an e-celeb and go on tour. 90% of blog/newsletter content (which are basically the same thing) is just self-promotion anyway.

Yeah man, the popups on blogs feel a lot like being forced to watch commercials before a movie trailer

I think there's monitization models somewhere there. Off the top of my head, you could go the email route and charge for "premium" features. Analytics, custom domains etc.

Either that or it could to be run as a loss leader for some other service

The thing is there's no money in charging writers, really. There's just not enough of them, and they aren't going to pay you enough (certainly not to reach golden egg territory). You must monetize on a per reader basis if you want real revenue.

There is a market but how big, I'd assume that these are real offers

https://wordpress.com/pricing/?compare=1#lpc-pricing

that seem like what somebody would pay. If you'd assume somebody spends 4 hours a week blogging and their time is worth $25 an hour you'd be putting $400 of hour of labor in a month and spending $40 for hosting is a fraction of that. That $25/hour would seem low to some people but high to others: some people are time-rich and cash-poor and others the other way around.

The horrific truth about the "Next Medium" is that it is going to appeal to people who are too lazy to write a successful blog by having GPT-4 write their blog posts for them.

This would be a good service for the Wikimedia Foundation to provide, IMO.

What's wrong with GitHub spaces?

Pages*

From my perspective there's nothing wrong, but most of the population that has ever even heard of Github think of it as a complex programmer's only thing.

I remember a project I did some time ago where we required Github integration, every employee of the company was supposed to have a Github account, it was even part of the onboarding day, there was a very internal knowledge base page on how to setup Github, and EVEN then people would just hear the word "Github" and freak out saying a bunch of people in the company would never ever be able to setup an account there.

Somehow I find that less annoying with substack, because their positioning is clearly "look, this is a newsletter, not a blog." The dark UI patterns around dismissing the pop up are annoying though.

Yeah that's the problem. I don't want a newsletter, I want a blog.

And like the OP I only care about people reading my stuff. I don't care about monetisation and I definitely don't want to put them through all the crap that medium does.. substack is not a great alternative because it's also monetisation focused for authors.

Genuine question. Isn’t HN what you are looking for then? What else would you need from a blog?

Good question!

I thought of it but Hacker News posts are pure text, you can't add a single picture. The reading format is also not suitable for long form, and it makes the post text kinda grey which makes it even harder to read.

So, no. The community is great but it's not a blogging platform. I could self host my blog and post links here for discovery but self-promotion is generally frowned upon. I don't want to abuse the community.

"I thought of it but Hacker News posts are pure text, you can't add a single picture."

... which is, in my opinion, an overlooked and extremely powerful filter.

It's a great way to reduce the moderation burden.

If people can upload images people will upload atrocity pictures (with the caption POST A STUPID IMAGE MEME... U DIE!), lewd pictures, CSAM pictures, and other things that will waste your time to manage if they don't get you in trouble outright. (It was super easy to get a basically G rated site demonetized with a 10⁻⁴ fraction of problem images ten years ago, it must be much worse now.)

For me one problem with the newsletter is that everybody and his brother and his sister and his other brother wants to send me email spams several times a day. The only way I can keep it manageable is to remove myself from every list as soon as I can.

I've been building my own smart RSS reader so I'd much rather add a feed to by reader which puts me, the reader, in control.

Substack has RSS feeds.

It's done that as long as I can remember - the "let me read it first" thing, right? Or did they change something recently?

companies have to make money at some point, it's not coincidence all these same types of sites do the same thing once they've burned through their VC money and have to make money. Hosting this type of stuff is a commodity service, it's why you constantly see a churn of people from each VC subsidized service

As an author, you can turn this off in the settings