Organizational announcement
The 20th anniversary of the start of my blogging career has come and gone, entirely unnoticed by anyone, myself included. I did notice, however, that this blog is steadily declining, bringing me to think that it is time to make some changes.
Over the past two decades of continuous blogging, I have tried various approaches and venues.
• The first, from 2006 until 2021, was at https://cluborlov.blogspot.com, where just under a thousand of my earliest posts can still be found.
• I also tried blogging at Patreon. Surprpsingly, it didn't ban me for being less than a full-retard liberal, but then in the spring of 2022 Patreon stopped working for me because of anti-Russian sanctions (at the time, I was already done with the US and living in Russia). Patreon blocked users from Russia and the US Treasury blocked payments to Russia. This forced me to switch venues yet again.
• Since then, I have been blogging at https://boosty.to/cluborlov. Boosty has solved most of the sanctions-related issues. There are exactly zero alternatives to Boosty.
Ever since my move from Blogspot to Patreon, I have been using the subscription model. It worked very well at Patreon and moderately well at Boosty — at first, but worse and worse over time. The number of subscribers has been dropping steadily and the readership has dwindled appreciably.
The demographics are not in favor of text-based blogs. My readers are getting older and seem to become less avid readers over time. Quite a lot of them begin to prefer the video format. Meanwhile, those significantly younger don't even seem to be aware of anything that is not available on video. Overall, text has fallen out of fashion.
And so, it is time to try something else. I am not yet sure what exactly this will be, but I am leaning in the direction of putting out fewer articles and more videos, and making most of them freely available. This will require a bit of retooling on my end, and so I will take a short hiatus, then re-launch in September.
In the meantime, please feel free to peruse and to share any of a dozen of my most popular posts from the past year, listed below, which I have made freely available.
read all your publications with great interest. I am reading you in English, my
knowledge of Russian language remains too average. I prefer to read your texts
than to listen to the videos. A Russian's view of the world, and particularly
the Western world, is essential to escape our navel-gazing. Your humor is
indispensable to me. I hope you will continue to publish in Russian or English
writing.