Blogs are weird and I do not understand them

2024-08-31

Off course I knew what a blog was before finding Bear.¹ I read blogposts and used tumblr (…), and I think my mother had a blog for some time, too. But I did not know about the technicalities (wtf is RSS?) and the culture of blogging. And although it took some time to set this whole endeavor up², it is the culture-thing that is the hardest for me.

I am used to Twitter and Bluesky, where posts have to be short and draw attention. This combination rewards posts that say divisive shit³ and punishes those that are nuanced and complex. It is easier to wish death onto some asshole politician than to explain what they did wrong. If you want to write something personal or sincere you have to meme and/or bury it under ironic detachment.

Like posts on microblogging platforms, blogposts follow their own principles and fall into their own patterns.⁴ Blogposts can be long and lingering, they allow nuance that the logic of the timeline prohibits, divisiveness does not guarantee attention. And not only do they seem to allow for a more personal writing style, they reward it. For example, Bear as a platform seems to favor specific kinds of posts: The suggestions on its discover-feed include, next to articles about technical stuff and blogposts about blogging, often personal stories that feel very intimate and earnest⁵ and function as a kind of fable that conclude with some (rather obvious) moral.

Conceptually I get these posts. The personal anecdote is for blogging what the shitpost is for twitter, it just works. Blogs lend themselves perfectly to this personal, reflective kind of writing. But for someone used to reading impersonal, hyper sarcastic punchlines on Twitter all day it is very hard to not find the 43rd story about your great productivity awakening a little too much.⁶

This may be an initial discomfort that goes away after some time. I know that I do not want to write personal anecdotes, so I will not. Still, I feel myself (here it is again, if you did not notice) conform to this blogpost-subjectivity that seems to be the only alternative to mean tweets and cold scientific papers. It is weird and I do not understand it, but this will not keep me from writing.