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Surely the biggest problem that most bloggers have is that no one reads what they write. Doesn't this make it worse?
by kwhitefoot 2y ago
Surely the biggest problem that most bloggers have is that no one reads what they write. Doesn't this make it worse?
- xandrius 2y agoI guess the situation is so bad that a gimmick like this might actually help.
- Kwpolska 2y agoI have a lot of feeds in my reader, but I don't add feeds without first seeing the content on the Web. This gimmick is nothing special to me. For someone who doesn't use feeds, I doubt they would start doing so for a mystery meat blog.
- nazgulsenpai 2y agoI imagine the author has baked in that people who don't use feeds won't use a blog that requires it be read as a feed.
- Kwpolska 2y agoIt absolutely does. I can't share a link to a post, so spreading the word about the blog's existence is pretty hard.
- Retr0id 2y agoThat's only a problem if your goal is to be read by as many people as possible.
- Closi 2y agoOr if your goal is that interested parties can find and access it easily. Otherwise why make it a blog and not just a private document?
- Retr0id 2y agoBut it's not private?
- antiframe 2y agoBy adding addition friction, one reduces that 'accessibility'. Adding unnecessary friction by doing extra work setting something up as feed-only so that readers have to do extra work to decide if the feed-only content is worthwhile, the question I have is 'why?' Subscribing to a site sight unseen, no pun intended, is not something I or anyone who is protective of their feed inbox would do. I curate my feeds so that I can sit down a few times a week and deeply read.
- Retr0id 2y agoPrecisely, that's the whole point.
- baby_souffle 2y agoOr if you’re publishing helpful reference material. I am under no illusion that my content is popular… but if I spend the better part of a weekend trying to get a config file working for a poorly documented tool, I’ll share it knowing that low double digit number of people will google and find it. Content exclusively behind rss is like tech support exclusively on discord. Discoverability approaches zero.
- bunderbunder 2y agoI recently stumbled across a neocities site where the author specifically called this factor out as a reason why she uses a 90s-style personal site instead of posting things to social media or Medium or whatever. She observed that she's grown tired of the modern Web's obsession with accumulating Whuffie (my choice of words, not hers), and thinks it's probably an emotional net negative. With a personal site, she feels freer to treat her Web presence as a personal project that she does purely for her own personal satisfaction. And, because of that, she gets more joy out of it. She specifically called out that she doesn't have any traffic counters because she feels she's better off not worrying about that. For my part, I also enjoyed browsing her site more than I do modern blogs. It was a refreshing reminder of what the Internet was like back when spending hours browsing it was called "surfing", and the term "doomscrolling" hadn't been invented yet. I'm seriously considering creating my own Neocities site (or similar). If I do, I won't be worrying about engagement metrics, either.
- DHPersonal 2y agoThe 90s style is certainly a fun marvel to me, but I think Neocities is an easy place to set up a modern site built with static site generators. I built my own non-90s blog with Jekyll and use the Neocities CLI to update the site.
- Gormo 2y agoCloudflare Pages is also a decent option. They offer completely free static site hosting.
- debo_ 2y agoI do this too. I have a Gemini gemlog with an http proxy in front, and I write up a little summary of my posts each quarter and email it to a group of ~30 people I like to keep in touch with. I do this in place of having social media.
- urban_alien 2y agoWhat's the link to her blog?
- darreninthenet 2y agoAnd if they want it read, they need to write something to read... this experimental blog has made four posts, the last one in January.