My Constant Reader, and staying close to the work

A middle caudal vertebra of a diplodocid, presumably Tornieria africana, on display at the Museum fur Naturkunde Berlin, in left lateral view.

Quick backstory: this post at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History led me to this post at Nothing Human, and poking around there led me to another good’un: “Shallow feedback hollows you out”. That post really hit for me, and it made me think about SV-POW! Especially this bit:

Suppose you don’t want to lose your ability to think new thoughts and see new things. What are your options?

The best remedy is to write to the single smartest person you know who cares a lot about your topic of interest.

I have two thoughts about this. The first, which dovetails nicely with the thesis of that post, is that SV-POW! staying relatively small is probably a good thing. We’ve never written with the goal of growing our readership, and I think that’s kept us from being tempted by a lot of bad habits whose deleterious effects you can see play out over and over again across the whole internet. Our habit of posting on a completely irregular schedule on whatever topics we like has been doubly beneficial: it’s kept us sane (for reasons explored in this post), and it’s probably kept our readership low,* which has kept the temptation to write for marginal readers from ever getting off the ground. In case that sounds insulting or dismissive to our readers, let me clarify: we love our readers, and we’d rather have our little community of dedicated weirdos than any other set.

(Don’t get me wrong, I like it when one of our posts goes viral, but I like it in the same sense that I like watching a comet: it’s a cool phenomenon that I feel is beyond my influence. I enjoy it, but it doesn’t affect how I conduct myself.)

*Having written that, I wonder now if our irregular posting schedule has possibly deepened the dedication of those readers who can tolerate it — it could be a form of intermittent reinforcement, which has been implicated in gambling addiction.

That leads to my second thought: at any given time in the 17-year history of this blog, we’ve had a small but dedicated cadre of commenters, but the makeup of that group has changed over time. This has also had a salutary effect: for every post I’ve ever written here, I could be pretty sure that at least some of the regulars would see it and comment, but the one thing of which I could be absolutely certain is that the post would be seen and read by Mike. For most posts, Mike probably cares as much or more about what I’m writing than anyone else in the world, he will absolutely call me to account if he catches any weaknesses of evidence or reasoning, and he’ll do it publicly, in our own comment section. These are all good things! As my Constant Reader, Mike’s helped enforce the good habits of mind and of writing that are the subject of that Nothing Human “Shallow feedback” post.

The same Tornieria vertebra in dorsolateral oblique view, showing some pneumatic features on the lateral aspect of the neural spine. The pocks on the centrum are also raising my pneumaticity antennae, but I can’t be sure from my limited set of 16-year-old photos. When Diplodocus caudals have pneumatic features this far back in the tail, they’re more commonly on the centrum than the arch, but diverticula gonna diverticulate.

Speaking of, I also really liked this bit from the first comment on that post, by Mo Nastri:

…the details change but the general pattern is the same. In each case the [once great] intellectual in question is years removed from not just the insights that delivered fame, but *the activities that delivered insight*.

To the extent that this blog has escaped enshittification, it’s probably because Mike and I are not removed from the activities that deliver insight. We care more about sauropod vertebrae (and pig skulls, etc.) than we do about clicks. And at this point, I’m confident that we always will. If we were ever in danger of click-maximizing behavior, it was probably back in the early days, and even then the risk was minimal. We love our weird little niche blog just as it is, weird and niche-y and little.

The possibly-surprising conclusion I’m building toward is that we’ve probably made SV-POW! a better experience for our readers (minimally, in that it still exists to be read) by not caring about our readership, and by not writing to please or impress anyone other than ourselves and each other. And that in turn has kept SV-POW! viable for us as well.

So if you’re here, great! We’re happy to have you — as an interested person, rather than a click. If you like what we’re doing, stay tuned. We’re gonna do a lot more of the same.