Friday, October 05, 2018

Anyone Miss Blogging?

This feels quaint.

I slowly stopped blogging a few years ago. I got tired of keeping up with it. I have always loved writing the posts and reading comments from people who read them, but at the time there was a lot of advice about blogging and a lot of people making money from blogging and if you weren't doing that it felt like a waste of time and all the advice I got about  blogging effectively made me hate it.

The advice was to post all the time, set yourself up as an expert in a niche, and monetize. I always had things to write about and wanted to talk about with other people and I wanted to have a good blog. So you start asking yourself, if it's worth saying then isn't it worth making it searchable and having a hi-res photo and promoting it on all your social media platforms? (Whew. That's a lot of work for a post about an ugly cat that made me dry heave.) It got to the point where you had to know how to code and do A/B testing and understand design to even keep up. Listen, guys. I don't know how to do anything and I have zero marketable skills. That's why I'm blogging.

How about you? I don't really read blogs anymore. I think a lot of people don't. Why click on a whole blog post when you can just look at a picture or read a tweet? I love Instagram and Twitter. It's fun there. Likes and retweets feel nice. You can tell a little bit about someone in a tweet or a photo or a caption and that's usually enough to kill some time. But we used to have pretty good actual discussions via comments on blogs and I met some of my best friends and favorite people this way. I've been missing it lately.

Maybe it's because I feel a profound and aggressive rejection of my values in the political sphere every day now. It's horrifying. It makes me feel lonely.

I think that's how blogging started for a lot of us who were home with kids and wanted to connect. Social media still serves that purpose, but the new things people are getting into—vlogging and posting videos to your story that people can watch and respond to—isn't my thing. Friend, if I were camera-ready I'd be out of the house actually doing something.

Posting videos of yourself defeats the whole purpose of online friendship for me. I'm also realizing that I care more about words than images. Words are more interesting to me. I want to hear more words from you. I want to stalk your blog and find out every detail of your life—not just how you look in all of your pictures, but what you think, what you hate, and how things are going. I guess I'm really nosy? Is longing for more than 140 [280] characters from someone considered nosy? I'd actually like to have really in-depth conversations with people I find interesting more regularly. I should make that happen more often. It's surprising, though, how long it takes to get into an interesting and meaningful conversation and how rarely it happens in real life. That remains the goal. Blogs are actually great for that: Bear your soul to me online and we can play it cool when we meet.

First-generation mommy bloggers are part of a bygone era, I know. Still, I miss my peeps. I took like-minded, friendly, smart, thoughtful, measured, interesting, competent people for granted. It feels like there's an abundance of the opposite kind of people everywhere now. They've taken the White House. Congress, too, has been infiltrated. The Supreme Court isn't even the paragon of independence and virtue we once thought it was.

They can't touch me here though! Actually, they can. If I don't post every now and then the Russian bots take over my comments. I hate them, by the way. 

17 comments:

  1. First!

    (Remember those idiots?)

    I agree with this 100%. Except I'm so hopeless and tired with all the nonsense that my words seldom come. I'd try again for you, though.

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    1. That's the spirit! You are one of the best gifts I got from blogging, by the way.

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  2. Yours is the only blog I still check. Have you read DEAR GENIUS? It seems like something you would enjoy.

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    1. Thanks for checking, Sarah! That inspires me to write more. I haven't read it but I will.

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  3. It made me happy to see this post pop up in my feed. I also have been missing the old blogging days.
    I'm sad that I don't know the details of your life anymore, long lost blog friend!

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    1. That's so fun that I can still pop up in your feed! Thanks for reading and for leaving an OG comment.

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  4. Yes! Let’s blog and leave the rest behind us! I want Google Reader back though...

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  5. I guess I didn't realize the hole blogs left - this past week I've been imagining some combination of an elks lodge, a motorcycle club, and encircle for local like-minded women. I could use the solidarity. Of course, if we just went back to blogging, I could get that solidarity without having to put on pants.

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  6. Seymour Chase, Hi! I miss you. Agree.

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  7. I culled my feed years ago and the sub to yours was one I left there...in case. Oh, the pay-off. Blogs. *sigh* I'm still posting, because I'm still being set books to review from five publishing houses. Please don't tell them no one reads blogs anymore. :| Also: I'm all the way down in New Zealand and I'm *still* seriously affected by everything going on in the U.S. right now. I was in a serious funk all last week. I mean, to the point that anything he said was offensive to me. e.g. Him: "Hey hon, I think I'll go mow the lawn" Me: "Typical. You pick a job you consider manly and offer to do it like it's generous to do one job and you're hoping this fills your quota so I won't enlist you in other domestic duties. You're the worst. Pure evil." Him: "Hon? You okay? You sort of spaced out." He was offering to help. He seriously could do no right.

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    1. Wow, Angela. It's great to hear your perspective from New Zealand. I wondered if everyone else was horrified. (They should be.) Thanks for keeping me around and for reading this.

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  8. Well, well, well. If fasting from FB, Instagram and Twitter leads you to start blogging again - hooray!!! I miss reading blogs a whole bunch. I read Light Refreshments Served and Modern Mormon Men, Cjane and Nie, Dooce, Fat Cyclist, all the post tragedy blogs and family blogs. I clicked around every single morning after my kids left for school, reading for a good hour or so before beginning my day. I felt like I knew you and all the others and way too many conversations started out with "I read on a blog...". Strange how it all changed. Glad I clicked on you today.

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    1. Those were the days, Wendy! That's what I did in the morning, too. Thanks for clicking on me. Blogs hardly even feel like "social media" do they?

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  9. Anonymous4:33 AM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  10. I think this is why I stopped, too. Rules were created and I thought I had to follow them or else.....but that killed what was so great about blogging to begin with. There were no rules. It was your own creative space to freely make and sometimes people enjoyed it with you. I miss writing too. Liz (I used to write at backwards attraction)

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    1. The good old days. Thank you for reading this!

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