The future of content creation on blogs in 2023

I saw a post from the blog website Vintage is the New Old this week announcing they are closing down the site. I was naturally sad to see this. I thank them for their work, and wish the creators well for the future. 

I am not at all surprised by the reasons why they are closing it down. It touched a nerve with me, so I wanted to make a small comment about it.

I have been creating content on this blog for over 11 years now, and like Vintage is the new old, recently receive little feedback on this site or on social media about it. I know plenty of people are regularly reading from the website stats, but few are commenting.

I realise the importance of social media platforms in this modern era, and the easy to consume clickbait feeds and stories on Tik Tok, You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Discord, Telegram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Line, QQ, and other platforms too. I am active on most of them.

I am aware of this trend, that many people prefer quick and easy to consume content over something they have to actually spend significant time to read. Fortunately there are still people who do want something significant to read. Take a look in your local bookshop sometime...

My content is generally quite detailed with lots of photos and screenshots I take to show what is happening so the reader can follow along and try it themselves easily. Explaining in a video would be hard, and would lose a lot of information. Wiki's are useful, but dry and usually lack step by step photos and other content to help with understanding.

I tried out live streaming and video creation for a while during Covid lockdowns but I didn't enjoy it as much. Connecting retro systems for live streaming has it's technical challenges with custom screen resolutions and interlace modes that impact the kinds of content that can be streamed from real hardware. 

I find writing detailed content comes naturally to me and is more satisfying personally. I refer back to my own content too when I forget how I did something!

I promote my Epsilon's World blog posts across Facebook primarily as I found most of my readership comes from Amiga and Retro computer groups there. I post on Twitter too, and show work in progress updates from time to time ahead of new blog posts on Instagram. I should post more on Discord as well, but generally groups I am a member of there just reflect a smaller subset of the same people on the respective associated Facebook groups.

I used to promote on Amiga forum sites, but very few visit from them anymore as many moved across to Facebook groups for easier interaction, so I stopped doing that. I rarely visit forum sites anymore myself too in 2023, which is sad and shows how things have changed. 

I take great pride, effort and time in creating new original content that is of interest to me, and hopefully to you as well.

I make no money from creating this content for you all. I buy almost everything you see or read about on this blog from my own hard earned money from my day job. 

Tik Tok and YouTube content creators make more money than I could ever hope to with my day job, and spend far less time generally to create it as well. 

Good luck to them. 

I know creating original (not advertisements) video content can be hard work too - I have tried it. As long as the creator remain flavour of the month with the YouTube (or whatever) advertising fund distribution algorithm controls their content promotion to their audience, they can enjoy their (usually) brief time in the sun if they go viral. Building a sustainable audience for ongoing income on these platforms is hard work though.

People are also taking my photos from my blog posts and using them on their own posts in social media without permission or acknowledging me as the creator of it. Some are being linked to video content not created by me. Perhaps they are monetising this also, I don't know. 

When I find out and approach them about the theft, I am told by some of the people stealing my photos for their own purposes that I should be flattered as my photos are great and the "best we could find". 

Well, in that case, please respect my copyright over my photos and content, and ask for permission first before using them. I am usually ok with it if asked first, and usually just asked to be acknowledged as the creator with a link to epsilonsworld.com. 

I could put big ugly watermarks on my photos, and in the long distant past I used to do that, but since it is so easy to crop them out and "erase them" in Photoshop, it hardly seems worth the time to add them to every photo these days.

So, given all this, why do I do this blog still then?

I do it because I love doing it. 

Especially when I get positive feedback about what I have done, feedback about things I missed, or features I didn't know about, or other options I hadn't considered. It inspires me to try more things! 

I enjoy the occasional post engagement and PM's on Facebook when I post my blog posts there, and that is what keeps me going at the moment.

Nothing would make me happier than to focus full time on creating content for this blog if I could make enough money from it to avoid having to work a normal day job to cover my bills and of course all the equipment I buy to play with!

Sadly though, the world doesn't work like that. 

I enabled monetisation on the website a few years ago in the hope of building some income towards that goal, but the money received is minimal. Really minimal. I earn more in half a day's work in my day job than I have received in income on my blog from people clicking on ads in the past 5 years. 

Meanwhile AdSense puts horrible ads on my site and throughout my content, which I really hate interfering with my content. I hope you can understand why I did it, even if it gets me little monetary reward. 

Several times over the past 11 years I considered stopping this blog altogether. It consumes a lot of my very precious spare time to create the content you read here, and I could be spending that time playing around with my hobbies even more. 

I have also had to reduce my output in recent years as my work commitments mean I have much less time in 2023 than when I started working on the blog 11 years ago. 

So, I focus on producing more detailed blog posts, but less of them. But I have never stopped blogging. I can't imagine doing that.

I love my computer and train hobbies, and love to create content to share my love of it to the world, and to help people out who want to try the same thing. 

I like to think that by creating detailed content rather than sound bites, Instagram/Facebook stories, or You Tube/Tik Tok videos, you may learn something from my content that inspires you or someone you know to try something with your own systems or try something you never tried before. 

You may also see what I am doing is not the way to do it, and want to help me to understand where I am going wrong! Happy to know this too!

Whether you care or not about my content, constructive feedback is an important motivator for continuing to create content here, so please don't let me toil away in total silence if you have something of value to contribute. I'd love to hear from you.

Content creators who create original content for free are precious resources in a modern world of consumers who often don't create anything themselves, or expect to be paid for content creation, or paid for "content" like social media influencers, who in my view create nothing useful at all. 

Please don't ever forget that we are human and want interaction too. Otherwise soon enough, there will be no new content to read in your feeds and you will be left reading all the old free original content via the internet archive website or it will just disappear....