A possible future for Damn Interesting

dclowd9901

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.

joeguilmette

I miss the old internet. I wish this fellow traveler well.

DamnInteresting

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).

MBCook

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.

scientifik

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.

js2

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/

Aachen

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.

quapster

What I like about this is that it quietly exposes how broken the "creator economy" narrative has been for text on the web. For 20 years the model was: have a normal job, let the internet subsidize the rest with cheap distribution and a bit of ad/support money. That worked as long as (1) part-time/contract engineering was plentiful, (2) search sent humans to long-form, and (3) nobody was flooding the commons with infinite free derivative text. All three legs are wobbling now. Hiring shifted to "full time or nothing", SEO is a mostly hostile environment, and AI has turned "writing" into something that looks abundant from 10,000 feet. The result is that the remaining high-effort indie sites end up in this weird funding gap: too small and stubborn to become a VC-scale "media brand", too big and polished to be a casual side blog. So you get this old-school, almost embarrassingly direct solution: just ask readers to buy back the author's time. No growth story, no "community platform", just "I can make more of the thing you like if you cover what the labor market no longer will." In a way that's the most honest possible response to the AI slop wave: not "we'll use AI better", but "we'll opt out of that game entirely and see if real people care enough to pay for it."

john-tells-all

Wife and I adore the podcast. Will be sending money. We love you guys.