Musings

The creator’s niche dilemma and the curator’s dilemma

I don’t post that much to social media. I mean, I do compared to people who don’t post anything at all. It’s more accurate to say that I don’t post much compared to the average person who regularly posts to social media.

A big reason for my limited posting is that I stick to just professional content, which means I usually post about an article that I published or a project that I worked on. I also want my content to be relevant to my followers and fairly high quality.

However, I often have a desire to share more from other areas of my life. One example is sharing music that I found and liked recently. Another is dog videos, which I share privately with my wife, but I think some others might also like my highly curated dog videos.

But I think it would be pretty silly to post those things to my professional social media accounts, because people don’t follow me for that content. Furthermore, if people did want to see my music likes or dog videos, why would they follow me when I primarily make web dev posts? I call this the creator’s niche dilemma.

Relatedly, but on the other side of posting, there’s a lot of people who post high quality web development posts that I’d like to see. But many of those authors also post content outside of web dev that I don’t care about. In small portions, I don’t mind, but when they post non-tech posts regularly, I often don’t find it worth the follow. I call this the curator’s dilemma.

I’ve been thinking about these dilemmas for a while but don’t have a good solution for either of them yet.

Iteration > from scratch

I’m increasingly convinced that it’s usually a bad decision to start from scratch.

There are a lot of reasons behind this belief, but the primary one for me is: Usually the old way is doing pretty well. Rather than risk losing what is already going well in a full redesign, it’s usually better to focus on improving what’s lacking. Secondly, starting from something causes one to avoid the blank page syndrome.

This rule of thumb applies to product-level thinking all the way down to code implementation itself. Following this rule of thumb and avoiding redesigns may make you much more efficient and able to ship more.

I was skimming Hacker News and read this article about microfeatures. This blog already had several of these features, but one I didn’t think about adding until I read the article is an icon to visually indicate external links. As you can tell, I added this feature to my blog!

My pre-Subsonic era

Remember the days when all the music you owned was on some hardware in your home (computer, iPod Shuffle, CD, etc.)? Before streaming was the norm every person had to be their own music curator.

I never stopped doing that. I’ve always had music that was not on every streaming services: music from NewGrounds, music I made, custom edits of others’ music (mostly just cutting out sections of songs), or music that are only available on one streaming service. This made me never want to transition to streaming services as the primary way that I listened to my own music.

The Stanley Parable

Have you played The Stanley Parable? I highly recommend it if you haven’t.

The Stanley Parable’s gameplay is simple. Most of the gameplay is just walking around, experiencing a somewhat dull office environment, and occasionally interacting with an object or two while a narrator (a non-playable character or NPC) narrates. The player repeats the “same” scenario again and again.

However, depending on the player’s choices and overall state of the game, the scenario will likely change in some way. Variations can include the narrator saying something different, a new opportunity or decision being available, or a different ending.