Why blogging never worked for me

When I was a child, there used to be blogger. Creating blogs in blogger was quite fun and exciting.

Then I came across Wordpress. Learning to run an apache server locally and then running Wordpress on it was one of the most amazing things that I did.

Though the experience of creating a blog on these platforms were quite fun I never continued writing blogs on them.

But then I came across Orkut and Facebook

They were not really blogging platforms but the functionality were more or less the same.

You could write posts that your others could see.

I ended up using Facebook for 10+ years.

I started many blogs in this time period and none of them survived.

So the question is why did I continue to write on Facebook but not on my blogs?

I think one reason could be that opening Facebook is a routine for most users.

You not only use Facebook to write posts, but also to check on what your friends are doing.

So Facebook is always on your back of your mind.

And you are trained by the posts your friends are making.

So you have a good sense of writing a Post on Facebook.

And you know your audience who are your Friends.

This combined with you checking Facebook every once in a while makes writing posts on Facebook so much more effortless compared to writing a blog.

Also when your Friends react to your post the reward system in your brain is activated by releasing dopamine.

This enforces the behavior of posting on Facebook.

This is how Instagram operates as well.

When looking at this, it’s kind of obvious why none of my blogging attempts never took off.

1. I don’t have a reason to keep opening my blog routinely. Because of this the idea of writing new blogs is not on top of my mind.
2. Writing a blog often requires significant more effort compared to Instagram or Facebook post.
3. It’s was not obvious who my audience was. The solution probably is to just write for myself and not think of any audience in mind.
4. No instant feedback loop like posting on Facebook or Instagram.

When I think about this, it kind of explains why Medium.com took off.

Medium solved 1 and 4.

It also partially solved 2 by making a UI where you write new blog posts easily.

They also give you some sense of who your audience is by showing the people who follow your blog.

Medium though was glorious when it was launched soon got filled with SEO spam.

It’s been years since I opened Medium.com to browse blogs to read.

I also never really tried to create a blog on Medium. The idea of giving Medium the rights to my content was never appealing.

Then came Substack.

Though initially started as a service for creating newsletters they also started entering to the blogging business.

Again I never found creating an account there appealing since it felt like I am writing there to generate money.

Again, it doesn’t really feel like the content I write there belongs to me.

I think there is probably still a big void that is left to be filled by a good blogging platform.

A blogging platform that solves the 1, 2, 3 and 4 but at the same time makes me feel like I own the content that is written on the platform.

Ideally it would be nice if this is built in a sustainable way so that it does’t have to do things that would end up killing the platform and user experience for the sake of higher valuations.