Being the millennial that I am, this blog is not my first foray into publishing my thoughts online. My hope, however, is that it will be the last one, at least for a while.
Exceedingly Humble Beginnings
My journey starts with a long-dead Israeli blogging platform cleverly named IsraBlog. While the service seems to be (barely) alive online, I wasn’t able to find my angst-infused teenage thoughts on it. Probably for the better, that.
Several years have passed, I became slightly less angsty, quite a bit more politically conscious and I decided to join Facebook. Undoubtedly a bad decision in retrospect, but everyone has a right to learn from their own mistakes. Initially effortless and cheery, the blue behemoth promptly degenerated into a cesspool of hatred. Close to the end of my relationship with the Zuck, I decided to venture forth and create my own blog (this pattern will repeat itself multiple times over the following years).
I believe I’ve got the rights to pavelbrodsky.com and went ahead to publish several posts, some of which, I thought, were actually readable. I failed (or perhaps decided not) to renew my writes to the domain at the end of a year, the hosted WordPress instance died with it, and so did my content. I think some of the posts still exist somewhere in the depth of a backup on Dropbox, but I’ve neither desire nor real reason to search for them.
A Portfolio of Failures
Several years passed after that, with a couple of false starts on Blogger, and (I think?) some other platforms as well. Nothing stayed alive for more than a few weeks. I proceeded to pick up the ancient art of photography as a hobby, and my next several attempts at sharing my creations online were focused on that. I had a portfolio up on 500px, Instagram (like, 4 different times), Flickr, SmugMug, and whatever else service would have me. None felt just right. They were either too social or not social enough, too restrictive or overwhelming with choice, expensive, clumsy, slow, etc, etc.
Finally, I found one that I liked well enough, called Fabrik.io. Through it, I bought back my blast from the past of a domain—pavelbrodsky.com, and published my portfolio on it. Everyone promptly ignored it, and I let the portfolio, along with my domain and a couple of hundred dollars, die a slow death of neglect. The next victim of my indecisiveness and inability to attract an audience was Exposure.co. A service rather similar to Fabrik, but slightly easier to work with. Another wad of cash and a new domain name—pavel-brodsky.com (notice the dash!)—followed, only to be abandoned in much the same manner as their predecessors.
Anti Content
At long last, a semblance of success appeared in the form of a joint publication on Medium called Anti-Content. Medium was a pleasure to behold, pretty great to use as a publisher, an excellent resource for sharing thoughts with millions of users, and a pretty horrible platform in general. Its lack of ads was a wise choice, but somehow the shallowness dynamic remained and prospered. After using it for a little bit, the homepage quickly deteriorates to the point of click-baitish articles about How You (yes, You!) can make a 100,000$ working from home. Give me a break…
Which brings us to this moment, and this blog. Nudged by my anti-content co-author, I’ve decided to carve me a small enclave of my own, online. This post was supposed to document the long and arduous journey that allows you (yes, you!) to read these very words, but a history of my creating and abandoning blogs is what materialized, so here we are. I’ll likely go over that other stuff in the next post. Stay tuned!