There is an excellent folk horror documentary called Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched. In the documentary, several folk historians, writers, critics, and even occultists talk about the folk horror genre, it's influence, and it's importance in modern culture. One of the people appearing as an interviewee is blogger Howard David Ingham who collected his popular series of posts on folk horror into the self-published We Don't Go Back: A Watcher's Guide to Folk Horror. Since I enjoyed the documentary so much, I decided to purchase and read the book, and later made the attempt to hunt down the author's blog to plug into my handy RSS reader.

As of this writing, the blog hasn't been updated since February of 2024, and it looks like Ingham has moved most of his writing from an open blog to a closed Patreon account, offering little in the way of publicly accessible posts, and requiring at least a $1 tier subscription for access.

I'm certainly not against making money… by all means… But I was disappointed in what this represented symbolically. Here was a person blogging for the joy of it (likely for the personal exploration), and some of his posts became popular enough to warrant a documentary appearance and a book. Yet, as soon as the traffic started heading in the right direction, the open arena that provided that popularity was turned off in favor of ushering people to a paywall.

RSS as a technology had its rough beginnings with a lot of in-fighting about advancing versions of implementation (enough that a rival Atom protocol was built), but the goal of RSS was easy discoverability of quality, regularly updated content on the Internet. Social networks (later social media) provided a platform for sharing links, but the goal of social media is to keep people on their own site to serve advertising. RSS as a protocol and RSS readers themselves had little in the way of ease of monetization for those companies attempting to build online media empires. When Google killed the Google Reader, it was the end of widespread RSS usage.

The end of RSS readers made blogs less discoverable, but after enough social media changes where Facebook required you to pay to get any real traction on people's timelines, many writer went backwards towards email, rebirthing the email newsletter—only this time, you had to pay for it. I quickly developed a love/hate relationship with newsletters, paying for too many, launching the previously mentioned Bots and Beer newsletter, merging it into Codepunk, and ultimately abandoning it, while also unsubscribing to much of the paid content I was reading. Something just felt wrong, and most of it related to building walled gardens. I don't mind paying for content, but there is a sizeable lock-in with modern technologies. It doesn't feel like the open Internet.

Patreon was a nice attempt to help content creators make a buck, but honestly, there is little in the way of quality content. Most creators I back, I end up dipping off in a year or less because the frequency and/or quality meets even less the bar set by a newsletter. In addition, the cost can sometimes be just as much as a corporate streaming service. This doesn't even touch the subject of sexualized, predatory accounts that take advantage of Internet nerddom while feeling like they're too proud to switch to OnlyFans. There's a lot of that out there.

Howard David Ingham isn't doing any of that, and his Patreon is just a dollar. He seems like a great guy, his book is a collection of blog posts, but enjoyable, and he has a great appearance on the Woodlands Dark documentary. My gripe is that he now lacks the discoverability where people would normally find such niche content. The Internet used to be a place to find the "others." But now it's just a place for the others to charge you.