[HN Gopher] I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years
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I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years
Author : benbreen
Score : 240 points
Date : 2025-12-04 18:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| protocolture wrote:
| >I also (then and now) have no appetite for short-form video
| content, and still less for the type of history explainer videos
| -- "here's a two hour deep dive into why this movie is
| historically inaccurate" or "everything you need to know about
| such-and-such famous person" -- that seem to do well on YouTube.
|
| 100% agree.
|
| Whats the difference between the sites "Blog Format" which
| apparently died in 2023, and what is happening now?
| pixodaros wrote:
| A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to
| read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a
| much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In
| the old days, you could make a bit of money just from views,
| and there were many more places to make money from writing and
| speaking offline. There were also more long-form musings about
| academic life which today would be snarky posts on Bluesky. As
| posting on microblog sites became sometimes professionally
| useful, academics put their energy into that and let their
| longform blogs fade (or just got older and busier and were not
| replaced by younger academic bloggers).
| simonw wrote:
| Turns out I've linked to you five times since 2023!
| https://simonwillison.net/tags/benjamin-breen/
|
| (A neat thing about having tags for people I link to is that it's
| easier to spot when I become a repeat-linker.)
| peterspath wrote:
| I do the same thing on my blog... have a taxonomy for people,
| countries, trails I hike, and national parks. Custom taxonomies
| are a good way to organise your blog.
| flir wrote:
| Tried that, ripped it all out. Too much hassle, too
| inconsistent. Now I just grep -r a pile of markdown.
| N_Lens wrote:
| Just in time to be scooped up in AI training sets!
| colesantiago wrote:
| 35 paying subscribers out of 8,000 seems to be very low,
| especially for 15 years.
|
| Do most people actually pay and support most newsletters?
| Wouldn't it be more stable income to have sponsors or commercial
| sponsors?
| emodendroket wrote:
| It doesn't seem like making money Is the object.
| ozim wrote:
| What's with the "everything has to be monetized" or optimized
| for earning?
|
| Why do people have to earn money on their hobbies?
|
| Why a person can't just publish stuff for others to read?
|
| Why should we be obligated to pay?
|
| If someone has to make a living, maybe they should stick to a
| proper job not a hobby side gigs. Well I have a friend that
| makes living from basically making side gigs, but he is not
| looking to "make it big" - he just values freedom more and if
| he gets some money to just get by he is happy with it. He is
| not going to optimize conversion rate of paying supporters. But
| he is authentic that is why people who drop him some money do
| so - second he starts "revenue optimizing" I believe anyone who
| follows him will just drop it and move on.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Care to share? Or at lease describe to what extent they
| 'offer the ability to pay'?
|
| I think many would like to live in that world. Good to see
| what an n=1 example of it looks like in practice.
|
| I mean, at it's extreme, he wouldn't even be on the internet.
| But dialing that back, it could be as simple as a 'buy me a
| coffee' link.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > What's with the "everything has to be monetized" or
| optimized for earning?
|
| > Why do people have to earn money on their hobbies?
|
| > Why a person can't just publish stuff for others to read?
|
| > Why should we be obligated to pay?
|
| The Author:
|
| > > Help support Res Obscura for its next 15 years...
|
| Although you are not obligated to pay and nobody is forcing
| you, If this isn't a problem for the author he wouldn't be
| asking you for money.
|
| But you do sound like this:
|
| "Why do I have to pay for things?"
|
| "Why can't I consume things for free?"
|
| Which sounds extremely entitled.
|
| > If someone has to make a living, maybe they should stick to
| a proper job not a hobby side gigs.
|
| This guy is an associate professor in history, not a working
| SWE or AI engineer like most people on HN.
|
| Have you not considered that this person has a family to feed
| or rent to pay and just needs extra money?
| manwithmanyface wrote:
| Okay
| vasco wrote:
| For what its worth, when you use expressions like 'those halcyon
| days' you don't need to tell us you're a history PhD.
| nspattak wrote:
| I guess that there are "content creators" who are not interested
| by video or click-bait as well as those "content consumers" who
| are looking for geniously interesting content written in a
| concise and clear way. Substack seems a good site for this but in
| general it seems to me that this is sth that is missing in
| today's internet.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Sad that a long time self-hosted writer conceded to Substack. The
| tyranny of convenience and distribution strikes again.
| nicbou wrote:
| It's getting harder and harder to get eyeballs on text. ChatGPT,
| AI summaries and social media algorithms all conspire to keep
| people on their platforms, denying any traffic to external source
| material.
| komali2 wrote:
| > Switching over to a Substack newsletter, in the summer of 2023,
| revived my interest in writing online. It felt like rejoining an
| intellectual community -- not quite the same as the golden age of
| blogging in the 2000s, but something equally as lively, in a way
| that I don't think quite gets enough credit in the 2020s.
|
| This makes me sad because I really want to be a part of such a
| community, but I really don't like how bloated and centralized
| Substack is, and how much control they take away. Seems that's a
| requirement for community formation these days though?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That's the harsh reality, first (anecdotally / personal view)
| it became social media that linked to blog posts - especially
| Twitter was used as an aggregator for "I wrote a blog post
| about xyz".
|
| Then Medium took off, and there was a vibe of blog posts being
| more authoritative if they were published on Medium. It was
| like the TED talks of blog posts. But also it mean that if you
| had a blog of your own and its contents were reposted on
| Medium, the latter would get more views.
|
| I don't have the full picture of the whole issue. I suspect
| consumers generally want a single website to read stuff on,
| instead of the sometimes jarring style differences between blog
| sites - even if that means they have individual personality.
| jmathai wrote:
| > even if that means they have individual personality
|
| Sadly I think that's true. People like consistency. Lets them
| more easily trust. It's what makes Starbucks and McDonalds so
| popular even if they aren't the best options in their
| category.
|
| I think Medium succeeded at first because it allowed minimal
| personalization while still signaling to users "this is a
| legitimate article and not some rando on the web".
| input_sh wrote:
| I think this might be a you problem because both Medium and
| Substack allowed randoms on the Internet to post from day
| 1. There aren't any requirements, anyone can do it.
| Tarmo362 wrote:
| Im gonna chip in and say that yes while they allow randos
| to post to the same extent i imagine the average person
| views a blog post/article as more legitimate when it has
| the branding of substack or medium attached to it rather
| than someones unbranded personal website
| tekne wrote:
| Funny... I've often felt the exact opposite.
|
| Medium articles often look janky; if you've got a
| personal website you've at least figured out how to get
| that working, and if it looks _good_ , that's a positive
| signal!
|
| Think myname@gmail.com vs me@myname.com
| rixed wrote:
| From my point of view, the advantage of those blog
| platforms is that I don't have to build and maintain my own
| set of bookmarks. I'm happy to delegate that to the
| recommendation system.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| The main thing is that no one wants the hassle of keeping up
| with 50 mildly-interesting blogs by visiting them regularly.
| You really need a "push" mechanism of some sort. Social media
| doesn't work for this because if someone subscribes to a
| content creator on X / Twitter, they most likely won't see most
| of the creator's posts. Instead, the algorithm will show them
| cat memes and other on-platform engagement bait.
|
| Many other social venues are gone too. If you're lucky, you can
| reach your audience on HN, but it's about the only remaining,
| successful aggregator of this type. Reddit has grown a lot more
| insular and many subreddits don't allow outgoing links. Where
| else do you go?
|
| In this reality, the most practical push mechanism is email,
| but sending email to thousands of recipients is hard. You
| pretty much need to pay someone for the privilege if you want
| to have a reasonable success rate. Substack will do it for you
| for free, and it also lowers the friction because it gives
| visitors a familiar UI with a pre-filled address and no concern
| about phishing / spam / etc.
|
| Beyond that, I don't think Substack is actually that much of a
| community. They built a good brand by attracting (buying) a
| bunch of high profile writers, then had an issue with neo-Nazis
| where they took controversial stances... I don't associate the
| domain with anything especially good or bad, not different from
| blogspot.com or wordpress.com. I have a special hatred for
| medium.com because almost everything over there is aggressively
| paywalled, but that's another story.
|
| And yeah yeah, RSS, but the friction for RSS is much higher.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Social media doesn't work for this because if someone
| subscribes to a content creator on X / Twitter, they most
| likely won't see most of the creator's posts. Instead, the
| algorithm will show them cat memes and other on-platform
| engagement bait.
|
| That's an X/Twitter/Facebook problem, not a social media
| problem. If you're on Mastodon, you'll see all of them.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| > Mastodon, you'll see all of them.
|
| Alone... look, I want Mastodon to be successful, but
| revealed preferences don't lie. Mastodon MAU is about 0.1%
| that of Twitter, down more than 60% from the peak.
| BeetleB wrote:
| The number of people you want to follow is much smaller
| than that 0.1%.
|
| Granted, not everyone I want to follow is on Mastodon,
| but many, many people I do want to follow are. More than
| I have time to follow. Indeed, many of the people I
| followed via blogs in the RSS days now are on Mastodon.
| It's essentially become my RSS reader, and the content is
| the same.
|
| Ultimately, the constraint is my time - not the
| percentage of folks using Mastodon.
|
| (And there's also the bridge with BlueSky, but it
| requires the BlueSky account to actively consent to the
| bridge).
|
| Reminds me of the time I canceled my Netflix DVD
| subscription because I could get them for free at my
| library. Did the library have a collection as large as
| Netflix? Not even close! But did they have movies on my
| To Watch list? Yes!
|
| I figured I'd resume the DVD subscription once I ran out
| of DVDs at the library.
|
| More than a decade later, I still haven't run out. Every
| year they get more movies I want to watch than I have
| time for. Who cares that they're only 0.01% the size of
| Netflix?
| chemotaxis wrote:
| > The number of people you want to follow is much smaller
| than that 0.1%.
|
| We're talking about bloggers reaching their audience. The
| audience they can reach via Mastodon is much smaller than
| on Twitter, even if you factor in the consequences of
| algorithmic feeds.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Ex-historian here, now an engineer. Ben is one of the few
| historians really thinking in depth about the implications of
| LLMs for historical research and teaching: both the good (wow,
| they are _really_ great at transcribing difficult handwritten
| documents now; you can use Claude Code to vibe code up quick
| visualizations for your research or teaching that would have
| taken weeks of work before), and the bad (students submitting AI-
| generated essays). Highly recommended reading.
|
| It's also nice to see a working historian who posts to HN. (If
| there are any others, please raise your hand!) Our community is
| richer for the wide variety of non-engineering professions
| represented here, from medical doctors to truckers to woodworkers
| to pilots to farmers. Please keep posting, all of you.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| I wouldn't call myself a historian, but I have been doing a
| history podcast since 2014.
|
| I agree that Ben's writings on LLMs and how they impact the
| humanities/history are great reads. But I am also the perfect
| target market for that kind of discussion, dev by day amateur
| historian by night.
| matthiaswh wrote:
| Oh you're _that_ Wesley. Big fan of your podcasts!
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| Thanks for listening! Yes, I am "that" one.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| 242 Episodes on WWII and you're only up to 1940!
|
| (I say that as a compliment, by the way. I love deep
| historical detail.)
| mdani wrote:
| I write about Indian history as my side project.
|
| https://a.co/d/guvUxgq
|
| https://a.co/d/iSg4jKZ
| waldohatesyou wrote:
| Oh wow, thank you for sharing
| benbreen wrote:
| Thank you! So glad people here are reading (I'm the author of
| the post). I'm doing student meetings and grading all day but
| happy to answer questions or discuss anything historical with
| the HN community in between!
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Question: How would you characterize the response to LLMs
| across the historical profession as a whole? Do you expect
| LLMs to lead to major changes in how historians approach
| research in the next ~5 years, or do you think they will be
| used by just a minority of people?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I always somewhat admire people, who can go through with one
| thing for that long. My own blogs mostly served as vehicles for
| learning another programming language or saw short-lived activity
| and then long inactivity, before I took them down. That said ...
| maybe I should make another blog, in which I document computer
| programming stuff and keep the topic vague, so that I can put
| basically anything there, so that I have enough stuff to write
| about.
| sigbottle wrote:
| I don't know why, it's just an irrational form of first-
| principles admiration for me.
|
| This is especially true in the age of LLM's (but the same can
| be applied to social media forums and the like). Sure, we
| should "just judge arguments on their merit" but there's
| something... suspicious. Like, a thought experiment: What if
| something came to a very reasonable seeming argument in 10
| minutes, versus 10 hours? To me, I can't help but feel
| suspicious that I'm being tricked by some ad-hoc framing that
| is complete bogus in reality. "Obvious" conclusions can be
| obviously shaped with extremely hidden premises, things can be
| "locally logically correct" but horrible from a global view.
|
| Maybe I'm way too cynical of seeing the same arguments over and
| over, people just stripping out their view of the elephant that
| they intuited in 5 minutes, then treating it as an
| authoritative slice, and stubbornly refusing to admit that that
| constraint, is well, a constraint, and not an "objective"
| slice. Like, yes, within your axioms and model, sure, but
| pretending like you found a grand unification in 5 minutes is
| absurd, and in practice people behave this way online.
|
| (Point being that, okay, even if you don't buy that argument
| when it comes to LLM's, when it comes to a distributed internet
| setting, I feel my intuition there holds much stronger, for me
| at least. Even if everybody was truly an expert, argument
| JITing is still a problem).
|
| Of course, in practice, when I do decide something is
| "valuable" enough for me to look at, I take apart the argument
| logically to the best of my ability, etc. but I've been
| filtering _what_ to look at a lot more aggressively based on
| this criteria. And yes it 's a bit circular, but I think I've
| realized that with a lot of really complicated wishy-washy
| things, well, they're hard for a reason :)
|
| All that to say, is that yeah, the human element is important
| for me here :D. I find that, when it comes to consumption, if
| the person is a singular human, it's much harder to come to
| that issue. They at least have _some_ semblance of consistence,
| and it 's "real/emergent" in a sense. The more you learn about
| someone, the more they're truly unique. You can't just JIT a
| reductionist argument in 10 minutes.
|
| IDK. Go small blogs!
| jkmcf wrote:
| I love to support creators, but I wish there was something common
| between free and significant subscription price so that I could
| show appreciation more readily.
|
| Examples I would use without thinking for worthwhile-to-me
| content: - "tip" options in the App Store -
| 10/year - 1/month
|
| Similarly, I'm surprised these newsletter gatekeepers haven't
| implemented a tip jar where you put in $/year and it gets divided
| based on readership.
|
| I know this has been tried in other ways, but I think Substack
| and Medium could make this work.
| nout wrote:
| I know I'll get hated for this on Hacker News, but this has
| been solved quite well on the bitcoin & Nostr side of things.
| It's easy to tip couple cents or whatever amounts and there are
| many apps / websites that support that.
|
| The main difference is that using the legacy dollar rails is
| super annoying for small amounts, since there are multiple
| banks/companies on the path between you and the author you are
| trying to tip. And each of these intermediators needs their $$$
| from you.
| chemotaxis wrote:
| > I'm surprised these newsletter gatekeepers haven't
| implemented a tip jar where you put in $/year and it gets
| divided based on readership.
|
| I've seen a bunch of publication with a "tip" button, but I
| suspect it's not worth the effort. Very few people pay in the
| first place, so a random one-off payment of $1, $10, or even
| the "unicorn" $100 is not worth standing up the infrastructure
| and dealing with the tax paperwork.
|
| On the flip side, if you find 100 people who _really_ like your
| content and are willing to substantially support it on an
| ongoing basis with a subscription, you end up with recurring
| revenue that makes it a better deal.
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