I, too, get more traffic & more responses on Quora (except, of course, when I cross-promote my…

I, too, get more traffic & more responses on Quora (except, of course, when I cross-promote my Medium posts: that’s my side hustle now, after all).

However, Quora is even less well-suited to soul-blogging than Medium: where Medium provides a steady stream of self-help articles, sprinkled with occasional satires of self-help articles, Quora’s top-level posts are approximately 90% easily-googled questions by indian junior high students (the remainder being questions that encode fundamental errors & therefore have no answer — like “How did Bill Gates write Windows with only a row of switches” or “What kind of alcohol is a wild boar” — by indian junior high students).

Where anything goes in Medium’s comment system, Quora’s responses are actually ‘answers’ (and unthreaded comments are allowed on answers so long as they’re not much longer than tweet length). Surreal comedy is impossible in questions, barring weird-twitter-style techniques; surreal comedy in answers will be downvoted as ‘off-topic’, or ‘irrelevant’, as though such things are meaningful criticisms of a fully-connected intellectual universe.

If you’re considering moving your current activity somewhere else, I recommend ditching the web entirely in favor of Secure Scuttlebutt. Scuttlebutt is a social network invented by a guy who lives on a sailboat in New Zealand (or, presumably, adjacent to New Zealand most of the time). Posts there are primarily meandering stories about the cosmic insights someone noticed while repairing their solar-powered chicken feeder, puns about the word ‘butt’, and photographs of people’s pet sheep and/or home-brewing equipment. One notable user scans and posts the funny pages from his local newspaper daily. It’s like living in a small town and gossiping with the neighbours about trivia, except that all the neighbours live in communes in australia, germany, and rural spain, and build twelve foot tall fire-spewing art robots made of recycled sneakers and scrap metal in their free time.

Scuttlebutt has substantial overlap with the fediverse, a different social network composed primarily of gay communist furries who collect forty year old personal computers.