Who am I? Great to meet everyone here!
I wanted to take a moment to to let you all know a bit about myself.
I am an entrepreneur that wears a lot of hats. I am a Realtor, insurance agent, content creator on Twitch and YouTube, and professional dungeon master.
I am so looking forward to connecting with you all here. Let’s grow together!
How Google and AI are Killing Travel Blogs Like Mine
I just finished reading this blog post by Amanda Williams, a travel blogger of 15 years, on the impact of Google's "helpful content" algo changes and AI on her ability to financial sustain herself.
And man- I might sound dumb here, but I totally had not connected the dots re: how AI will absolutely destroy ad revenue for creators-- specifically creators that produce written content.
Ad placement is driven by site visitors, and AI totally bypasses the need for a site visit. Instead, it harvests the information from blogs like Amanda's and puts it in a neat list along with the content of 10 other bloggers so a person trying to find the top sites to visit in Paris never needs to even visit the site.
This is a problem in that, bloggers like Amanda have to switch strategies-- she now needs a new means of making money to continue producing trustworthy travel content. That might be creating a substack with individual subscribers, creating courses, etc. But her content likely won't be publicly available in the future, non-harvestable by AI... and that's a problem too in that AI's knowledge sources are going to get worse and worse.
Also, I just can't imagine that the 1:1 subscriber model won't be a losing game for soooo many great writers/creators. It's very different to be a person creating content that people are willing to pay for month over month, especially in niche fields like travel, instead of being paid by relevant brands through ads.
What do y'all think?
Dating is over.
discuss...
Uptrusting as Oral Culture. Interesting to explore UpTrust w/ the frame that it's more of an "oral culture" than a "written culture", where it has more of a riff and jazz kind of energy than other internet community sites that I frequent. I think it's looking through the comment sections, with the branching and forking, and I imagine more of "sparking a multi-party conversation" and "ah yes" than traditional writing. LessWrong (another experiment in a new internet forum style) is strongly essay culture, Twitters got a bit of oral culture vibes, but perhaps less collaborative (uncertain).
I wonder how far this lens can go for community or product development.
When I was writing this post, I realized I'd rather have dictated it!
It's too intimidating for men to be men. Alright, here’s one of my most controversial opinions, and I’m gonna try to take the filter off as much as possible:
Feminism has played out as retribution instead of solution. The Barbie movie is an entirely thorough example of what I’m talking about. You suppressed us, so we’re gonna use any means necessary to take over.
And then they recreated the same imbalance in its opposite.
I see most social movements do this too. True solutions to imbalances aren’t fair because they don’t have human-enacted payback. You suppressed us, so we’re going to move toward balance.
I’ve been spending about 2 years trying to set aside my learned default into my masculine energy (having grown up in highly feminist orange/green) and learn how to root in my feminine. But my feminine longs for a tether to something rooted. Masculine energy feels rooted, solid, grounded, and my feminine very much doesn’t (though it is held by a spacious ok-ness, but it’s so airy it easily gets chaotic when not balanced in connection with a grounded masculine.)
But I’ve had a hell of a time finding grounded healthy masculine men. Many of them can do it for a time, but then flee to an extreme, like angry resentment at one end and non-binary softness at the other end. And I think it’s because the culture has become super aggressive to men who are solidly men.