340 karma · joined July 31, 2018
Also, let’s be clear: we’re talking about the US. I’m sure it’s different in other countries.
How many of the farms surveyed are the owner and operator’s full time job? How many of those farms are owned and operated by multiple families at the same time?
Farming in the US is nothing like a corporate job, or even most small businesses, for reasons I just don’t have the time to share. Your comparison to income for the general population…doesn’t work.
Farms with 2k acres or less are indeed small, family run operations. Especially if you only farm cash crops. These are the kinds of farms that rely on right-to-repair the most. Not the homesteader family with 16 acres and some goats.
Sorry all, your idea of what most full-time, successful, multi-generational farming operations in the US looks like is simply not accurate.
The amount my family has saved by being able to fix and even modify stuff on their own is huge. My dad still mows our lawn with an antique Allis-Chalmers hooked up to a commercial mower. Equipment is wildly expensive compared to margins at smaller scales (think like 2k acres for small farms). Things need to last for decades or generations in order to keep a profit.
At many of my previous jobs, I was so frustrated by the people obsessed with tooling instead of doing the work. Like, why are you trying to develop a react application in VIM after you spent months evangelizing VScode to me?? Who cares, ship the thing!
Of course, these were the most visible people to upper management, and the darlings of our department. :/ Meanwhile I was the one staying on task, making sure things got out on time. Lesson learned: be loud. Advertise your accomplishments and advocate for yourself if you’re a do-er.
Nonetheless, here's a twitter thread I made with a bunch of examples of big, well known sites that use programmatic SEO. Which of these sites are spam? https://twitter.com/allison_seboldt/status/16195138347790499...
"This strategy targets keywords that aren't served well by human written content."
One example I often use is nutritional information. We don't need in-depth, 1200 word articles for how many calories, carbs, protein, etc. there are in every food and drink item out there. Plus, there are billions of them. So it's not even feasible to create human written, long-form articles for every item. Websites use templates to plugin in nutritional information into webpages, and Google picks it up. That's programmatic SEO. It's applicable to lots of situations, and we consume tons of it every day.
If you can't see even a single legitimate use case for this strategy after all the resources and details I've provided, I just have to assume you're looking for people to argue with. Not worth my energy, sorry dude.
Here's a twitter thread with legitimate websites getting millions of traffic each month from programmatic SEO: https://twitter.com/allison_seboldt/status/16195138347790499...
I also created a free course on the subject to address people's concerns about this approach, and to teach them how to do it the right way: https://asebold.gumroad.com/l/free-programmatic-seo-course
Indie Hacker Podcast (the forum on the site was also a great resource for me): https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast
How I Built This Podcast: https://www.npr.org/series/490248027/how-i-built-this
Stacking the Bricks: https://stackingthebricks.com/
Books: The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, The E-myth by Michael Gerber, Running Lean by Ash Maurya
As the other posted said, any resources provided by MicroConf are also great. Basically look up their videos on YouTube and follow all of their speakers on Twitter or subscribe to their newsletters.
Programmatic SEO has a long history of being conflated with spam, though, it is not. There are many instances where this approach to creating content is the best approach for users, and many are surprised to learn how often and how much programmatic content they consume (I often use nutritional information as an example).
I've talked about this at length on my twitter, podcast interviews, and my free course on the subject. I will put links to these below. If you're concerned about the efficacy and morality of programmatic SEO, I'd suggest getting more information from these resources in order to make an informed opinion.
Also, my product does not provide any AI services. I know it's common for people to assume "programmatic" means "AI", but this strategy has been around much longer than AI.
My twitter (examples and many threads on the subject): https://twitter.com/allison_seboldt
Free course: https://asebold.gumroad.com/l/free-programmatic-seo-course
Podcast interview I did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU9VYD86xTA&t=818s
Also, my product does not provide any AI services.
All the contract work I've done was part-time at most, so I also haven't had the comfort and safety of a full-time gig during this time period. My projects have been the priority, and I've only done the bare minimum to get by. Which, imo, is still full time "indie hacking", though maybe you disagree.
I stopped hanging out there once I realized how much spam there was. And that you could pay people to "hunt" products. Totally inauthentic.
All I wanted to do growing up was sleep. We were the first ones on the bus at 6:30am every weekday, and then my parents dragged us to some kind of sport extracurricular on Saturday mornings and church on Sunday. I would have been so much easier to deal with if I'd just had a chance to sleep.
In this respect, I don't mean "density" as strictly spacial. The subdivisions I'm referring to stretch on for blocks with no businesses or services mixed in. Typically they're zoned strictly residential. No corner stores, transit, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. And this means people have to rely on cars to go do simple things like grocery shop or socialize outside the home.
There's quite a bit of research and discussion on the value of walkable communities if you're interested in learning more. Maybe you disagree, but I believe the kind of "density" created by mixed 5-over-1s is better for people and their communities than mile long cookie cutter subdivisions.
Additionally, security is one of those things it's hard to get C-suite execs to pay attention to and spend money on. When it's working, you don't notice it. And if your 5 person security team has worked fine for the past 5 years as the org has grown, why should you suddenly scale it up to 10? Everything is fine! That is...until it isn't. But rarely do people think ahead like this.