It was up earlier this morning, but taken down within the last hour or so.
The indie web replied to Andy, loudly, and I suppose he didnāt appreciate the focus. He wrote a reply that leaned further into the whole SEO thing, pointing out that he was an SEO expert for over twenty years, blah, blah, blah, and thatās why you should pay attention to him. Then he ended with some contrition that said something like āIf you just like to blog, keep doing that.ā
Then there were a few more posts with weird sales/SEO style wisdom.
Itās unclear why exactly the whole thing got taken down. For all intents and purposes, Andy managed to quickly build up a ton of views and his ābrandāāfrankly the whole thing felt like it was rage bait, with hot takes from competing perspectives generated via prompts. Is that true? No idea, but itās my head canon.
Interesting.
Thinking about it, I think I did see Andyās post and a reaction by someone a couple of days ago. And I disagreed with him too.
But who knows what he had to have yelled at him. We all know how harsh and uncivilised a lot of people are when they disagree with someone online.
Itās bizarre. I originally thought that his domain might just be down, but Iād still expect to see the posts listed in the Bear Blog discovery feed. Instead, theyāve just vanished. I guess itās possible this is all temporary and everything comes back eventually.
In terms of harsh replies, I canāt really say which one had the most teeth, but I can think of about a dozen off the top of my head (including one from Manu). Replies were also getting boosted left and right yesterday on Mastodon. This is probably my favorite reply from this morningā¦ at least I assume itās related based on Andyās claim that he was a 20 year SEO expert.
I didnāt reply, because I left the commercial Web to avoid getting into rage bait fights with people whose opinions I cannot change. But absolutely everything Andy posted on Bear rubbed me the wrong way.
I was willing to accept maybe itās just the sudden and violent allergy to commercial Webspeak I developed after also ābeing an SEO expert for a double digit number of years.ā But itās heartening to see so many people say the exact things I was thinking.
Also, there was a link here recently about trying to be the tech expert in the room and instead ruining it for everyone? That. Andy gave me that vibe.
I added a blog page to my website! Getting the images to display properly was a bit of workā¦ theyāre still a bit wonky on mobile, but Iām happy with them so far!
Yeah, Andyās post really did have that vibe, which he could have avoided by linking to the site in question.
TBH, Iām not sure Andy wrote any of those posts himself. Like @n3verm0re, Iāve come to suspect that theyāre all machine-generated. That would explain the inconsistency in viewpoints, though people can change their minds.
I think what bothers me about that post is that it might discourage someone from simply blogging and contributing to the real web (as opposed to the corporate bullshit one).
I hope not. It was a weaksauce argument, barely worth the effort I had put into my reply. I was this close to making the tl;dr for my own post: āargument from popularity ā 10 yard penaltyā.
I like how the images look. I also like how the first two sit next to one another and spill over on both sides on mobile. Though I totally undersrand if thatās not what you want it to look like.
Years ago, just to see what was up with it, I subscribed to a blogging advice email newsletter. It was full of the same kind of wankery we still see today. Dumb it down. Donāt make it too hard to read. Etc etc.
in the earliest wayback machine link for his site (here), his homepage says heās a newbie blogger and indicates he doesnāt know much about SEO. he started the blog as a hobby after retiring, having previously had some success creating a website for his business and successfully learning enough about SEO to get it some momentum.
in september 2022, in a post amidst some generic seo-bait-titled blog posts, he posts this entry in which he says that SEO is an interest and hobby of his!
it also looks like he tends to blog in bursts of activity; in 2022 and 2023, then again this month.
i think that he is probably being honest in that post: he finds SEO itself interesting and enjoys blogging with an angle to SEO. it seems like when heās in a blogging mood, once in a while, he posts a flurry of posts with different variations on a theme / different titles that are not super different from each other, and then enjoys seeing which ones perform better w/r/t metrics and keywords.
so i donāt think he posted āragebaitā exactly; more like everything he posts is SEO bait, because looking at those numbers is interesting and fun for him, and the bait that works on the indie web is āblogging as a hobby is funā. the bait was bitten, and then when people went to look at his other posts they found the bait that hadnāt worked on them, and chomped on that anyway (thus turning it into ragebait).
i donāt see much indication via the wayback machine that heās ever engaged with any particular blogophere, nor does he have contact info or comments sections on his posts; probably receiving any kind of response to his posting at all was a surprise, and not necessarily a pleasant one.
thatās my headcanon, anyway. it looks like the follow-up arguing posts arenāt archived and i havenāt read them, so maybe iām wildly offbase
Sounds like he hasnāt read his Nietzsche. Shout at the void long enough, and eventually the void shouts back.
Had I known or suspected that Andy was writing as a SEO experiment I might not have bothered. Instead, I fell for the classic trap: someone is wrong on the internet. Youād think that at my age Iād know better.
On the other hand, and as @ConcreteLunch observed, somebody still in the āshould I start my own websiteā stage might have seen Andyās posts and decided against it if there was no pushback. (This might itself be a post hoc rationalization on my part.)
I appreciate the research This seems to conflict with his claim earlier today that he was an industry expert with 20 years of SEO experience. Itās probably best not to assume ill-intentions; the whole thing just felt very manufactured to me.
Thisāll be my last post about this since I feel like Iāve woefully derailed this thread. Sorry @xandra!
no, thatās totally okay! discussions of blog posts definitely happen in here. :)
this whole situation was weird. it did feel like SEO bait to @xixxiiās point, considering that he seemed to flip-flop on his views. (i actually agreed with his post about blogging being for you.)
i also really donāt like the linkedin-esque every-sentence-is-a-paragraph, aggressive hustle-grind writing style (cue the ājust do itā meme), so his blog was pretty off-putting to me.
I read your I Still Donāt Have a Career post yesterday. It hit home. I remember in my early 20 (post-college) wondering what I was going to do with my life. I had jobs I didnāt care about at all. I was amazed that the companies I worked for expected us to be excited about the work. Clearly they didnāt really expect us to be excited, they expected to pretend to be excited and buy in to the āmission.ā
I spent 1996-2005 in special libraries. Engineering and then legal. The work was better, but honestly, did I care that much? No. Not really. Well, my first job out of grad school was at Johnson Space Center in the library there. It was really interesting. One morning I got to work and there had been a fire on the Mir space station. I was called into action immediately by many of the old-timers, getting technical specs and stuff. It was exciting, and I felt like I mattered, but I did. But the rest of those years was better than crappy jobs, but not great.
Iāve been in a public library from 2005 to present. It is the one job Iāve ever had in which I really believe in the mission of the organization. I am fully aware that I am very lucky to be in such a position. I could go on and on. But stillā¦Iād love to just work on my own personal interests all day.
Iām not sure how youāll take this, but I kinda wish I was the only one, and that the inability to fully buy into oneās paid work under capitalism wasnāt so damnably common. This demand for emotional buy-in is one reason I wrote Programmer Passion Considered Harmful back in 2015.
@arevakhach had asked me about whether I had ever considered creating interactive fiction. It makes sense since Iām a writer by choice and a programmer by trade/necessity.
This seems to conflict with his claim earlier today that he was an industry expert with 20 years of SEO experience. Itās probably best not to assume ill-intentions; the whole thing just felt very manufactured to me.