The Blogging Shangri-La
I’ll have you know that I was skeptical from the start. If you look at my first post on Medium, you will see that I was afraid the whole thing would not work out. You can verify my omniscience here:
In that post (because I am certain you didn’t bother to click on it), I wrote:
We now know that there is no promised land. We come, we colonize, they monetize us, the site starts to suck, and we move on.
I’m not ready to move on, but I’m starting to think about it. Remember, bloggers vote with their feet. If there is a better gig over there, we go over there. Lon Shapiro wrote about the comparatively large response he gets when he writes on Quora. Quora? I’ve never even considered writing on Quora. But I bet I could answer a few questions about paraphilia’s involving swim fins and football helmets. There may be an audience over there for me. And let me be clear, I’m not above seeking the adulation of a thousand Internet robots saying “good answer”.
I’d be interested if any of you have found sites that are more fun to publish on than Medium.
When a beehive swarms, it sends out “scouts”. Those scouts look for a good place to build the next colony. When they have found one, they return to the swarm and dance the location of the potential site. Based on the enthusiasm of the scouts’ dances, other scouts check out the new site. When the bees establish a quorum of fifteen or more scouts, the colony leaves en masse for the new site. It’s quite a spectacle if you’ve ever witnessed it.
You are all officially “blogging scouts” now. We are looking for the site. I don’t know who we should consider the “queen”. I vote for Lisa Renee or Devon Henry. Wherever they go, I’ll go.
For the time being I am ensconced here at Medium. In case you were wondering what I think the Next Great Blogging Platform (xGBP) will look like, what follows is my description of Blogging Utopia.
For Writers, Not Readers
The metaphor of modern life is a cocktail party where everyone is talking at the same time. We only listen to each other to justify our next comment, concentrating just enough to find the segue to the thing we want to say. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are about POSTING, not about reading. Everyone knows that reading other people’s Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts is a recipe for depression.
On the blogging platform of the future, the focus is on WRITING rather than READING. We read each other’s offerings the same way tennis players watch their opponent’s shots… to plan a return.
Medium is VERY GOOD for writers. It could be much better. The easiest way to make it better for writers is to tell the readers to “go suck it.” You may be wondering what good is a platform for writing without readers.
Well, I promise you that not many people are reading what you are reading right now. You are one of very few. Yet despite my paltry numbers, I will still get an erection when I post this.
Sorry you had to find out this way.
Writing dreck and then posting it on the Internet is as close as I get to “artistic expression.”
Without this kind of nonsense I am simply Mr. Mench. My life is superbly ordinary. I got to work, I pay my bills, and I take the trash to the dump on Saturday. Hippo-splattering stupid things on the Internet is my only expression. It means a lot to me. You handful of readers give a serious lift to my delusional self-concept. I thank you for that.
Here is an old Myron Cohen joke:
Two alter kockers are sitting on a bench in Miami. One says to the other, “My doctor told me I should get a hobby.”
“That’s a good idea. What are you going to do for a hobby?” His friend asks.
“I already have a hobby.”
“You have a hobby? What’s your hobby?”
“I keep bees.”
“You keep bees? I never knew you kept bees. Where do you keep them?”
“At my apartment.”
“At your apartment!? Where at your apartment?”
“In the closet.”
“You keep bees in your apartment closet?? Don’t they get out?”
“No. I keep them in a box.”
“In a box in the closet? Don’t they die?”
“Yea, sure,” says the first guy, “But who cares? It’s just a hobby.”
My guess is that there are enough “hobbiest” writers in the world to build a site that has scale.
The Site of the Future Will Allow Pseudo Anonymity, but Will Make People Pay for it
Medium has done a great job at keeping the trolls at bay. For a while it was touch and go, but right now those mouthbreathers from StormFront and /r/MensRights don’t show up in my feed.
I have to have anonymity in my blogging site. What I write here often could get me fired. Unfortunately, any site that allows anonymity invites spammers and shitheads to create sockpuppet accounts. The simple solution is that to make people pay to WRITE but not to READ. Nobody is going to spawn 1000 fake accounts if they have to pay $50 a pop for them.
I have no problem with the site knowing who I am, so long as they aren’t quick to out me to my neighbor. Just make doxxing me difficult enough that the 17-year-old I taunted on a game server can’t find the name of the place I work without some serious effort.
When it comes to how much I will pay to write, I’m not really sure what the upper limit is. My other “hobby” is bee keeping. When it comes to the hierarchy of hobbies, beekeeping is #2, ant keeping a potential #3, and way down on the list, after things like gardening and cutting cord wood, is cooking. That said, I just dropped $100 on an instant pot, plus $30 on accessories, and $25 on instant pot cookbooks. I won’t tell you what I spend on bees, but it is in the thousands.
You know what I spend on writing, my #1 hobby? $5 a month.
A Site for Writers That Is Still a Social Site
There is a reason there are so many “writer’s groups” meeting at your local libraries and civic centers. As much as I hate to talk about writing process, I love to talk about writing process.
Blogging Utopia will promote a tight community by having a working comment system controlled by the individual authors.
For the past couple of months I have drifted away from Medium. Guess where I have gone? I have been trolling the GoComics comment boards. Let me tell you, the Nancy commenting “community” is tight, knowledgable, and sometimes funny. Everyone is very well behaved.
Commenting is writing. Commenting can be great fun. In the old world of Gawker the comments were better than the originating articles.
Everyone tells me that the commenters are on Twitter, but I say “no”. Twitter is a mess. There is no there, there. It’s like having a cake made of icing. I read the Buzzfeed curations of Twitter eruptions. Huffpo and Buzzfeed like to gather the “best” burns of Donald Trump, or the biting responses some unwitting celebrity invited upon themself. Those articles are dull.
Reddit is nothing but comments, right? The problem is that assholes control many reddits. They upvote one another and take over the board.
On GoComics, individual creators can turn comments on or off. 9 Chickweed Lane, by Brooke McEldowney, doesn’t have a comment section. There is some kind of banhammer feature. I think the “creators” can cull comments.
In the Blogging Shangri-La will have real threaded comments, but allow the blog creator to turn comments on or off and delete threads.
Real Statistics
The statistics provided by Medium about my “stories” were a marvel when I first joined. Unfortunately, they are virtually unchanged since that then. Becoming a paying member didn’t “upgrade” what I could see in any way, which, I must admit, has been a disappointment.
I have played “free” multiplayer online games that provided more meaningful stats. At least in O Game I could figure out where I stood in the Universe and what the size of that Universe was. On Medium I can’t figure out if I have lost my mojo or if the entire site is heading for the shitter. Is the Universe expanding or contracting? Does it matter?
It turns out it does. I’m not here for much, but “losing” doesn’t feel good. I hate to think that my efforts this year are less successful than my efforts from three years ago, but that’s what the stats tell me.
I had always hoped that on my death bead I could quote the “Death of Ivan Illych”:
“I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death." (hey, what’s with the new serifed font for pull-quotes?? UX BLEEECH.)
But Medium doesn’t even allow me the “going up in public opinion” part. I’m post celebrity, and I missed the celebrity part… I think. I don’t really know because the site’s STATS ARE SO BAD.
Features That Make Writing More Fun
I subscribe to the New York Times online and I read the AP, BBC, and the Apple “News” feeder somewhat obsessively. All of the above have audio and video features that annoy me, because when I am looking at those sites I am looking for words to read.
Maybe Medium audio and “series” are successful, but in the blogging Shangri-La all of the development muscle will go into making WRITING more fun. LiveJournal had polls. Polls and quizzes seem stupid until someone really smart starts fucking with them. Layouts for chapters, and indexes, ways of formatting poetry or song lyrics… these are the gizmos the blogging site of blogging sites will have. I’m sure we can think up a lot of them.
I do believe that photo blogging and publishing comics should be part of the Blogging Shangri-La. Medium does good things with photos, but somehow the best photo publications, like Vantage, died out. spiral :: bound is, to my mind, the one great successful Medium-backed project. I think it proves that you can publish comics on Medium. Too bad it is so alone.
OK, I’ll Stop
This isn’t tight. I’m rambling, because I’m tired and I never wanted to write this post. I loved Medium once, but somehow the site has really started to suck. There may be no other place to go, but this is the Internet, so the next great thing might be a click away.
Please let me know if you find it.
