100 Subscribers! And some comments on the blog

1.5 years of writing about frisbee

I recently passed 100 subscribers*, which feels really cool. Of course, that's still only a tiny fraction of the frisbee community! I wanted to take a moment to make some meta-comments about the blog itself.

*As it says on the About page, I don't really care if you subscribe to the blog. If you don't like receiving emails and just want to check the website every once in a while to see what's new, that's totally fine with me. It's what I do myself on websites I read.

Anyways, on to some comments:

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Share my stuff

I try to make this blog match the experience that I want to have when reading. I'm an anti-capitalist (sort of) and anti-intellectual monopolist. I'm not on Facebook or Twitter (I am on Reddit). Substack makes it easy to put Subscribe and Share buttons in my articles, but I never do—I don't want it to detract from the experience.

My goal is that people come back because they like what they're reading, and not because they were annoyed by an endless series of buttons, by constant reminders to "like and subscribe", or by me posting my articles on social media multiple times a week.

(I am aware that Substack will sometimes show a page asking new readers to subscribe before showing an article. To me, that's the price I pay for using a free, easy-to-set-up platform. I even emailed to ask them to turn it off once and they weren't willing to.)

I write because I genuinely want to help people get better at ultimate frisbee. I don't want high-quality ultimate frisbee advice to be locked behind a paywall. I'm happy to make money other ways and write for free to help grow our ultimate community. Have you ever heard people say that if we had a Universal Basic Income, some people would just be poor and make cool art? In a way, that's me with this blog.

If you've benefited from reading my articles, and have friends or teammates who you think would benefit as well, I'm always honored if you share my stuff—with your teammates, with the players you coach, with your local community. Since I'm not on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram, sharing my articles in frisbee communities there might be extra helpful.

And a big thanks to those of you who I know have already shared my blog.

I promise I'll never annoy y'all about sharing my stuff again!

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Read my old stuff

They say musicians have trouble making a second album as good as their first. They spent many years working on the songs on their first album, and then had to go and make a second album a year later.

My blog, I expect, will have the same issue — I started it with a number of things in mind that I wanted to write about, and as I use up those ideas, they're probably not being replaced by ideas that are equally important. You should assume the blog is already more than half over.

It's great if you subscribe to get notified about future posts, but my past work is probably more impactful than what I'll write in the future. So head over to the Guide page and work your way through the older articles if you haven't already.

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Give me feedback on my stuff

Feedback is always welcome!

Again, I write this blog aiming to benefit my readers—if the meaning of an article isn't successfully getting through, then I haven't accomplished the goal I set out for myself. So you're only helping me by telling me where my articles aren't good enough!

Whether it's something relatively small like the phrasing I use in a certain paragraph, or something big like a whole article not really clicking for you, don't hesitate to ask me to make it better.

I'm not afraid to admit that I'm just straight-up wrong sometimes. It happens. If you don't agree with one of my posts, feel free to let me know about that too. I'll either update the post to be more convincing, or update the post to say I was wrong.

One specific question I'd appreciate feedback on: Do you watch the video clips included in many of the frisbee-related articles? If not, would you be more likely to watch them if I presented them in a different way, like GIFs instead of timestamped YouTube links?

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Write a guest post?

If you have ideas you'd like to share but don't want to go through the hassle of creating your own blog, feel free to get in touch! I wouldn't mind hosting guest posts. (Though I should point out Ultiworld.com also posts freelance work, and their audience is bigger than mine. But I'm better at replying to emails!)

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As always, let me know what you want to read about

As it says on the guide/archive page, I'm always interested in hearing what you want to read about. If you have questions/ideas you'd like me to write about, I'd love to hear from you.

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PS

Substack generates a map of where my subscribers are from, which I think is pretty cool to see (screenshots below). Stray thoughts:

• I'm not completely sure why my blog is so popular in Oregon? Maybe it's not a coincidence that an Oregon team recently made their first ever Nationals 😉 Shout out to the Oregon folks!

• Apparently I have a subscriber in Malawi? Assuming it's not a fake location due to a VPN. Shout out to you if you're out there!

• Still haven't broken into the Japanese or Colombian ultimate scene. Not very surprising since there's probably a bigger language gap than with European countries.

• And no subscribers in some US states with lots of frisbee, like Maine, North Carolina, Utah or Texas. But perhaps this is mostly just a reflection of where people use Reddit more vs. other social media apps. (Also, my blog is still small enough that random events have an outsized effect, so really it probably means nothing at all.)