Free Content

Les Orchard (@lmorchard) on Mastodon:

Folks pouring so much effort into a thing they seem to think is theirs and absolutely never will be. Doesn't matter how much noise or how many petitions or how many shitposts. You can't own a social network by just occupying it and emanating presence and making noise. You are ballast, packing peanuts, slight impulses on a metrics dashboard. They'll do it without you.

This post is interesting in terms of users thinking they 'own' a platform or offer value, but never will. Which is a weird thing to think as a platform user, but whats the alternative?

I've been a proponent of having a blog for what feels like forever, there’s value in the words you write. Not because writing whoever you see fit isn’t something worthwhile to some people, or that have a website make you a ‘real’ writer in some egocentric attack on those that want to tweet (or skeet or whatever). Simply because I don’t like people giving things away for free.

This way of thinking of course falls down when you think about people actually reading what you publish. There has been a shift away from reading websites, to reading smaller and smaller content. You can barely get anyone to visit a webpage any more unless you have an already established audience. If you ever need proof of this, just go to Reddit and look at the comments under any link posted, and a large percentage of people will have looked at the little of the post and very little else.

Sure, having a blog and a website is great but posting life update and thoughts to whatever platform you feel comfortable with (or all of them) is fine too. You may be feeding the machine, training the algorithm and giving away from content — but you’re probably doing that on your blog too.