> Spencer Draper—best known as the Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader on YouTube, where he reviews the technical and historical aspects of digital releases with a rigor usually reserved for scholarly peer review
I will occasionally think about various topics "I'm really into <thing> but is anyone else in to <thing>??"
And then I read a quote like the above and I realize that, for lack of a better phrase, "it's a big world out there" and people have many varied interests.
Plus, if folks are REALLY into <thing> then they want different perspectives about <thing> even if it's a sub-topic that has been covered before.
In other words, write blog posts and make videos. Someone will consume that content and you never know where that leads.
This is what the early web was all about: people sharing their obscure hobbies and obsessions with everyone else, building small communities across the world. It was beautiful. It is still out there, to a degree, but unfortunately the socials have sucked the air out of publishing on external websites. Back in the day, this guy would have had his own blog or specific AV/cinephile forum, and now he's just another guy on youtube.
More otimistically, there were far fewer obsessive niches online then as the technical requirements were so large to set a site up. Even if the ones that existed were great.
There are a lot more obsessive YouTube channels and newsletters in a lot more varied niches today by comparison. I'm delighted regularly by new discoveries.
If you were obsessed with cinema and films, chances are you were already adjacent enough to the internet to blog about it. If you were obsessed with woodworking, probably you needed to wait for the smartphones and YT boom.
Unless you were one of the few people lucky enough to live in New York most of us never had access to movies beyond what you could find in a second tier Blockbuster on a Friday night. Or worse: cable television.
Nah. phpbb was a thing. Every niche crafting hobby imaginable had at least on "authoritative" forum-based online community before smartphones were a thing.
alexpotato · · focus · HN ↗
I will occasionally think about various topics "I'm really into <thing> but is anyone else in to <thing>??"
And then I read a quote like the above and I realize that, for lack of a better phrase, "it's a big world out there" and people have many varied interests.
Plus, if folks are REALLY into <thing> then they want different perspectives about <thing> even if it's a sub-topic that has been covered before.
In other words, write blog posts and make videos. Someone will consume that content and you never know where that leads.
toyg · · focus · HN ↗
usef- · · focus · HN ↗
There are a lot more obsessive YouTube channels and newsletters in a lot more varied niches today by comparison. I'm delighted regularly by new discoveries.
darkwater · · focus · HN ↗
expedition32 · · focus · HN ↗
forgetfreeman · · focus · HN ↗