why i love my low-traffic blog
So, I read this post yesterday from sameoldstory basically asking this question:
What is the point of having a low-traffic blog?
I was originally going to write an email to them specifically, but decided why not make a post about it?
I understand their sentiment. Why blog if it's not gonna be seen by a ton of people? If you don't care who sees it, why not just journal? It was the question I asked myself the first time I started doing this almost a year ago.
When I first started blogging, I was in the first stages of shifting to the indie/alt web. I was tired of the black box algorithms, the addictive nature of social media and technology design.
Why don't I post on social media? Their point of posts being seen by hundreds of thousands of eyes is one of the main reasons I don't want to be on social media. When you are visible to THAT many people, you're bound to get some feedback and some toxic feedback at that. People who haven't had a human interaction for probably a week now pushing that problem onto you. I don't want a bunch of people (much of whom might not even be real people) passively engaging with my works. It's too easy to leave a hate comment and walk away in a second. I like blogging because if people want to reach out, they TRULY want to contact you, and you know almost for certain it's a real person.
Because of my low-traffic blog, I've been able to foster a community that I never could have with social media. Social media tends to lead to parasocial relationships, not real ones. I've made real friends because of my blog, this is something that I was never able to with social media.
Social media also doesn't facilitate nuanced or really any thoughtful interactions and posts. Sure you can write a giant ass wall of text underneath your Instagram post, but nobody is going to read that. They'll see the picture, like it, and move on. We live in an age of 6 second attention spans, and social media revolves around that.
When people like my blog, it's because they've made it to the end of the page. When people email me, it's because they've been somehow positively impacted by what I wrote, so much so they opened up a separate tab or window just to reach out. That means a hell of a lot more to me than comments. That's a REAL thoughtful interaction.
It's a quality over quantity approach. I've had more quality interactions thanks to blogging than I ever did with social media. Yeah, it's not as big, but that's what I like about it. The smallness of it. The more close-knit community on this platform. We all know who the popular bloggers are on here, and we can reach out to them usually, and they will likely respond. You can email the guy who made this website, and he will likely respond. There isn't this aura of untouchableness on Bear. It's real people talking to other real people.
I journal, but that's more for my own mundane purposes. Maybe I'll make an "Absurd Pirate's Mundane Blog" that just talks about my boring life rather than trying to "say" something like I do here. Slice of life stuff and all that, but then again that's mostly what I use my microblog for. Sorry, I'm rambling.
I love my blog because it's me, from start to finish. It's my CSS, it's the template I chose, the links link to my other stuff, the art is from my friends. It's a culmination of myself, and unique to me. Social media only gives you a profile picture, a bio, and if you're lucky a banner. It doesn't let you truly express yourself really.
The tl;dr of it all: I love my low-traffic blog because interactions feel more real and I can fully embrace my creative side in it's design
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Reply via email: me@absurdpirate.com
as of writing this...
I just woke up, I took today off because I've been having a really rough day yesterday mentally and need a mental health break. Been kinda struggling dealing with this masquerade with work, and all the time it takes away from me. I hate the meetings that seemingly spend half the time trying to justify their own existence for the sake of having them. I'm tired of these out-of-touch boomers at the top and the nepo-babies dictating where I do my work. It's obvious they care more about control than they do the well-being of the people that work there. When I was dealing with the trauma of escaping that shooting, my options were "get over it" or take unpaid leave (functionally removing any income from my house). My medical marijuana card came in clutch for that... This is America and all that.