A couple of weeks ago I learned something new about diaries. Something I have never thought about. Diaries are like toilets or garbage containers – you dump your thoughts there, so they do not bother you anymore. Diaries are not for rereading, recollecting or reflecting, they are containers to keep stuck programs, that are eating your CPU cycles, winding up your energy bill.
In other words, usually I think way too much and way too long about posting something, and in the end, the posts are never published. They are either “eating my brain” or sitting in the draft folder forever, because I can’t figure out how to complete them. Familiar, isn’t it? So, finally, my first dump 😀
You may have noticed that the blog is not updated as often (mmm… one-two post a year?) as, say, 5 years ago (one-two posts a day?). Lost interest? Hmmm… No. Check the forum. My average “speed” is 5 posts a day. But there are reasons indeed.
Paradigm shift 1
I’d like to see more user interaction and involvement. Blogs and comments are driven by the owner’s posts. Users are very limited in their initiative. No new blog posts – the site is dead. While everybody registered can post a thread or a message in a forum. In terms of initiative all forum users are equal.
No proper time line structure. Blog posts can be tagged, categorized, but additional efforts are needed to figure out what category or tag should be used to line the posts up in the correct order. Blog index page is a salad of mixed up post excerpts! On the contrary, appropriately maintained forums have threads dedicated to particular with fully visible posts ordered by time.
Posts can also be generated automatically. Or automatically gathered from various sources. This is how the Streams (RSS aggregator) were created. (Hey, cumulatively they have achieved more than 2.5mln views!)
And on top of that there are technical issues: the internals of WordPress are blown up and slow, the theme is outdated and not responsive, the plugins are abandoned and need to be fixed or even rewritten, etc.
As a result, the attention was shifted towards the forum.
Cognitive dissonance
But there are downsides. Forum posts are not tagged. Random, but important thoughts can get lost. Threads can have mixed subjects and can be misleading. Anonymous posts are not allowed. Registration repels potential readers. Search engines prefer big images and do not like thumbnails. Visitors do not proceed to the forum: the blog is not updated – goodbye forever.
Paradigm shift 2
Old generation moves away from the fetish scene. New generation is not interested in the old-fashion fetishes, mostly uses mobile apps or social nets on mobiles, mostly reads short sentences written in large fonts embedded in pictures, or watches short videos. Only the kinky die-hards keep entertaining themselves. And this is, actually, what this site is for. We share, what we find interesting. Look at the amount of posts/views/thanks and you can clearly see where interests match. What also means, that some interests are much less popular.
Saying that… I’m going to try to resurrect the blog, but in that new “incarnation” I will mostly dedicate it to some thoughts, that I’d like to dump, to subjects, that most likely will not be popular in the forum, and to quotes, questions, queries, quests for anonymous quora (5 q-words 😉 You got the idea 😉
Here we go, dumped! I mean … Dixi!