actually, blog because people read it

10 Feb, 2025

I love blogs and want all my friends to make one, but I don't agree with a lot of blogging advice that you should blog for just yourself, or just for the sake of blogging. If you genuinely don't think anybody else will read what you write, you should just keep a private journal!¹ It's more freeing than a blog. You don't need to explain the background life story required to understand any random reference you want to make; you don't need to worry about whether any other characters in your stories consent to being described publicly, or what some hypersensitive future employer will think.

(Counterpoint: some people say writing publicly helps them think more clearly because it pressures them to structure their thoughts, anticipate and respond to rebuttals, that kind of thing, independent of whether anybody reads their blog in practice. Personally, I do not feel any less of that pressure writing privately instead of publicly. But maybe I'm simply weird and most of you can ignore this post.)

Instead, I would bite the bullet and make the hard side of the argument: you should blog because people will, in fact, read it. Maybe not many, maybe not for a while, but I really believe that there are readers out there who will be interested in you and your blog, no matter who you are. Right here on Bearblog, people read the "Most Recent" Discovery feed. If you want more affirmative knowledge, Manu or any of his dozen readers will read your blog.

All things in moderation, of course: it's not healthy, and often counterproductive, to optimize your blog or writing for getting as many readers as possible. Compromises I like include:

• Blogging for people like yourself, or perhaps like your past self, who want to know the same things you'd want to know.
• Blogging for people who would already be reading other things you write, e.g., because you're messaging them in a chat room.
• Blogging for a moment in the future somebody asks you a question, where you'd want to say, "Hey, I wrote a blog post about that."