Our Niche

From the beginning of our blogging journey, one question that has plagued us is, “What’s your niche?” For those not terribly familiar with the world of blogging, it is divided up into niches. There’s tons of lifestyle blogs, dating blogs, sports blog, parenting blogs, and a shocking number of blogging blogs. It goes on and on. We’ve been resistant to adding a label to ours. Part of that is we both have diverse interests and don’t want to pick just one of them. Another part is that we agree that good writing is good writing, whatever topic it happens to be about. We try hard to produce good writing and hope people enjoy it.

The niche questions keeps coming up, though. It’s more persistent than SEO. We get it. People are more likely to visit if they have some idea what they’re going to find. Good writing is vague. As we’ve been talking about it, Gene noticed that there is a theme to our writing. We have a certain contrariness about us. The way he put it is, we frequently disagree with and point out issues with the people that we generally agree with. That’s a little confusing, but it means that we are liberals who find the political left maddening. We’re anti-racists who think that way too many fellow anti-racists are counterproductive. Jamil is a gamer who worries about the sexism and bullying in the gaming world. We’re both geeks who love Star Trek, but think they got Discovery and Picard wrong. The same patterns are there in all of our takes.

The thing is, we’re not contrary just to be contrary. We do it because we want to make the world better, but we’re pragmatic rather than idealists. Jamil realized that we’re Cynics in the classical sense. We push against conventional wisdom and social norms in the hopes of improving them. We’re not Socratic in many ways, but we want to be like his gadfly. So, that’s our niche, classical Cynicism. People should come to us when they want a different take. When they want to refine their ideas. When they want a sparring partner. We know many people are perfectly comfortable in their bubbles. We want to get to know all the rest. We don’t need to agree. Think of how much fun a community where we challenge each other could be.