Five Things: October 31, 2024

This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox, with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email’s not your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed. I encourage you to click through the main links (there’s only five and they’re all interesting!), and if you enjoy something — send me (or them) an email, leave a comment, or hit the socials!

_ONE

POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world | Molly White

When platforms die, there is inevitably community loss as the userbase fragments. Some people move to the same platforms but never manage to reconnect. Others migrate to different services that don’t interoperate. Some vanish entirely. Each shift requires rebuilding, and the process of finding the people you once knew and the communities you once valued is laborious.

I’ve always believed in owning your own domain, making it your main hub, and using other platforms as intentional spokes extending to specific communities of interest — but too many years on Twitter had led to me mostly abandoning my own website for a while. Their short-lived acquisition of Revue actually helped pushed me back, though.

Launching this newsletter in 2021 was really just a way to get back to reading and writing longer articles more consistently, instead of doomscrolling headlines and competitive snark. I initially revived my blog as an archive for the newsletter, which moved from Revue to Substack (and, briefly, simultaneously on LinkedIn), and by the time Twitter finally imploded and the #SocialReboot was in full effect, I’d reestablished my own website as the hub it always should have been. (This newsletter is really just a blog post a couple of hundred people choose to get via email.)

I definitely don’t have the reach I used to have, mostly thanks to walled gardens and algorithms and my simply not caring anymore, but most of the people I do reach are those I’m actually engaged with and care about — particularly those of you reading this via email! More importantly, I’m enjoying blogging again, and generally look forward to doing this every other Wednesday night. (And when I don’t, I just skip a week. You won’t catch me out here #BloggingTooHard!)

RELATEDISH NOTE: In the early days of ebooks, when many declared the death of print and democratization of publishing, I often obnoxiously noted that blogs had already done the latter while bringing new blood to the former. WordPress has been my platform of choice for nearly 20 years, personally and professionally, but nothing good in tech lasts forever. I’ve been keeping an eye on Ghost for several months now, and its co-founder, John O’Nolan, makes a pretty compelling case for considering a move. (Coincidentally, White very publicly left Substack for Ghost earlier this year and seems to be happy with it.)

__TWO

Your new (old) internet homepage | Jared Newman

RSS can be overwhelming, which may explain why it’s never gone mainstream except as an underlying technology for podcasts. But as I seek out more enduring technologies that put users first, I’ve found myself coming back to RSS and finding new ways to make the habit stick. With the right setup, it’s still one of the most empowering ways to control your online content consumption.

The social web is a trash fire these days, and one of its less heralded victims has been the humble RSS feed, which was effectively kneecapped when Google killed its beloved Google Reader. When I first started this newsletter, one of the things I really liked about Revue was its bookmarking feature that let me collect articles for consideration, and then drop them right into my template.

I eventually replaced that bookmark / read later function with Feedly and have been relatively happy with it ever since. Unfortunately, they keep pushing AI nonsense that I’m now paying for even though I don’t use any of those features, so I’m starting to explore alternatives. Newman has become a great source of tips and tricks, and his overview of a few RSS readers gave me some options to consider.

If you’re reading this post through an RSS reader, bless your radical heart!

___THREE

How Google is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers – And Why | Michael Miszczak

So, why does Google suddenly think that RandomGuy69 on Reddit is the expert on everything? Well, in early 2024, Google announced it had joined into a 60 million dollar a year partnership with Reddit. What sort of partnership? It was training its language model AI on Reddit’s API. Essentially, training its AI to answer questions by learning from Reddit users. Ohh, sneaky sneaky Google! How convenient, pumping tons of traffic into Reddit and then using it to try and win the AI “space race”.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with SEO over the years, but I’ve always fundamentally believed that writing and publishing useful content for a specific audience of humans is the best way to build a sustainable platform — whether you’re helping writers, librarians, or meeting planners.

Professionally, I treat content marketing as a vehicle to establish credibility and deliver useful resources to a specific audience, from which a relationship can develop that might lead to revenue. I never chase trends or hijack current events unless they’re directly relevant to the business I’m in, and it’s an approach I’ve succeeded with over the years. I definitely chose to miss a couple of waves here and there while others pivoted, but I also never had to lay anyone off because of my bad decisions.

Google has steadily moved the goal posts over the years for how it defines good content, often promoting a particular approach while rewarding a completely different one. [Pro Tip: It’s always the one that benefits their ad business; Follow the Money 101.]

Now that they’re going all-in on AI, all bets are off, and publishers (and bloggers) are at another digital inflection point. Those who have prioritized unique and useful content for a specific audience are going to feel the coming sting far less than those who have been playing the SEO game for scale, but it’s going to have a notable impact across the board. Combined with the increasingly locked-down walled gardens every major social network has evolved into, which are also jumping headfirst into the AI lottery, the internet is going to feel very different in a few years.

____FOUR

The Existential Threat to Publishers | Frank Bilotto

Investing in in-house AI development allows publishers to build proprietary technologies and capabilities, enhancing their expertise in AI. This positions them as technology leaders, opening up further opportunities in the tech landscape beyond just content creation.

Every technology “disruption” brings a wave of calls for publishers to transform themselves into tech companies, despite a long history of failed attempts to ship competitive (or even minimally viable) alternatives. 15 years ago, during the last big disruption phase, we saw notable failures like Skiff and Bookish; or my favorites, enhanced ebooks and transmedia.

While AI is the latest tech shiny du jour, it’s not a magic bullet, and it requires a lot more than just the vast amounts of data tech companies are stealing, and occasionally licensing, from publishers and creators of all shapes and sizes. It also requires a large, exploitable workforce to sift, identify, and tag all of that data so they can pretend their robots are actually learning and understanding anything.

I wouldn’t be surprised if KKR or PRH are experimenting with something they believe they might be able to license to other publishers, but publishing is such a low margin, low growth industry that I don’t see where the ROI would come from. It’s easier to simply cut a licensing deal for the short-term revenue boost, especially if you believe the inevitability argument and/or have gullible investors to please. Most publishers and individual creators will simply be victimized by the “move fast and break things” mantra of craven VCs who will move fast to the next breakable thing when their latest bubble inevitably bursts.

_____FIVE

How Snake Oil Became a Symbol of Fraud and Deception | Jordan Friedman

The history of snake oil as a symbol of fraud and deception dates to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s widely connected to the story of Clark Stanley, the self-proclaimed “Rattlesnake King” who sold his so-called snake oil as a treatment for joint pain and rheumatism. In reality, his products contained no actual snake oil at all—just mineral oil, beef fat, red pepper and turpentine. Yet he got away with deceiving his customers for more than two decades.

Years ago, I bought the domain snakeoilreview.com and was planning to move the snark about social media gurus I was occasionally writing here and frequently posting on Twitter to its own website, but I quickly abandoned the idea as a waste of my time. A savvier version of me might have turned that into an opportunistic platform, complete with an industry column, a couple of ebooks, speaking gigs, and consulting engagements, but I simply didn’t care enough to do it.

One of the most interesting things about the history of snake oil is that there may have been some actual truth to it, but a very familiar combination of cultural appropriation and mundane greed turned it into something completely different and completely untrue. It’s a good thing we don’t have problems like that anymore! O_o

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Written by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Chief Content Officer for LibraryPass, and former publisher & marketing director for Writer’s Digest. Previously, he was also project lead for the Panorama Project; director, content strategy & audience development for Library Journal & School Library Journal; and founding director of programming & business development for the original Digital Book World.