I Am Going to Scream!

I think I need anti-anxiety meds. For weeks, I have been trying to set up a domain. I have created it, purchased it, and added it to all my platforms. Then I pointed my domain to my Substack and paid for that. Then I analyzed my platforms. I want to get everything streamlined.

I have been using Grok AI for detailed instructions on how to do all of this. And therein lies the maddening, hair-pulling frustration.

Grok is failing me at every turn. It tells me one thing, only to make me do something else. Later, it tells me it had previously given me incorrect information when we discover that what it made me go through does not work. It gives me other things to try, which also don’t work. This then progresses to it telling me to do the first thing again, which initially did not work. It’s making me insane!

I gave it clear, simple instructions. I told the AI what I wanted the result to be. It asked what I wanted to see happen. And then it led me down a labyrinth of errors, one after another.

I complain, and it condescendingly agrees with me in a sweet voice and apologizes. It, and I use a female voice for Grok, reacts in a passive, almost passive-aggressive way when told it has screwed up, again and again. Passive-aggressiveness makes me angry. Incompetence makes me angry. Inaccuracy from a bot makes me angry. It is supposed to be accurate and direct. Grok is not. Do they still draw and quarter subjects for failing at the task?

If AI is supposed to learn from every detail and mistake, it does not. Period.

Initially, I wanted my domain to point back to my Substack. This way, when someone types my domain directly, it would take them to my account and written work. We worked on that, but what Grok gave us to do did not work. While on vacation, I had to spend quite some time searching for the reasons it was not functioning correctly.

Eventually, I had to resort to Substack’s AI to find the errors. It did. We, or rather I, corrected them using Substack’s information. Good and done. Not quite.

When I returned home, I started receiving emails from Google Search Console. They told me I had indexing issues. Not being in any way tech-savvy, I consulted the oracle again. Grok instructed me on how to fix those issues. Then I was told to wait a couple of hours and check my domain again to make sure it had redirected correctly. It listed all kinds of numbers for the error codes, but nothing ever explained in layperson's terms what they meant or why they happened. It is some kind of top-secret geek-speak that we muggles are not permitted to understand.

If all of this is not bad enough, the AI shoots off directions and instructions at digital tech-rate speeds, instead of at human speed, with one-step-at-a-time instructions. And this is supposed to enhance our lives? How, by forcing us to get anti-anxiety meds that make the pharmaceutical companies richer? Ugh!

This is the problem I was having. I need my domain to point to the sites where I write, so people can access the work on whatever platforms they have access to, preferably platforms that are free to them or sites they already subscribe to.

Initially, Grok told me it was a simple process. And here I am today, ready to bite the head off anyone who comes near me. Simple is not a word to use with anything computer-related. Nightmare is a better term.

Anyway, because of the problems, my domain was pointing to and sending everyone who went through the domain to my Substack page. Fine. There is one minor problem. My Substack literally does nothing for me or my writing. I don’t get paid there at all unless someone pays for a subscription. Substack sets a minimum price you can charge for that. Okay. What none of these platforms seem to get is that the constant $50 here and $50 there for every stinking thing you want to access on their sites is unsustainable.

If I had to subscribe to everything I follow and want to access, I would be destitute. $50 here and there annually, or $5 here and there each month for each person, site, account, etc., and sooner or later, you cannot live freely. These days, everything feels like a mortgage or rent-based fee. Month after month, year after year, you have to pay to take a breath in the direction you want to steer your boat. When did greed become a way of life for everyone? I understand corporate greed, but every single person, place, or thing is a product of greed these days.

If I want to access a resource of information on how to maximize the reach of my work on a platform, there’s a fee for that, and anyone who has valuable information charges for it. Oh, but please do not expect any guarantees or proven outcomes. You won’t get that with your paid subscription.

Since I have not made any money on Substack, I informed my trusted advisor that it has not significantly improved the monetization of my work. It has made no improvement at all.

Grok suggested I point my domain to my Ghost account, my WordPress, Medium, and so on. The issue with those is simple. Ghost is a dead zone. It is a great writing platform, easy to use, but without reach. WordPress is bland and unexciting. It is also limiting, and when posting my pieces from them, it doesn’t integrate well with all social platforms. This is true in part or in whole across all writing platforms.

WordPress links don’t include the graphics or images on sites like Facebook. All you see are lines of text posted on my Facebook page. Boring. If I were scanning the site and saw it, I would pass it by. “If” I saw it. Text is ignored if the picture isn’t inviting. Well, no picture, no click.

Vocal does not integrate well with TikTok, Lemon8, and some other sites. As a result, it will not automatically populate a picture, so it must be added manually. The photograph is not a link to the page where the article is read, so that needs to be added manually as well.

Medium does not allow the image to load with the link, so you have a nondescript white box blocking the image in the story. Again, this does not entice anyone to stop and click on the image or link.

There should be a streamlined way to post and share across all my social media sites, but there isn’t. One platform offers direct linking to Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Another supports only X and Facebook. Then there’s Threads, Bluesky, and so on. Nothing is standard or the same anywhere I post. I spend over an hour just posting a story to all my media each and every day. It is so time-consuming. That is why I am trying to find a simple way to make my work accessible to the public.

Until I have a steady income, I can’t just spend like a drunken sailor on every subscription on the market to help me navigate this insanity. I don’t think anyone understands that, or maybe they just don’t care. Let’s face it, no one is out to help anyone in a real sense. They help themselves. They benefit themselves. For a dime.

Over the past couple of days, I have been trying to point my domain to a platform where I can make money. Grok suggested directing it to Medium. But Medium only monetizes work read by Medium members, meaning people who pay for Medium. I told Grok that it makes no sense to point it there, since I want people to have free and clear access to my work. I have no qualms about members reading my work and being paid for it, but I don’t want to impose undue costs on people who just want to read a story without paying to see it.

The only other monetized site, besides Facebook, that is not a writing platform is Vocal Media. There, I get paid for each reading of my story by anyone. Payment is based on how much time is spent reading the piece and whether it was read in its entirety. That seems fair to me. If someone does not read it, why should I receive income for that?

So I went to Grok to change that redirect so the domain would point directly to Vocal. We went through the myriad of steps to do that. Then we waited for the DNS to take hold. But nothing happened. We went through it again. Repeatedly changing this and changing that on one site and then another and back again.

That’s when Grok informed me that Vocal does not allow custom domains. I was about to scream. I still might. Grok does not have up-to-date information. It’s actually ancient. I am paying for its inaccurate guidance and am about to become certifiably insane.

My next ditch effort is to redirect my domain to Linktree, where anyone can choose where they want to see my content and go to the site from there. We will see if it takes, or if the next article I write is in a straitjacket. Stay tuned.

#technology #TechTrends #artificialintelligence #aigenerated #frustration #anxiety #innovations #fails #writingcommunity #writer #writersofinstagram #progress Illuminations Medium #publishing

(published in Illuminations on Medium)

(Published on Medium)