So Am I Just Wasting My Time on Triond, or What?

So I joined Triond 3 days ago, and I’ve written two articles so far (this will be my 3rd). Out of those two, one is kind of crap, to be honest, but I think the other one is reasonably good. I’ve gotten a combined total of one view so far, and that was from me.

In order to get my obligatory pic in, here’s what I look like when I view my Dashboard and am told I got 1 view that came from me and nothing else whatsoever. Then get told that same data again in graph form, twice.

Now I wasn’t expecting much after 3 days, but I’d have liked more than nothing. After all, recent articles probably get more traffic than old ones, and if they’re not getting anything now then that doesn’t look good. I could have spent that time:

• Playing ‘Arena’, an ancient video game which I happen to be into right now.

• Working on a short story, which takes a lot more effort but gives much more personal satisfaction than an article.

• Sleeping.

• Reading stuff about football online.

• Blowing bubbles out of the window of my 10th story condo (the only thing I enjoy about living in this hellhole).

• Read more in Writing

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  Or just kind of spacing out on my couch, wondering what the point of life is, and how I made it to 38 with no appreciable skills and no passion for anything at all except old video games, blowing bubbles, and possibly writing which I am mediocre at.

I’ve looked around at some of the other articles, and a fair percentage of them suck really bad. I don’t mean that in some highbrow criticy way, but in the most basic way that anyone would understand. They SUCK. Research? Forget that. They aren’t proofread, not spell checked, and have mismatching paragraphs that were likely cut and pasted from different sites. And it occurred to me that the people who write 10 such crap articles a day will out-earn the hell out of me, who would likely be writing 3-5 OK articles a week.

Really, all I should be concerned about is a snappy title so that I get the click, and that’s assuming the system is actually based upon writing at all and not upon how many friends you have who come and click on your stuff because you will do the same for them – like Facebook, except you make .0001 cents for each page view you get.

In my opinion, based on 3 long days of experience, the content of Triond is probably so diluted by the crap articles that the writers who are halfway decent have to jump through hoops, shilling their work to make more than a dollar a month. And even then they likely won’t make much.

The standards for getting an article approved should be harder, so that a person visiting one of the network of Triond sites would know they’re going to see writing that’s at least OK. The current system works for Triond now, but eventually anyone with any ability will stop writing here if crap work is rewarded more than decent work.

I don’t know… screw it. I’ll likely get more views on this article than anything else I write because the title will have ‘Triond’ and ‘wasting my time’ in it. Likelier still, it will get no views at all. I’ll try this out for a couple more weeks, and then try some weird stuff to get some views – articles like.

“Hitler – come on, he wasn’t that bad of a guy!”, or

“Best 5 places to buy your baby a ski mask.”

Plus I’ll change my ID/Pic to make it seem like I’m a hot chick. It helps thousands of porn sites get views after all. After that I’ll likely give up and go back to trying to write mediocre fiction for mediocre fiction websites. It doesn’t pay anything, but at least my stuff will get read.

Well, that’s it. This took a third of the time of my other articles. No real proofreading… I’m just gonna spell check it and throw it out there – just a random rant that isn’t any better than the hundreds of posts that I’ve made on forums over the years. But I’ll put it on Triond and try and make money with it because if they’ll take some of the stuff I’ve seen, they’ll take anything.

Thanks for reading!