In the post where I allude to “10 years of BP” someone mentioned old comments pre-2014 (I do have those posts in tables I need to load up). That suggests to me that some few of the readers here date to the beginning and transitioned to the blogspot site and back again.
So here is an unlurk thread where you can tell us who you are. Are you Indian? Are you a techie? What is your caste/jati? The usual.
Brown Pundit emeritus Zach pointed out on Twitter that BP launched at the end of 2010. A lot has changed. At BP and the world.
There is actually MySQL table data with archives back to 2010. I should resurrect those at some point.
A lot has changed in the last 10 years. The biggest thing is the size of the brown faction on the internet is now huge. About as many Indians read this website as Americans.
The price-point for paid subscription to my new newsletter is too high for most Indians (well, Americans perhaps?). So I am not asking for paid sign-ups as much as encouraging people to do a free sign-up. The reason is two-fold.
First, I’m going to put out a reasonable amount of free content. You can see that this week where I put out 5 posts.
Second, I want more sign-ups from India, because one of the areas I plan on covering in my Substack into the 2020’s is the America-India relationship and India’s future prospects. I’m personally interested, and honestly, I think there are some business opportunities I want to explore. So I would appreciate sign-ups as I want to build up that relationship.
(if you don’t know what Substack is, here’s an article)
They say blogs are dead. They say comments are dead. To my surprise, this website has surprised me. In the later years of the Sepia Mutiny weblog the number of comments started dropping off. The theory was that people were commenting more on Facebook (Twitter wasn’t huge then). Google Analytics says that more than 20,000 people are reading this website in a given month. That’s not trivial, but it’s small. That being said, the comment threads are often “hopping.”
This is good and nice. How do we maintain this? I don’t moderate much at this point but am worried about things getting out of control. That being said, this is not a job and I have lots of other things to attend to. Thoughts?
Readers have been posting stuff about better commenting-systems. I want to keep WordPress because I don’t have time/energy to run a new CMS.
In the comments below put up your suggestions, pros and cons.
I WILL DELETE OFF TOPIC COMMENTS.
– A greater and greater portion of the traffic on this weblog is mobile (about 60% now). That’s why I redesigned it a while back. This mobile traffic is clearly driven by Indian traffic, which is overwhelmingly mobile.
– There has been a major dropoff in positive reviews on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher. Please leave some positive reviews.
– The downloads are about 50% American (USA). About 10% from India. The balance is other nations.
– I’m still doing all the editing, which is one reason the sound quality is…variable. If you want that to change, you probably should become a patron. Once we hit around $200/month I think we can afford an editor I know who does good work (she edits The Insight). Right now it is costing me $40 a month to host the podcasts and get a good Zencastr account.
But really the opportunity cost of time is the major issue for me. I enjoy recording podcasts. I generally am ambivalent about editing (it’s kind of interesting to listen, but I have to focus on other things besides content).
– This weblog now regularly gets more traffic than my primary weblog, Gene Expression.