A possible future for Damn Interesting
damninteresting.com225 points by mzur 10 hours ago
225 points by mzur 10 hours ago
Heavens to Betsy. My server alerted me that traffic was far exceeding a median Thursday. For the record, I am a fairly active user on HN, but I was not responsible for sharing this link here, directly or otherwise. I have little stomach for self-promotion (probably to my detriment).
I've come across your site before, but I didn't realize just how well researched your articles were until now. I thought you were recycling other folks / were blogspam. (oops)
I understand the aversion to self promotion, but it genuinely made it harder for me to hear about Damn Interesting. And I feel like my life has been poorer for it, because your site really is damn interesting.
Suggestion, I think you have at least 1k people who'd be willing to chip in to give you a "job."
FWIW, in this new age, patronage might be the only way. Allow people to pay on a sliding scale, with an uncapped upper end. And give them access to a tightly moderated, thoughtful community. Who knows, maybe there are Damn Interesting superfans out there who can chip in $1k/mo. You never know.
The modern economy of fan economics is strange. It's very much a whale phenomenon. People want community and belonging. And a community of people who like stuff that's damn interesting is pretty damn neat.
Also, you should consider turning some of these images into items people can buy. There's something funny, sweet and thoughtful about these, if you know the story,
https://damn-8791.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/disne...
https://damn-8791.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Bathy...
> I thought you were recycling other folks / were blogspam.
It's understandable that you thought so, though the opposite is usually the case. There are a lot of creators who poach our catalog; if you compare publication dates you'll usually find that ours was published first. While I'm out there scanning the microfiche, reading the dusty old books, filing FOIA requests, and hiring researchers at the National Archive, these lazy creators just yoink the gist and earn 100x more than I do. It's a lot to grapple with sometimes. But I enjoy doing it, so I ignore the parasites most of the time.
> FWIW, in this new age, patronage might be the only way. Allow people to pay on a sliding scale, with an uncapped upper end.
That's not far from what I'm attempting with this fundraiser experiment. There is a modest goal for the year, but no cap on contribution, so if someone(s) with vast resources is inclined to make a generous contribution, they are able to do so.
One problem is that I don't know how to reach such people apart from this omnidirectional signal. Another is that I would not be amenable to string attachments. Maybe I'm broken, but I'd rather shut down the site than allow a wealthy benefactor to call any shots, and most wealthy entities won't like that (I expect).
> And give them access to a tightly moderated, thoughtful community.
We kind of have that in our comments sections, but a more unified place might be an interesting exploration. I'll ponder that, thank you for the suggestion.
I would support this Patreon. Particularly to the extent that something like that allows the funding vehicle to remain behind the scenes / separate from the main publication you’ve so lovingly polished and shared with the world over all these years.
Yea - I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term as they make it super easy to pay $8-15/mo which the best readers won’t even miss!
> I think moving to Substack (retain domain) would be a much stronger way to build in the long term
Hmm, the danger there is that one is putting a lot of one's eggs into a fickle basket. In the early days of Facebook we had a page with 20k+ followers, and we got a lot of engagement there, people followed us to be informed of when we published anything new. Then one day Facebook introduced 'boosting,' and overnight our posts were hidden from all but a fraction of our audience. Paying to boost each post would convert them into ads, which is not how we wanted to reach our readers. Our site traffic plummeted. I would have happily just paid FB a flat rate to retain access to our audience, but that option was not on offer.
I was already a proponent of the "own your platform" philosophy[1] (aka "Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms"[2]), but that misguided reliance on Facebook really cemented it. It's nigh impossible to own everything we rely on, but I'm reluctant to give any company that much power over my project again.
[1] https://www.chuck.is/platform/
[2] https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...
Was kinda inevitable though. Before that everybody was making huge amounts of money off Facebook... except Facebook. Really spammy "publishers" like Zynga were cleaning up.
Was the end of the "if you build it they will come" era. Around that time Google's enclosure of the web was well underway and the black hat SEO masterminds I knew were switching to AdWords.
https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/19/dont-call-it-a-substack/ is a persuasive argument for the opposite
Spamstack? The site where people can just sign you up without you knowing until you get your inbox flooded with garbage?
Yea there's a reason I bin everything that comes from that site to my spam folder.
Admittedly, I haven't read DI in quite a while, but seeing this post brought back a flood of memories from my college days of waiting for the next article to drop. This blog was the precursor of an entire genre of "generally interesting shit" that has kind of underpinned most of the spirit of podcasting today. Shows like 99PI, Stuff You Should Know, RadioLab and so on owe I think a little something to this blog.
The amount asked for is meager, and I was more than happy to throw some bucks at it.
> 99PI, Stuff You Should Know, RadioLab
It's funny you mention those three in particular. We've collaborated with Stuff You Should Know several times, and we almost worked with both 99PI and RadioLab on separate occasions (i.e., I pitched ideas that got some traction, though they didn't ultimately materialize). I still think my pitch for RadioLab is a good one, though it's a throwback to when they did episodes with three stories around a central theme (e.g., Blood).
> I was more than happy to throw some bucks at it.
Thanks! If this fundraiser works out, you're part of the reason we get to keep going.
Generally interesting shit, as a category, has been shedding audience figures. It's unclear which of the explanations for this is correct.
Just more focused places to find it, I think. I loved the historical seafaring stories that DI would post, but then I realized that there were subject matter podcasts that dug into these stories even more. So I think it was just specialization taking over.
https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of... - has long been one of my favorite articles on the internet. Happy to chip in to support the site.
I found Damn Interesting because of an orbital mechanics simulation the author coded in javascript as a one-off for an article about iirc cyclers. Crazy amount of effort for what's probably about 10 seconds of eye-candy for the average reader. I found it a really neat implementation and while the articles are a bit long for me, it got me hooked on their podcast. There seem to be few projects as thorough and long-lived as this one.
Ah, you must mean the one embedded in this article:
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-martian-express/
Originally, in 2008, it was 100% Javascript, but a few years later I updated it to use CSS transitions for a much smoother animation.
That cycler simulator actually led to a very cool life experience. An administrator at NASA contacted me wanting to use it for a presentation. Of course I said yes! Then he invited me to be his guest to watch an early test of the SLS rocket that was happening about 90 minutes from my home. Of course I said yes!
I got to meet a bunch of astronauts, see a big rocket engine fire horizontally in the desert, and got a NASA SLS pin. The fellow ended up not using the animation, as that part of his talk got edited out, but nevertheless niftiness.
This is a beautiful turn of phrase - the likes of which is unlikely to ever be generated correctly and in appropriate context by an LLM:
"An additional inconvenience is the flyby speed: as designed, the Cyclers would swing by Earth at approximately 15,000 miles per hour, and fly past Mars at 22,000 mph. In order to intercept such speedy Cyclers, the rocket-taxis would need to be capable of splitting a lot of lickety."
I miss the old internet. I wish this fellow traveler well.
That explains why it’s so rare for a new episode to appear.
I’ve been reading (then listening) to DI forever. Not the full 20 years, because I remember reading through the entire back catalog when I first found it, but a very long time.
Happy to help. Donated.
Can't remember the last time I read a DI article, but I've definitely read them before and value the non-AI content[^1]. Donated.
(Good golly, GoFundMe defaulted to a 17.5% tip. WTF?)
> This fundraiser is entirely separate from our Give a Damn donation system, which aims to cover Damn Interesting monthly expenses —web hosting, subscriptions, usage licenses, link curation, and that sort of thing. An amazing array of donors support us through that system, and those lovely people are the reason we survive to this day. This new experiment is specifically so I myself can afford to spend more time writing and running the site.
I'm left confused...
Why you don't run this experiment through that same system?
Why you don't pay yourself out of that system?
What will happen if this experiment fails?
[^1]: "Rider on the Storm" is very memorable - https://www.damninteresting.com/rider-on-the-storm/
There are a few considerations. One is that the 'Give a Damn' system only aims to collect about $1,800/month, an approximation of our monthly expenses (not just hosting, but author payments, subscriptions to archives, research expenses, etc). And most months it barely collects the target amount. I've tried nudging the goal upward to see if I can slowly push it into actually-make-a-living territory, but it seems to have plateaued; increasing the goal there just means we usually miss our goal.
There's also the fact that the 'Give a Damn' system is supporting the site, to the benefit of all of its contributors, not just me. Changing that dynamic could be detrimental to morale.
There are lots of other small things making it very difficult to just update the existing system, not least of which being the same time shortage this fundraiser is trying to relieve. I'd need to make a bunch of changes to a very sensitive money-handling chunk of code, which requires careful coding and testing.
> What will happen if this experiment fails?
I have a series of decreasingly appealing follow-up plans if this one falls too short. But it's already earned enough to get me through at least a few months, so I'll have a chunk of time to take some positive action. Maybe that means I only get 6 months off before I'll have to resume full-time work, but I'll take what I can get.
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