Profiting

I haven't written in a while.

At some point since the last time I did, Ghost, the blog engine I use, pivoted from just being a blog engine to being like a self-publishing, charge people for subscriptions kind of thing, like Substack.

I get it.  A business has to make money, but thinking about it just made me kind of sad.  

I've always liked to write as a thing I just did for myself, and maybe for posterity, and it just feels a little like it's been corrupted, and it's making me reflect on how many things are like that, and what kind of awful crap had to happen to cause it.

Like, how bad did things have to become for regular people that they have to think about monetizing everything?

People, who used to just like playing video games, now read from crappy scripts about smashing subscribe buttons, and degrade themselves by making shocked faces that they can put on some dumb formulaic YouTube thumbnail, where the video is basically just reading a press release about a game out loud, instead of just having fun playing their games.

I think it sucks, but I understand it.  You read from the crappy script, you make the shocked face, and make the formulaic thumbnail, because you're fighting with algorithms, and whenever you're fighting with an algorithm, you find where it behaves predictably, and then you exploit it mercilessly.  

The shocked face gets more clicks than a regular face, or no face.  Telling people to smash like and subscribe buttons gets you more clicks than not telling them.  More clicks begets more clicks.  It's just another iteration of search engine optimization.  

I hate it, though.

As someone who's done websites for so long, I am weirdly hostile to search engine optimization, but, I don't know.  I can't help it.  I don't like it when people aren't just themselves, and the more they have to monetize stuff, the more it happens, and the more I think it degrades quality.  Degrades us.

A person stops just being a person who likes to play video games.  Now, they're a brand, and a performer.  They have to put on a show, and they get fans, who they probably resent for making them debase themselves, and the fans are like, "This person is so great and appealing!," never having to deal with them needing help moving, or any of the messy stuff real friends demand.  They want good times, in a can.

And they get sucked into the performance, and drift away from actual people in their lives they could have been spending time with instead, as if one could broadcast, or subscribe to friendship.