What the Fryx is Going on Here?
Notes on Internet Shadowing and Discussion of System Reconstruction.
I am amazed at the total lack of traffic to my most recent blog post on Wordpress, “Hell Bent for Election”. Zero? Oh, no, three days later it gets its first read.
On substack, it generated a mediocre but definite traffic. A few people even read it as a thread on Twitter, even though dirty bird gets such threads out of order.
I think this piece was actually one of my better ones recently. I started out with the Ontario election and then referred back to my adventures with Fair Vote Canada (FVC) and running in their election for their board. The point was that the governance system in Canada and almost everywhere else in the western world is breaking down and there are no widely accepted and realistic ideas for a solution.
It does seem to me that there good analyses of the problem with there way things are run. There are people with good ideas of new ways of running things. They have a special difficulty being heard and with finding each other.
Making sure of this seems to be a special priority of internet censorship. It actually suits the establishment fine that people are alienated from the political system. As long as people cannot agree on a better way of running things, they do not care much if things collapse totally.
They can use it as a cover to put in an even more repressive regime. That is how fascist regimes get going. Of course, fascist regimes tend to turn into Frankensteins which turn on their creators and eventually also self destruct. Then space is finally opened for a more enlightened regime.
Rather than go through all this turmoil in the western world for the next twenty years or so, it might be better for intelligent people to manage a transition to a system of governance which serves the interest of the public, instead of the privileged. What such a system of governance would look like has been the subject of my natterings at FVC. It will increasingly be a topic of my blog posts going forward.
That is, if I can get anyone to read them. I have discovered one way of getting some traffic to my stuff. That is, to post links to it on the comments boxes of other bloggers. This works if the topic is broadly relevant to the topic on that blog.
The best responses I have gotten are to my posts on the Ukraine situation. Some of them have had over a thousand reads. However, this has lead to few signups to my mail list.
Yet I do not want to write only about the Ukraine war and the global situation. Therefore I must find ways to break through the shadow over discussion of post capitalist political and economic order, and means of getting to one. People may be surprised to know that there are not so many related blogs to link to there.
So I study how to get more traffic to my sites. The platform itself matters. I quit Medium because I was getting nothing at all there. Often I get very little on Wordpress despite me actually paying them.
But sometimes I get a huge wave of readers to Wordpress posts. The same article on Substack would get only a few. Substack is slow but steadier; I think much traffic on Substack is Substackers reading each other’s stuff.
Sometimes a few people will read my stuff as a thread right off Twitter. But generally I do not get many referrals from Twitter. Very little comes in from search engines, either. It seems to be mostly word of mouth and bounces from other blogs.
Yet Twitter occasionally invites me to ‘promote’ my postings. I have looked into this. I can easily declare myself a ‘professional’. That and lots of money would allow me to promote my Twitter account and related web sites.
You can check out below how much it costs to get some mugs looking at my Tweets. It would work out to about five cents per ‘impression’ per day. That is slightly outside my budget.
So I will continue to try to build up my readership, especially a consistent core readership, doing it the slow, hard way. I need to find more people interested in my core topic, the need to move to a post capitalist world, and what it would be like.
I think one of the problems I am having is that people are so busy coping with the crazy present that they cannot even begin to think about a better future. I am actually blogging mostly about the present problems, especially the war of the ruling class on all of us.
I mean, using the covid/sars virus to wage a biologic war on all of us. Use of the Ukraine war, apparently as a proxy war on Russia but in fact also as a war on us. Use of the false ‘global warming’ trope as a cover for an attack on the population, a cover for destroying living standards.
Speaking of climate, it is finally warming up out there. It has been a long and cold spring. I have delayed moving my delicate babies outside. I have delayed other gardening projects I do annually, perhaps for too long.
But I have been out in the fresh air lately, getting dirt under my fingernails. My old back is stiff. I have not spend as much time at the keyboard and that would also account for my lower traffic lately.
But keep watching this space. I have a bunch of half finished essays sitting on my desktop. I managed to erase one, which is pretty hard to do on a Mac, and had to start it over. Hrmpf!
However, I will soon put out a mini blizzard of really brilliant work, which I expect to attract lots of new readers. The sign up for my newsletter is on the page.
Meanwhile, consider actually taking a look at the “Hell Bent for Election”
post.