State of the Website Address 2021

How many more times can I retire from writing?

It seems like no matter how many times I quit I just keep coming back to write for this damn rant site blog. With this most recent “retirement” I’ve officially retired from writing more times than Brett Favre has retired from playing football.

What keeps bringing me back?

It’s certainly not the fame. I’d call my site stats a joke, but usually jokes are funny and my stats are just sad.

It’s not the anger. Since 2007 I’ve gone from “Angry_Jerk” to “Mildly_Annoyed_Jerk”.

The fabulous moolah? Nah, she’s been dead for about 14 years now.

Maybe it’s the passion? Ha, good one. Tell that to every project I’ve started and abandoned since this site’s conception.

In all honesty, I have no idea what keeps bringing me back to write for this turd of a website. Trying to quit writing for this site is like trying to quit heroin. I can quit for months or even years, but eventually I get “the itch” and come back with grand plans to modernize the site and create all kinds of amazing content. Sometimes I even go so far as to create that content, but it usually comes out half-hearted and not-so-amazing.

I could spend another paragraph or two bitching about how the internet isn’t the same as it was 14 years ago when I started this site, how most content creators are obnoxious douchebags, and how the internet has become so saturated with half-assed content that it’s next to impossible to get noticed unless you have connections. I could talk about how it’s everyone else’s fault that my podcast flopped and my YouTube videos sucked shit.

But I won’t, because I’ve done that to death.

 

What can we expect from the site in 2021?

This year, I’m going to focus on what once made this site good: Writing.

Videos and podcasts aren’t my forte. I have the charisma and appearance of a potato, and my voice sounds like cancer. The podcast isn’t coming back any time soon. The YouTube channel may only come back to preserve clips from old streams, or to hold any short videos used in articles.

I spent too much time attempting to modernize my content through other forms of media, when I should have spent more time honing my writing. Making videos and podcasts could be fun at times, but very often I found myself annoyed and frustrated. Between the tedious editing process, trying to stay energetic and engaging, and making the time to record, I quickly lost my passion. Not only for making videos and podcasts, but for writing articles. This frustration only increased as I realized nobody was going to watch my videos or listen to my podcasts, no matter how much effort I put into them.

 

Social media is a shit-show.

Trying to promote myself and the site on Twitter was also a waste of time. Twitter is full of some of the craziest people I’ve never met and hope I never meet. Everyone on Twitter is either a hardcore SJW pundit trying to silence anyone with an opinion even slightly right of center, or they’re a hardcore conservative going out of their way to pick pointless fights with the SJWs. The few people that aren’t political lunatics are streamers or other content creators looking to promote themselves with the “Follow/Unfollow” method.

Trying to build any kind of audience on Twitter is an exercise in futility, and to be honest I don’t think I’d want any of those weirdos as an audience. As such, AJnet will no longer have a social media presence. Bookmark the site or subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to know when a new article has been posted.

 

What are AJnet’s goals for 2021?

This year I’m keeping my goals for the site simple:

  • Write more articles.
  • Clean up all the title cards and older articles.

That’s it, those are my only goals for 2021.

I’d love to also build a small community in the comments section, but it’s not something I’m too concerned about right now. If you want to help all you need to do is comment on articles. I use Disqus, click the link and sign up. Many other sites also use Disqus, so if you sign up you can also use the same alias to comment somewhere else.

The site’s content will also be modernized. Notice how I’m using subheadings in this article? I want the site to be easy to read. Walls of text apparently scare people off nowadays.

 

The Takeaway

For 2021 readers can expect a return to this site’s original purpose: Social commentary written by some jerk. I don’t foresee a full return to this site’s glory days, but I’m just going to keep writing anyway and see what happens.

By Angry_Jerk

The CEO/Editor-in-chief of AJnet, and the current king of internet ranting. Hailing from the fine village of Northeast Philadelphia, AJ has been creating content on the internet for over 15 years. None of it has really been funny or entertaining, but he keeps trying anyway. When he’s not creating new articles for the site, he can be found hitting the weights, watching anime, or playing retro video games.