On Atrophy and Content Creation

The 2025 Milkers of the Year Awards blog was a rousing success, racking up over a MILLION impressions on X and over 250,000 link clicks. It's the most viewed thing I've ever written (I think?), yet writing the 2025 Milkers of the Year Awards proved harder than I expected.

Actually, that’s putting it mildly.

Writing the 2025 Milkers of the Year Awards fucking sucked.

The inspiration was there, but funneling it through my fingers and onto the page was shitty. Painful. Awful. The words didn’t flow. Everything felt more laborious than it did in prior years. Not because MOTY 2025 was materially longer than it was in 2024, 2023, or 2022.

Simply put, I lost the magic touch I learned from grinding for so long.

For roughly four straight years, I wrote 5,000-plus words every single week without much thought or readership. Each post featured ten custom GIFs made from scratch. I wrote during lunch breaks. I made artwork after my kids went to bed. I stayed up late on Thursdays and published on Fridays.

I did this for years without missing a beat, while also editing and updating Cloth Off Friday, producing feature-length documentaries on Marxist revolutions, and shitposting on X to slowly build an audience.

Then I stopped.

In early 2025, I stepped away from blogging because it felt like a dead medium. A blog needs an audience. To build one, you need a platform. If you don't have a platform, you need to build your own. Well, I built mine on X, a place that actively deboosts posts that include links to outside websites, making it incredibly difficult to turn my X following into readers.

**WOMP WOMP**

I tried to MAKE BLOGGING GREAT AGAIN by introducing interactive custom GIFs in an effort to bring my words to life and keep people engaged. None of it mattered. Google SEO (and my own lack of skill/effort in marketing my work) decided I failed.

My audience did grow over the years, but the return never felt proportional to the amount of work required. The only real payoff was the small group of readers who would message me privately, tell me what parts made them laugh, and thank me for the effort. For a long time, those messages were enough. Eventually, I had to admit that while the ego boosts felt good, the blog itself wasn’t going anywhere.

So I took the year off. And when I sat down to write the MOTY 2025, I learned the cost of that decision.

For example, in December 2024, I published a 5,000-word edition of Serious Matters & Unfolding Trends and wrote the 4,100-word 2024 MOTY Awards in a single week. During that same week, I also edited two other blogs for others and produced the Cloth Off Friday Christmas Special.

This was all in the same fucking week.

Fast forward a year, and a single 6,000-word piece stretched into a three-week grind and nearly made me lose my fucking mind. Things became so frustrating that I considered just scrapping the blog entirely. I told myself that, since I had not blogged in so long, nobody would care or even notice if I chose never to publish the 2025 MOTY blog or any others.

I'm glad I did, though, as MOTY 2025 was a smashing success, surpassing all of its previous iterations in views and web traffic in a single day!

I actually don't know how I used to get so much done by myself. The 2026 version of me is very impressed by his 2020-2025 predecessor.

The lesson here is simple and familiar: atrophy is real.

I didn’t forget how to write. I didn’t forget how to design custom artwork. MOTY 2025 is probably the best one yet, if we’re being honest. What I lost was rhythm. Conditioning. The discipline that comes from repetition.

Humans are not computers. You don’t take a year off and reboot at peak performance. If you don’t use a muscle, it weakens and eventually dies.

Which brings me to content creation in 2025.

It’s a mess.

The current monetization structures actively discourage depth and reward volume. Professor Jimbo and I produced seven hour-long documentaries on the French, Chinese, and Russian Revolutions. Those videos took months of research, writing, production, and editing. They required real sacrifice. They remain the work I’m most proud of creating, and it's not even close.

Yet, in five years, those documentaries generated $404.91 on YouTube.

That’s not a typo. Nine hours of video. Over 210,000 views. More than 42,000 watch hours. All for four hundred dollars and ninety-one cents - AND MOST OF THAT MONEY CAME FROM VIEWER DONATIONS! NOT YOUTUBE!

Guess how much money I’ve made from blogging? Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Look around, there are no ads here. I’ve never bothered with them because I hate them and believe they ruin the reader experience. To be clear, paying for Wix to host this blog has COST ME over a thousand bucks over the years.

Meanwhile, X, has actually paid us money through its revenue-sharing program. Not much, but more than YouTube, Rumble, or t-shirts ever have (to be fair, that money goes to charity or to giveaways for our followers).

And here’s the rub: the content that performs best on X is the lowest-effort content I make.

The system rewards velocity. Posting first beats posting well. Quantity beats quality. On X, the incentive structure is simple: farm engagement for money. And the most reliable way to farm engagement is to slop post frequently, which means spending less time on each post.

I try to resist that pull. I still make and share original videos, memes, and tweets (which is more effort than most on X), but as most posters will tell you, the more effort you put into a post, the less likely it will end up getting engagement. People like quick, easy, identifiable chuckles. You, yes, you have a short attention span, and you reward low effort work. I'll be shocked if you've even read this far into the blog.

Here, I'll scratch that attention span itch with a GIF of Professor Jimbo and Gladys O'Flannery behaving frisky with one another (the horror).

Thanks, Grok!

So, while I silently bitch and moan when I see the same recycled memes or rage bait posted over and over again, I also understand why it happens. The system rewards repetitive slop.

Hey, whatever works.

So where, exactly, is the incentive to make feature-length documentaries that YouTube suppresses? Or to write 5,000-word essays nobody reads? You tell me, my dear reader.

I'll put this in more direct terms - you are getting what you pay for.

AI has accelerated this issue. We’ve scrolled, liked, and retweeted ourselves into an ecosystem where effort has become an actual liability. I don’t have any answers for this problem. We're kinda fucked!

Well, I do have one answer, but it sucks too.

If we want creators to make work that algorithms don’t reward, then audiences have to support that work directly. There is no other mechanism. Decentralized funding isn’t preferred, but it's necessary. Support the creators you value. Share their work. Fund the things you want to exist and incentivize creators to invest their time into a high-quality end product.

Best-case scenario is that those creators grow large enough to be platform or self-funded later. Worst-case scenario, you pay for something you enjoy and help keep us off the path of cultural decay.

Which brings me to some good news.

I've been talking to Professor Jimbo, and he says he is motivated to start making videos again. Even better news - we have already finished a draft of a script on a famous war from American History. Jimbo may still change his mind (it's happened before), but we’re exploring ways for people who enjoy our history video to help us make that effort sustainable.

So, yeah, you can expect some new Professor Jimbo video in 2026.

Not just one video. Several videos that we will try to monetize.

I'm not sure what monetization will look like yet, but I think some type of subscription system with early access and other perks makes sense. If you have ideas on how we should do it, I’d genuinely like to hear them. Send me a DM, or just shoot me a reply on X (IT WILL HELP BOOST MY ENGAGEMENT!)

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog and the 2025 Milkers of the Year Awards published last week. While I don’t plan on blogging as relentlessly as I did in years past, I do hope to write more than I have this year. If for no other reason than to make sure I don’t forget how to do it when I have to write this shit again in 2027.

I continue to appreciate your support for whatever Flappr is these days.

Thanks, I love you. God Bless America.