I've thought about this some. The reality is that if you're not getting people to share your work (and asking people to share your work directly doesn't work) you're not going to get a lot of views.
There's this shadow-of-the-mainstream effect. See the mainstream is really really big, which means there's a lot of people writing mainstream opinions. I wouldn't say you're a mainstream writer ('Movements are always a distorted lens on the ideas they embody' is a pretty fantastic work about the fringes, from the fringes) but you're discovering the difficulty of writing things people want to read. This is a race to the bottom price point. People give away takes for free, you see.
You can write more controversially but that feels like chasing clicks, it deforms your work and not for the better.
You can spend some money on advertisements and maybe get a 1.5x multiplier on your current subscriber base, applied once.
Learn the Scott Alexander lesson, though: your audience gets shaped by who you bring in. You quite frankly could advertise on Reddit, say try and get a spot on /r/neoliberal.
I would have at least five essays I was especially proud of before I advertised. Yeah you've got your 'best of' but you need to give newcomers a solid blast of recent work.
I'd also spend some time knocking out a post describing the major themes you hope to write about. I know you from Reddit but I don't know where you're going with this blog other than the idea that you want to have a successful blog, and given Scott Alexander got popular (remember, it took him a number of years!) I think the barrier for entry is lower than people are inclined to think.
But what are your objectives? You're decent at meta-commentary, but successful writers online tend to be able to tie together some big ideas on their blog, and they generally remain pretty tightly focused on those big ideas.
So one of the things I took out of this insightful comment was a need to specify what the blog stands for. At a rough list:
-In philosophy- A kind of revised Canberra plan with elements of ordinary language philosophy.
-In ethics- A sophisticated form of consequentialism, welfarist or close to such, somewhat like a Moorean utilitarianism.
-In what we might broadly call "philosophy of life"- an emphasis on the importance of forgiveness and empathy, and on ways in which mental illness can expand our understanding.
-In politics- Democratic socialism, but with a Utopian communist horizon.
-In sociology, a "foxy" (in Isaiah Berlin's sense) Marxism.
-In criminal justice- Prison minimalism and more lenient sentencing.
-In discourse- An emphasis on greater tolerance, and efforts at persuasion. An emphasis on the idea that things must be evaluated as they are, not as our politics would prefer them to be.
-Also in discourse- An emphasis on the way that the real villains tend to escape censure. We tend to latch onto personal rather than political misdeeds in a way that is rather hypocritical. Why is, say, Armie Hammer considered more cancelled than George Bush?
-In economics- a kind of critical post-neoclassical not anti-neoclassical perspective.
-In futurism, an emphasis on the unpredictability introduced by AI.
The big problem here is that I'm a fox, not a hedgehog. I think a lot of different things and like writing about them all (carefully positioning the claims and statements so as to avoid going too far past my areas of expertise). It's very hard to know how to extract an *essence* from this, indeed the anti-essentialism is somewhat the point.
I might add that this is hardly a complete list, despite being very long! For example, a moderate, careful, anti-identity-politics stance, combined with skepticism about the politics and motives of many others who oppose identity politics, is also an important part of the politics.
For the record I personally like that you cast such a wide net and I thought your 'Questions I have' post was very interesting, I'm thinking of doing one myself but haven't decided if I want to commit to the Substack platform.
But I'm also a person who is looking at how Scott Alexander rose to popularity writing about two or three specific topics, but then faceplants pretty hard when he writes outside of those topics.
The big problem with people who take IQ seriously in any way is they believe they are general intellects, and can approach any topic and contribute immediately. This leads to the arrogance of not having done the 'basic' but serious reading that occurs in the years of an undergraduate degree for the topic, and can produce some really frustratingly ignorant work.
I've thought about this some. The reality is that if you're not getting people to share your work (and asking people to share your work directly doesn't work) you're not going to get a lot of views.
There's this shadow-of-the-mainstream effect. See the mainstream is really really big, which means there's a lot of people writing mainstream opinions. I wouldn't say you're a mainstream writer ('Movements are always a distorted lens on the ideas they embody' is a pretty fantastic work about the fringes, from the fringes) but you're discovering the difficulty of writing things people want to read. This is a race to the bottom price point. People give away takes for free, you see.
You can write more controversially but that feels like chasing clicks, it deforms your work and not for the better.
You can spend some money on advertisements and maybe get a 1.5x multiplier on your current subscriber base, applied once.
Learn the Scott Alexander lesson, though: your audience gets shaped by who you bring in. You quite frankly could advertise on Reddit, say try and get a spot on /r/neoliberal.
I would have at least five essays I was especially proud of before I advertised. Yeah you've got your 'best of' but you need to give newcomers a solid blast of recent work.
I'd also spend some time knocking out a post describing the major themes you hope to write about. I know you from Reddit but I don't know where you're going with this blog other than the idea that you want to have a successful blog, and given Scott Alexander got popular (remember, it took him a number of years!) I think the barrier for entry is lower than people are inclined to think.
But what are your objectives? You're decent at meta-commentary, but successful writers online tend to be able to tie together some big ideas on their blog, and they generally remain pretty tightly focused on those big ideas.
So one of the things I took out of this insightful comment was a need to specify what the blog stands for. At a rough list:
-In philosophy- A kind of revised Canberra plan with elements of ordinary language philosophy.
-In ethics- A sophisticated form of consequentialism, welfarist or close to such, somewhat like a Moorean utilitarianism.
-In what we might broadly call "philosophy of life"- an emphasis on the importance of forgiveness and empathy, and on ways in which mental illness can expand our understanding.
-In politics- Democratic socialism, but with a Utopian communist horizon.
-In sociology, a "foxy" (in Isaiah Berlin's sense) Marxism.
-In criminal justice- Prison minimalism and more lenient sentencing.
-In discourse- An emphasis on greater tolerance, and efforts at persuasion. An emphasis on the idea that things must be evaluated as they are, not as our politics would prefer them to be.
-Also in discourse- An emphasis on the way that the real villains tend to escape censure. We tend to latch onto personal rather than political misdeeds in a way that is rather hypocritical. Why is, say, Armie Hammer considered more cancelled than George Bush?
-In economics- a kind of critical post-neoclassical not anti-neoclassical perspective.
-In futurism, an emphasis on the unpredictability introduced by AI.
The big problem here is that I'm a fox, not a hedgehog. I think a lot of different things and like writing about them all (carefully positioning the claims and statements so as to avoid going too far past my areas of expertise). It's very hard to know how to extract an *essence* from this, indeed the anti-essentialism is somewhat the point.
This is a puzzle I will continue to think about.
I might add that this is hardly a complete list, despite being very long! For example, a moderate, careful, anti-identity-politics stance, combined with skepticism about the politics and motives of many others who oppose identity politics, is also an important part of the politics.
For the record I personally like that you cast such a wide net and I thought your 'Questions I have' post was very interesting, I'm thinking of doing one myself but haven't decided if I want to commit to the Substack platform.
But I'm also a person who is looking at how Scott Alexander rose to popularity writing about two or three specific topics, but then faceplants pretty hard when he writes outside of those topics.
The big problem with people who take IQ seriously in any way is they believe they are general intellects, and can approach any topic and contribute immediately. This leads to the arrogance of not having done the 'basic' but serious reading that occurs in the years of an undergraduate degree for the topic, and can produce some really frustratingly ignorant work.