Second Thoughts: Five Takes From the ChrisJM Archive I've Quietly Retired

There's a particular feeling you get when you open an old post and find a sentence you were once terribly pleased with. It starts as nostalgia and ends as a wince. I've been doing a lot of that lately — partly for housekeeping, partly because a reader emailed to ask why I'd changed my mind about something I'd been quite rude about back in 2023. Fair question, honestly.

So this is the reckoning. Five strong opinions from the site's back catalogue that I've since decided were wrong, half-wrong, or right for the wrong reasons. Not a confession, more of a service history.

1. That you have to publish constantly or vanish

For the first year or so, I posted four times a week and treated it as a moral obligation. There's a post from early 2023 in which I genuinely claim that consistency beats quality — that showing up matters more than what you bring. I still think consistency matters. I no longer think it means volume.

What actually happened was that I got tired, and tired writing reads like tired writing. Pieces got shorter and safer. I was producing more and saying less, and I suspect you could tell. These days it's twice a week with a newsletter on Fridays, and the gaps are doing more work than the extra posts ever did. A reader would rather have one piece worth their coffee break than four they skim.

2. That social media was the engine of the whole thing

I spent an unflattering amount of time on X in 2023 chasing reach, and I wrote a fairly pompous post about how you're invisible without it. That post has aged badly.

What I've found since is that the things which actually bring people here, in order, are: search, the newsletter, other people's links, and a slow trickle from Reddit threads where someone has asked a specific question. Social is a nice place to chat and a terrible place to build anything you own. Platforms fall over, rules change, accounts get locked — and if all your readers live somewhere you don't control, you're one bad afternoon away from starting again.

I still use the accounts. I just stopped treating them as the plan.

3. That search optimisation was a con

I called SEO 'writing for robots' on this very site, and I meant it. What I was really objecting to was the SEO advice I kept running into: keyword-stuffed intros, headings written for crawlers, pages that answered nothing because answering would end the pageview.

My view now is less dramatic and more useful: search optimisation is mostly just answering a question clearly in the order a person would ask it. Use the words people use. Put the answer near the top. Give your headings a real job. Write an honest description. Add alt text. None of that is a trick, and none of it hurts the writing — it's the same discipline as being easy to talk to.

The one thing I'd still push back on is the industry that sells panic. Most small sites don't need an audit; they need a clearer opening paragraph.

4. That entertainment meant telly, and only telly

When I started, 'entertainment' was a narrow word for me: shows, finales, casting news, the occasional rant about a scheduling decision. If it wasn't on a screen, it wasn't the site.

What changed my mind was a piece I wrote almost by accident about a comedy night above a pub in Leeds, and the number of people who replied to say they'd never heard of it. Since then the definition has loosened considerably — games, books, hobbies people take far too seriously, the strange things we do on a wet bank holiday. Entertainment isn't a genre. It's whatever holds your attention without being asked twice. Narrowing it to one medium was like refusing to eat anything that wasn't toast.

The site is still mostly telly. But the door's open now, and the better pieces tend to walk through it.

5. That the goal was a bigger audience

This one is the most uncomfortable to write down. I spent a long time looking at numbers — monthly visitors, followers, open rates — and quietly measuring myself against people with teams and ad budgets.

I don't want that anymore. I want enough readers to keep the conversation interesting: the people who reply to the newsletter, the ones who email about a recommendation, the couple of collaborators I've ended up working with because they read something here. A thousand people who'd notice if you stopped is a better position than a hundred thousand who wouldn't. It's also far less exhausting, and it leaves room for the posts that don't perform — which are usually the ones I like most.

What I'd still defend

For balance: I still think you should write it yourself rather than letting a machine do the first draft, and I still think telling people what you actually thought is more useful than hedging until you've said nothing. Opinions age badly. Silence ages worse.

If you're running your own thing, expect a few of these reckonings in your future. The trick isn't to avoid changing your mind — it's to leave a trail so people can see where you turned off. That's most of what a personal site is for, really.