I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years

Ex-historian here, now an engineer. Ben is one of the few historians really thinking in depth about the implications of LLMs for historical research and teaching: both the good (wow, they are really great at transcribing difficult handwritten documents now; you can use Claude Code to vibe code up quick visualizations for your research or teaching that would have taken weeks of work before), and the bad (students submitting AI-generated essays). Highly recommended reading.

It's also nice to see a working historian who posts to HN. (If there are any others, please raise your hand!) Our community is richer for the wide variety of non-engineering professions represented here, from medical doctors to truckers to woodworkers to pilots to farmers. Please keep posting, all of you.

Turns out I've linked to you five times since 2023! https://simonwillison.net/tags/benjamin-breen/

(A neat thing about having tags for people I link to is that it's easier to spot when I become a repeat-linker.)

> Switching over to a Substack newsletter, in the summer of 2023, revived my interest in writing online. It felt like rejoining an intellectual community — not quite the same as the golden age of blogging in the 2000s, but something equally as lively, in a way that I don’t think quite gets enough credit in the 2020s.

This makes me sad because I really want to be a part of such a community, but I really don't like how bloated and centralized Substack is, and how much control they take away. Seems that's a requirement for community formation these days though?

>I also (then and now) have no appetite for short-form video content, and still less for the type of history explainer videos — “here’s a two hour deep dive into why this movie is historically inaccurate” or “everything you need to know about such-and-such famous person” — that seem to do well on YouTube.

100% agree.

Whats the difference between the sites "Blog Format" which apparently died in 2023, and what is happening now?

I love to support creators, but I wish there was something common between free and significant subscription price so that I could show appreciation more readily.

Examples I would use without thinking for worthwhile-to-me content:

  - "tip" options in the App Store
  - 10/year
  - 1/month

I know this has been tried in other ways, but I think Substack and Medium could make this work.

I always somewhat admire people, who can go through with one thing for that long. My own blogs mostly served as vehicles for learning another programming language or saw short-lived activity and then long inactivity, before I took them down. That said ... maybe I should make another blog, in which I document computer programming stuff and keep the topic vague, so that I can put basically anything there, so that I have enough stuff to write about.

It's getting harder and harder to get eyeballs on text. ChatGPT, AI summaries and social media algorithms all conspire to keep people on their platforms, denying any traffic to external source material.

Just in time to be scooped up in AI training sets!

I guess that there are "content creators" who are not interested by video or click-bait as well as those "content consumers" who are looking for geniously interesting content written in a concise and clear way. Substack seems a good site for this but in general it seems to me that this is sth that is missing in today's internet.

Sad that a long time self-hosted writer conceded to Substack. The tyranny of convenience and distribution strikes again.

For what its worth, when you use expressions like 'those halcyon days' you don't need to tell us you're a history PhD.

35 paying subscribers out of 8,000 seems to be very low, especially for 15 years.

Do most people actually pay and support most newsletters? Wouldn't it be more stable income to have sponsors or commercial sponsors?

[dead]

Okay