DamnInteresting

Most months I earn around a grand on https://www.damninteresting.com/ after I pay for hosting, subscriptions, residuals, author payments, etc. And that is 99% from donations, I refuse to host ads (and about 1% from occasional content licensing). I pour so much time into it that my hourly rate is fairly low. For me, it's not about the money, I just enjoy doing it.

Same experience here. I've been using Macs and iOS devices for over a decade, and while I cannot say that it never works, I could count the successes on one hand (granted, I don't try very often after so much failure). I've even tried setting the "allow me to be discovered by" option to "everybody", and it still fails.

Maybe the problem is me, but I'm good at computers. I can make them do almost anything else in the catalog. Airdrop is a glaring exception.

It's not just non-Apple devices. I use my iPad to make music and sketches, and sometimes I need to move files between my iPad and MacBook. Airdrop almost never works, and transferring in the Files app is confusing--sometimes the file won't appear in the relevant app, or sometimes it appears twice, and it's not clear which is the newer version. I often resort to emailing the files back and forth to myself as attachments, which is not ideal.

If anyone knows of a better way to move files to and from an iPad, I would be delighted to hear it.

> It's a no win situation

Exactly! That's what I meant by tragedy of the commons. It sucks for everybody, consumers and creators alike, and there is no satisfactory solution. I empathize, I am an independent creator myself, and I know the pain. For what it's worth, it helped me to change my mindset from sprint to marathon, and accept that success, if any, would be slow.

I also feel that the modern web's lust for stats is doing more harm than good. If one's follower count isn't growing, the dopamine dries up. Falling listener stats? Enjoy that depression! Better to ignore the stats and use "is this still worthwhile" as one's compass when possible.

Entirely you say? I was addressing this portion of your comment:

> I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion"

I agree whole-heartedly with your share it sentiment, but if that was your original point, it was unfortunately obscured.

"Seemed" is the operative word here. Past tense, and indefinite.

The problem isn't self-promotion per se, the problem is the sheer amount of self-promotion that occurs when it is allowed. If any is permitted, then often all is permitted, and a forum becomes inundated with people vying for attention. Classic tragedy of the commons.

I am likewise a historian/author who relies on newspaper archives for a lot of my research. I have been maintaining my site for 17+ years, and if one visits my older writings, many of the source links are long dead.

Of course there is the Internet Archive, but if one looks into the stewardship of that project, it is quite vulnerable in the long term. There are key people whose departures would compromise the viability of the project. Perhaps we need the digital equivalent of the Svaldbard seed vault for digital archives--a state-maintained facility storing the bulk of Internet history in a geologically stable server farm.

And yet good luck landing an interview if you lack years of experience with React, Angular, Vue, Bootstrap, Typescript, Node, et cetera ad nauseum. Dependency hell is now the foyer.

So many replies here that are essentially "I hate them too, but I use them because they work"--i.e., "I am a hypocrite because capitalism."

I've been driving a Chevy Bolt EV for almost 6 years now. I have the great luxury of a garage with solar panels on the roof and 240v service, so charging is fast, almost free, and very low effort. I've never been happier with a car, but I can see how someone without easy access to high voltage charging (e.g., in an apartment) would have a much less satisfactory experience.

And don't forget that you can alternatively rent an ICE car for long road trips.

I have been in the webdev industry for 20+ years, always in high demand. I am reliable and good at what I do. I have never had trouble finding gainful employment...until 2022. I have been applying for jobs every day--jobs I am quite qualified for--and most of the potential employers don't respond at all. Those few that do respond mostly say "we are looking at other candidates, thanks anyway."

I have had a few companies reply to my applications with an "email interview" questionnaire, but after I reply I usually hear nothing back. One actually scheduled a video interview, but the day before it was to occur, they emailed to say nevermind, the position was filled.

It's so odd. Some of these job descriptions are an exact match for my skill set. I suspect that ageism is a major contributor given that I am over 40. I am starting to look into other industries, but it feels like such a waste to abandon my cultivated experience.

Mostly it is asking for reader/listener donations in a non-aggressive way. For example, if one is reading on the site, the request for donations appears only if one reaches the end of the text. If listening, the request comes after the story. This is supplemented by licensing our work occasionally to magazines, other websites, etc., and a wee bit of merchandising.

I launched DamnInteresting.com in 2005, and just last year it started consistently earning $2k/month. That's gross revenue, a goodly chunk of that goes out for hosting costs, research expenses, paying writers/editors, licensing fees, etc.

It's been interesting to see the changes in the audience over time. In 2005, 100% of our audience was desktop browser readers. Somewhere around 2011, mobile readers became the dominant group. Today, our biggest audience by far is podcast listeners. We'll probably need to start creating videos soon if we don't want to get left behind. And what comes next? AI-enhanced immersive binaural VR experiences? The future is weird.

Not nuclear, but the U.S. Army Air Corps once tried this in Hawaii: https://www.historynet.com/army-tried-to-stop-mauna-loa-erup...

Copyright and intellectual property exist because we've decided as a society that we want people to spend serious time and energy making these worthwhile things. Absent protections, the upfront investment of time and effort aren't worth it. If one cannot control the use of one's original works, only the wealthy can afford to chase that sense of accomplishment.

I am an author who is able to earn a modest income from my body of work, but only because I have spent almost 20 years creating a diverse collection of writings, and copyright law mostly protects me from having to compete with other people selling my writings. I say "mostly" because I find my work plagiarized once in a while (often with the word-for-word copies of my work earning more money for the plagiarizers than it does for me).

On a surface level, I understand the critics of intellectual property. I concede that all art is derivative to some degree, and nothing springs from a vacuum. I acknowledge that even greater art can be achieved if something can be iterated upon by a diversity of artists. But the harsh reality is that most of the people who want to repurpose art aren't doing it to create something new and distinct, they just want to profit from hard work without doing any themselves.

It's like the use of those delicately constructed examples of burgers and sandwiches used in restaurant commercials--it may be appetizing, but it fails to represent the reality of the product we are being sold. This is one (or more) steps further removed from reality. It's misleading, and the image captions merely reduce the severity of the deception.

I have been unable to find work for so long that I am on the cusp of exiting the industry. I need a paycheck. I've been in full stack web dev for over 20 years, and I've never once had trouble finding a job before now.

For months it's been hard to get any response to an application, let alone an interview. And when I do get responses, they are often strange. One company where I would have been a perfect fit claimed that my code sample had "scary" SQL injection vulnerabilities. It did not, I have been doing this for decades, and I know how to sanitize my inputs.

I asked for specific file name and line number, and they sent back a vague non-response on how to identify vulnerabilities, so I stopped pursuing it. It was a lost cause, even if I showed them how they were mistaken, it wouldn't work out. I suspect they were using some kind of automated scanner that flagged some false positives.

I don't want to stop making software professionally, but that decision may not be in my hands.

I wrote about this fellow back in 2007[1]. In 1935 he was asked to make predictions about what chemistry/science will accomplish by 2035. Some are pretty wild, but others are spot-on, such as:

• Interplanetary travel, involving the production of a substance that will produce more energy per pound than is required to lift that pound out of the Earth’s gravitational field.

• The end of visiting; people will stay at home and call on their friends by television.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-ethyl-poisoned-earth/

I made an interactive Drake Equation back in 2007, it is embedded in this page: https://www.damninteresting.com/space-radio-more-static-less...

It's not mobile-friendly, unfortunately. I made it in the same year the first iPhone was released. Some day I'll update it for smaller viewports. Some of the default settings are also too low, for example we now know that exoplanets are very common.

Edit: Oh yes, it slipped my mind that there is a totally stand-alone version here: http://astro.nomical.info/drake/

I was one of the earliest Alexa users, I was invited to buy the first Echo before it was generally available. It was handy mostly as a kitchen timer, occasionally for random questions when my hands were too busy/gooey to whip out my phone (e.g., "What is the safe cooking temperature for chicken thighs?").

But then one day the LED ring on the top of the Echo was flashing yellow, and when I asked Alexa why, it responded with an ad. I haven't used it since.

I taught myself coding during high school in the mid-1990s, built a lot of my own web projects, and I worked for a series of startups. I've loved web dev for over 25 years.

A long-term coding contract recently ended for me, so I have been looking for some new full-stack web dev work. Everything I encounter now is tangled in over-engineered dependency hellscapes. Simple sites that could be vanilla HTML/CSS/JS are instead built and rebuilt on whatever tools and frameworks are currently trendiest. Technology is selected because it is cool instead of appropriate. I don't mind learning new tech if it's useful and fitting, but I loathe the 'disposable skills' of dumping frameworks every 2 years.

I've watched this tendency gradually growing in web dev circles for about a decade, but in just the past few years it's gone bananas. It's so much unnecessary faffing, it's got me looking into other fields for new work.

Location: Salt Lake City, UT

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: PHP, Python, Javascript, SASS/LESS, HTML, MySQL/MariaDB, web design, illustration, writing, voice work, sound design, music composition.

Résumé/CV: https://alanbellows.com/

Email: alan@alanbellows.com

The rub is that I am seeking part-time work, I want to spend half of my daylight hours writing. It seems to be really hard to find part-time work for a programmer.

> I'm pretty baffled by this layoff wave.

There is good evidence that layoffs conform to social contagion.[1] In other words, layoffs are trendy right now.

[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-la...

> Which is not actually legal.

Perhaps so, but the legality of an action is immaterial if it is left unprosecuted.

The donation form on my site was recently being inundated by some card tester (person/group who have a huge list of stolen credit cards, and they try making $1 donations with each card to see which cards still work). They were making around 10k attempted fraudulent donations per hour from a huge pool of IP addresses.

Rather than simply blocking them, whenever I detected a card tester, I started sending them random results that mimic real-world results. About 98% of the time, I sent a false "card failed" error, with varying reasons for the failure. And about 2% of the time I sent false "donation successful" messages.

It went on like that for weeks. I was giving them complete garbage data that they seemed to be accepting, so I assume I was completely wasting their time and effort, and possibly getting them in hot water with the shady clients who buy the lists of "working" cards.

I finally got sick of the ongoing DDoS and started replying to them with SQL injections, like:

> '; DROP TABLE users; --

> '; DROP TABLE user; --

> '; DROP TABLE credit_card; --

...and so on. My thinking was that they might not be sanitizing the inputs on their end, replies from a CC processor would be an unexpected vector for SQL injections.

The card testing stopped just after that, either because the change tipped them off, or because I managed to guess one of their table names and caused hilarious destruction of data.

I never used Instagram much (anything attached to Zuckerberg is rotten), but I recently tried to log in to check something via desktop. I have email-based 2FA set up, so it said to check my email for the code (while showing me my correct email address).

The email never arrived, I checked the spam folder and all that. After a while I clicked "Send a new code" and got the error "Select a valid choice. 0 is not one of the available choices." Oooooookay. I cleared cookies etc and tried again, and it continues to demand, while failing to send, a confirmation code. But this second login attempt did cause them to send me an automated "New login to Instagram" email.

Lastly, I clicked the Get Support link, and it just pops a dialog that says "If you’re unable to get the security code, you need to use the Instagram app to secure your account." I do not have the Instagram app, and newly installing it while my account is locked would be pointless.

So, I guess that account is unrecoverable now. Great work, Meta.

My latest side project is still in figure-out-how-to-get-users mode:

https://feelers.online/

The idea is to give content creators (authors, YouTubers, webcomics, bands, etc.) a way to inform their fans when new content drops. It also gives the fans a lot of control over how the notifications arrive.

I made this to address a problem I experience myself. I operate a website that publishes on an irregular schedule, and it can be hard to let readers/listeners know when we have something new.

> I thought Google was a search company ...

They are an ad company that once used a nice search engine to serve ads.