I’ve been using WordPress for a long time. Like rounding the corner to twenty years (in actuality going on 17) of time in the open source content management system.
Blogging was the new hot thing when I was in college. Blogging platforms emerged out of the strange tendency millennials and Gen Xers had for publicly sharing their own self reflection. I presume we got this from the Me Generation who raised us.
“I learned it from you Mom and Dad!”
Those early generations of social media all had flavors of being oriented towards writing with some multimedia mixed into mediums that were immersive and hyperlinked m but also narratives shared in reverse chronological order because the norm.
We went from Geocities to Livejournal to blogger, Typepad (RIP), and WordPress over the course of a few booms and busts. If you were blogging before 2005, you probably could have made a career out of it.
I don’t just mean writing, though lots of bloggers because professional writers, but whole online communities turned into careers from fashion and beauty to legal and financial.
Alas, the type of person who might once have made a wonderful career out of being a writer was caught out by the gutting of print media. America lost especially the kinds of middle class aspirant jobs that local news and independent publishers once provided for all kinds of creatives.
I’ve watched many platforms attempt to replace media jobs. Tumblr once hired a stable of writers. So did Medium. Neither ended well for anyone. Watching the comings and go of platforms and networks instilled a kind of paranoia in me about owning your own space.
I prefer posting under my own name on my own domain on an open source maintained piece of software as a back. I don’t pretend like I own my distribution on any social media channels. I’m sure Twitter will always be around wink wink.
So I am inclined to distrust Substack though I am reading more and more on the platform and I’ve enjoyed writing my own beauty blog there in the last few months. Thus far they managed to thread the needle on making money and making a social network and I don’t feel fearful that it will suddenly disappear like I once did.
Which is really a shame as it’s designed almost completely for the Gen C and Millenial set who really wished they had media jobs. The most successful did have media jobs and realized they could make more as an independent niche like the venture beat or by pandering to a very specific demographic or market that the giant media platforms don’t like.
These professionals class writers have a preference set for how they do content management and writing that just doesn’t remotely overlap with how I like to write. They want easy peasy hit publish. I want mobile. I want cross platform writing. It’s funny to finally have a content management system solve for monetizing and it’s just not made for me. But distribution and payment matters so I’m not booting up anything on my own without handling that first.