Paragraph reminds me of the early 2000s blogs. There’s not much noise over here. People write their posts themselves, on the topics they care about. That’s at least my impression so far. And it is beautiful! I like it more than Medium and Substack combined.

I had specific reasons to go onchain, though.

I have been (ghost)writing books that sell and articles that convert for a decade. That’s what I do and what people pay me for. I know how to optimize content to make crawlers love it and people want to read it. At the same time, I deliberately choose not to optimize some of my thought pieces. The result is that some of my best writing remained undiscovered. I had hoped to connect with an audience that shared the same interests as me, but I couldn’t find such an audience in the Web2 jungle.

I felt I needed a new realm on the internet, and I knew that such a realm existed. I spent an afternoon trying to find the best Web3 platform for writers, and I instantly fell in love with Paragraph.

The way monetization is handled onchain seems amazing too, but it is too early for me to write about that.

Let me introduce myself instead.

I am Valentina, and I am a classic literature scholar. Yet I don’t work in academia but in the free market. I do all things language- and content-related. I read, review, write, edit, and proofread content, and teach AI to do the same. I don’t feel threatened by AI, but that’s a topic for a separate post.

Privately, I am a Christian, wife, and mom to two teenagers. I have a cat as an assistant, always on my desk when I least need her there.

This publication is titled Philologist for three reasons.

Philia and logos are ancient Greek words meaning love and word, and philology is literally the love for the Word. I love words, especially the word logos and everything that it means: word, reason, meaning, order, and Logos from John 1:1.

The second reason is that philologist is a part of my academic title: MA philologist of general literature and literary theory. Philologist is also the name of my freelance business, which is the third reason why my publication is titled like this.

This might be enough for my first post here. I have only just created my account, and I am going to spend some time reading recommended posts. If you have great Paragraph authors to recommend, please do so! Same if you think we have something in common - I’d love to read your posts.