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Internet Creators Have a Platform Problem
Why I love, and hate, writing on the internet
The great poet-philosopher Homer Simpson once praised alcohol as “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” We might say something similar about internet platforms — they’re the cause of, and the solution to, all of an internet creator’s problems.
In many ways, the story of my modest career in writing stuff on the internet is a story of how I have benefitted from internet platforms but have also been vulnerable to their whims and weaknesses.
Bored at work over a decade ago, I decided I would start posting about history online. I messed around with different platforms and projects, eventually settling on an artifact-of-the-day blog. Tumblr had the easiest interface for this type of post, so I started there. I did try at several points to branch out to other platforms like Twitter and Instagram but, for whatever reason, I got a pretty big audience at Tumblr, and my posts never really took off anywhere else. So Tumblr it was.
If you understand anything about Tumblr’s history, you will know that I had bad timing. I got in around Tumblr’s peak, and the growth of my audience there coincided with Tumblr’s decline as a social network. Partially because of its own leadership’s decisions and partially because it got…
