# blogging: people should blog

i guess almost all bloggers write a meta post about blogging where they either explain why they blog or why others should be blogging. well, better not to stick out of the crowd.

sometimes a thought or idea gets into my mind and unless i talk or write about it, it keeps pestering me. writing about my thoughts really helps me organize them a little bit. it calms my mind. having them outside my brain means that i do not need to worry about losing a thought so i can calmly forget about it. it is important to have an audience though. without it i would not be motivated to keep the sentences even remotely coherent. it forces me to think really hard on how to express some of these pesky thoughts in somewhat sane way. but often i do not really have an audience. or even if i did have one the thought is so long that it would be rude to send someone an unsolicited wall of text. so i thought i write to an imaginary audience, in a somewhat secret place on the internet that nobody reads. the possibility that someone will read this forces me to write in a somewhat clear way.

most of the stuff i write is just crappy ideas or silly thoughts. better out than in as the saying goes, no need to take my writing seriously. i do not think that on my deathbed i will be agonizing over the fact that i was stupid on the internet. more likely scenario is that i did not dump everything from my brain, i still feel like there is some unfinished business i have to do. dumping everything here helps me achieve my little nirvana sooner. now all i need to do is to gather the courage and start writing. i have more than enough silliness to write about, i just get overly anxious what my non-existent audience will think of me. not forcing myself to reserve time for this is not helping either.

so that is about me. why should others blog? i do not follow many blogs but i would be super interested in reading blogs of some of the people around me i personally know. i am very reluctant to initiate towards people but i could learn more about the person through their words. i could learn how they think, what do they think about the world, what do they do in general and so on. i will see a personality behind the face. i am not interested in reshares or likes though. that is very low quality signal about the person. i really wish for short article format, not twitter sized thought bites. if people want to point to an article, i would much prefer if they would rewrite articles in their own words rather than linking to an existing article saying "hey follower, read this". there are a lot of rotten links on the internet so such posts consisting only of a link would be worthless after a while. the blogger's personality will flow into the rewrite so even if something is not an original idea, i will still see the issue from the blogger's point of view. it also demonstrates that the blogger actually read the article not just blindly resharing something they have seen on the internet.

i also prefer if bloggers did not have any tracking, commenting or other popularity counting widgets on their blog. this is why it is better to run one's own blog rather than relying on shared services like facebook and whatnot where one cannot even turn off these features. the problem is that if the blog starts to get popular the blogger will start to care about popularity. they will be more likely to write posts that get the most attention rather than what they actually think. they will either moderate themselves, become less radical, more mainstream, more boring or they will swing into the opposite direction where they will get super radical and all their posts will be about outrage. if one does not have any analytics at all, they are less likely to fall into this trap.

a comment about publicly visible comments: it is very easy to get demotivated or get argumentative when posting very controversial or unpopular thoughts and then reading the comments. i think it is easier to open up if one does not need to spend rest of their energy on arguing with others after posting something personal. if a post generates significant response then i would rather see a followup post summarizing the private response than wade through all the comments. this really helps to keep the content of the blog linear. it should be possible to read a blog just like a book. i think it is best to keep discussions on sites that are specialized for this and as such have moderation and other means of maintaining civility.

published on 2019-01-23

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