Occam's Razor

I’m approaching post 2000. As I move close to this auspicious number, it has occurred to me that this may be a good time to stop blogging. My traffic is way down and has been way down for years now, and keeps declining. But even if it were not, it’s pretty clear to me that blogging is not much of a thing anymore, at least not blogging as I have practiced it.

Successful blogs these days are not collections of essays like this one, but for the most part contain short and punchy posts. That’s not my style. I use a popular WordPress plugin called Yoast, which helps boost your traffic by basically making your post more attractive to Google. I’m sure that if I took Yoast’s advice I probably would see more traffic, but it would also violate the spirit of my blog. This is a blog of essays and it aspires to be of interest to highly literate people capable of deep thought. Yoast though wants my posts shorter. It wants me to add more headings, pictures and links. It wants me to give short excerpts of the post for search engines. It wants me to use even simpler sentences to make it optimal for people with no more than an eighth grade education.

Ironically, the same technology that elevated my blog years ago now seems intent on killing it. Search engines like Google (the only one that really counts) continually refine their algorithms, which they don’t share. What Google is looking for is relevance, an ephemeral quality. It all amounts to: is this site worthy of promoting in its search engine to advance the company’s profits? A blog of essays does nothing to help Alpha (Google’s parent company) increase it’s shareholders’ fortunes.

Basically Google wants you to spend your life in search engine optimization (SEO) hell. You are expected to work ruthlessly to promote it at your own time and expense for the tiny chance that you will have enough “relevant” content for Google to send people your way. You are expected to master the complexity of SEO, which is basically impossible without paying a lot of money to consultants, which is increasingly making blogging a privilege of the rich. The result of this “relevance” strategy is to deprecate the very things about my blog that I want to retain. So by retaining this approach, I attract fewer readers.

The really successful blogs these days are attached to successful sites, with Huffington Post coming to mind. The author is already someone of some prominence. They are broadcasting their stuff not just in a blog, but are constantly tweeting and posting to Instagram and pore through their site’s analytics to look for ways to make their site more attractive. Yoast tells me such with every post.

Frankly, this is a game I don’t like playing, so I haven’t. So sixteen years of blogging may be enough. The Internet has moved on. Blogging is still a thing, but if Google has their way relevance means it must be of topical interest and take you into an area of specialization. With essays that mostly discuss current events, I am part of a huge pool of similar bloggers. An occasional post will get a fair number of shares or likes (it’s rare to get more than ten likes for a post) but comments are virtually nil.

My first post was on December 13, 2002. My friend Lisa who beat me to it inspired me. Her blog is still around. But she is naturally more connected and sociable than I am, in spite of us both being introverted. Also, she posts a lot less frequently. Maybe I need to do something like that.

So 2000 posts may be it, or maybe even this one (post 1987). Or maybe I should close it down on December 13, 2018, which would make it exactly sixteen years. We’ll see. If it shuts down, it will probably eventually migrate to wordpress.com where at least it will persist indefinitely, but at someone else’s expense.

It’s unlikely though that I would stop putting my stuff out there in some form. I might try podcasting or nibble at vlogging (video blogging), but both take more work than I am likely to want to engage in. If so, I will assume a new persona. Perhaps by looking fresher I will attract more readers.

Sixteen years is a good long time to ride a trend, but it’s abundantly clear to me that blogging is a trend that has been petering out for a while now, being killed slowly by our search engines. And I won’t pay the price in time and treasure to be relevant the way that Google wants me to be.