There’s more than one way to do this thing.
Look, I know you probably stumbled on this site because some search engine plopped you over here or you read the little clip about high performance blogging on a social media feed, but writing for the wrong reasons is not my jam.
I’ve spent too many years trying to find a community of like-minded writers who use blogging as their medium.
Who are those people?
Are you looking to optimize your search engine ranking so that you can serve targeted ads and increase your revenue so that you can pursue positive cash flow via your website? Um. You’re probably in the wrong place.
Are you curious about a form of writing that is a self-publishing platform for personal expression that is not controlled by some corporate social media algorithm, where we work towards building curated collections of niche content for the love of simply doing it? Yeah, this is probably your stop.
And I realize that ninety-eight percent of you just clicked away.
I’ve been online for over a quarter of a century and it’s taken me almost that long to realize and embrace the notion that I’m nothing short of a techno-idealist. I hate that the thru line of this incredible communications tool we created as a species has become the pursuit of wealth at any cost, damn the truth, damn reality, damn the harm it is doing. I hate that.
When I started writing online I had no delusions of making any money. It was a passion project. I wrote online for the sheer joy of expression and sharing ideas. Sure, I have put ads up on my site on occasion, but always in the hope of turning my sites into self-watering flowers, not content engines making me money.
Is that privilege? Damn right it is. And so what? We use that excuse too much in this capital-focused society. Anyone who does something for a reason besides profit is sneered at for having the time or inclination of going against the money grub.
Why do you blog?
If you’ve made it this far maybe it is because you are doing it for some other reason than milking ad revenue from your words, and if that is the case I not only applaud you but suggest you mark this topic where I hope I’ll write a bit more about my experience in writing against the grain and share a bit of the lore of what makes blogging so much bigger than just farming for clickthroughs.
Terms FROm this POSt
- algorithm
- The modern internet in all its forms is far too large for people to fully manage anymore without the help of automated systems. Any time an unseen calculation weighing our public profiles against what an app, website, or service chooses to show us, one of these automated systems is at work behind the scenes recommending product, ideas, politics, and friends. The invisible hand of fate has turned into a digital calculation so big we can’t understand it, and so complex it is often hauntingly accurate. If you are not afraid of the algorithm and what it has done to our society, you are probably not paying enough attention.
- blog
- I admit, I am pretty old. And I started posting formatted words and photos online before the word blog had even entered the common lexicon. Most people work in the medium of social platforms these days, but being both a product of my time and a stickler for content ownership and control, I still lean into and promote the idea that a personal content managed general purpose website is the beating heart of the internet I once knew and loved. I use blogging software, but I don’t think of these sites like blogs, more like living documents that happen to look an awful lot like blogs.
- community
- It comes in many forms, but I like to think of community as something deeper than just social connection: in the artistic sense, those people are around you to support, inspire, and honestly critique.
- corporate
- Having worked in many desk jobs, I tend to think of the corporate mindset and anything related to it as a kind of collective brain of capitalism and the search for profit. It is a core piece of the culture, but personally I’ve found it to be the antithesis of creative spirit, and often use the word as a pejorative in this sense.
- social media
- You almost certainly found this post because it was posted on someone’s feed. The platforms are terrible, but as it stands they are about the only way to find an audience in this crazy version of the internet. I avoid the socials when I can, but to ignore their existence is to toil forever in obscurity.
