The content soon becomes more about narcissism than value creation.
"I started from nothing and now I have a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, a beautiful car, and a beautiful boat, as you can see on this beautiful website, and you can too - if you sign up for this free newsletter which will give you some sticky free content and then introduce you to my special Monthly Success Diamond Club Offer which is usually $1000 but for today only...'
And then it turns out all of the above are hired for the photo feature and aren't real. But maybe wishing hard enough will make them so. And so it goes.
I don't think we're close to that limit here, but it does exist and reliably seems to exert a dark gravitational pull on the hopeful and unwary.
I don't want to be rude. We just get so much of this stuff somebody promoting something about talking about building something that helps people build something to talk about promoting stuff. That's so many nested meta levels that I'm as a dev calling BS after about 2 of them and go away.
Unfortunately I read your blog post as something similar. It was about how you funnel people into some community that helps others polish their writings so they get more reach. That's 3 levels right there.
Here is you chance to show that the chain ends after those 3 levels and there is actual non-meta content waiting at the end of that chain.
So I never intended it to be here, just trying to answer some questions as I get that people from HN have way less context about me or the community than people who've been following the community and newsletter for 6 months on Twitter!
So yeah, it's not meant as self-promotion. It's part of my effort to "build in public", as I mentioned in another comment.
My main takeaway in the article is actually that a lot of people skip the step of "providing value first" and jump to something paid.
Whereas I've been writing a free newsletter for 6+ months, which many people have actually offered to pay for and told me are "better than most paid courses". I've done weeks worth of free consulting over email for subscribers and they have had really cool successes.
Anyway, we do have a public events page if you want to see the kind of stuff going on: https://bloggingfordevs.com/events/
As I mentioned at the end of the blog post, I'm personally preparing an SEO Workshop which'll be given in less than two weeks. The membership is literally $12/mo and refundable, and a workshop like that alone would cost 10-20x that if given in a conference setting.
Not sure if this is "enough" for people here, but as long as members who are there are happy and feel like their investment is compounding, that's gonna have to be my metric for success.
Hope that contributes to the discussion.
Effectively a form of information dropshipping.
It also speaks to the fact that over the last handful of years HN has been reduced, in a significant way, from people discussing tech-as-a-means-of-business, to something akin to those “business forums” where people share how they made money doing Whatever, But Online (tm). As if just about any way at all to scrape a bit of money from an online presence is a viable way to create a sustaining business that can generate good profits YoY.
But I digress, here we are.
