#000: My First Online Publication
I’m not an avid internet-article-essay reader, but through random searches and discovery I’ve come across some amazing designers, programmers, and artists by way of their published writings. Over time though, most of the platforms used for discovery have lost what made them such special pieces of software in the first place. Constantly being hit with a paywall (Medium lol), or letting the algorithm create a space that forces random bullshit on my screen (Medium again lol), I low-key gave up on reading these things, and totally gave up on the idea of starting my own.
After doing some research about Substack, I came across an article where someone compared Medium to YouTube; you don’t really know what you want, so you let the algorithm decide for you. I’ve been trying to stop the bad habit of going down the YouTube rabbit hole, only logging on to search for videos I know I want to watch. A couple weeks in I barely go on YouTube anymore, so it’s really shown how much unnecessary media I was consuming just for “fun”. For these reasons, I never wanted to become a part of the click-bait community that Medium fostered.
With Substack, I finally feel like I’ve found a place where my writings can exist on the internet, distanced from the fervor, clutter, and noise that platforms like Medium create. From what I’ve gathered so far, Substack looks like a platform and software that puts the choice into the user’s hand, presenting content that you choose to view, since you’re literally subscribing to it. I’m still not sure how I feel about it being a “newsletter by subscription” though; tbh I don’t love newsletters, signing up for newsletters, or having to give out my email to one more thing. I wonder if as time goes by, Substack can make the “publication as newsletter” an option, and just allow these publications to exist somewhere safe that can be found on the internet.
Because of these qualms, I’ve always thought about just building my own “blog” system, designed and programmed to do exactly what I want, but the constant troubles of SEO, indexing, tags, meta tags, discovery, maintenance, etc. have always pushed me away. I think and hope Substack will do a good job at doing all that, and just let me focus on writing. I’m excited to get started.
If you continue to read more of my posts (as if anyone has time haha) and something I said resonated with you, or you just think I’m a nice, maybe interesting person, please email me and let’s hang! I think it’s important to build communities with the people behind the work we engage with on the internet.
omar.mhmmd@gmail.com