Blogosphere = ‘Officially Boring’;

Lately I’ve been kind of checking out the old websites I use to read and keep up with, but lately I find them asking the same thing I am:

Where the hell did everyone go?

Ironically, this morning Vixx posted something similar about the subject in question:

Anyway, onto other things – where has everyone gone? I was going through my Bloglines and links page to weed out dead links and realised that a good third of them have now expired. Where have you all gone? Have you moved without sending me a forwarding address? Let me know if I’m linking you incorrectly or, worst still, not linking at all . . . unless, of course, you’re hiding from me for a reason. Oh no. I don’t have . . . *whisper* . . . BLOG BODY ODOUR, do I . . . ?

Jem also posted on her website:

I’ve been an avid blog reader for years. As long as I’ve had my own… possibly longer. I read a huge variety of topics, too. From personal blogs (or “journals”) to tech/gadget stuff, marketing, SEO and code to cooking and cats (but not cooking cats). However, it seems that of late all of my favourite bloggers have buggered off and I’ve got nothing to read.

I’ve come to a variety of conclusions in regards to this matter.

People have better shit to do than write in a fucking blog.

And hey, I totally respect that. I seem to be shitting out a post every couple of months it seems. I went almost an entire year and a half without posting at all. People lose interest in it, or they just don’t have the time for it (or the money). Or they do what I did, they get a website courtesy of some free blogging software and just post whenever they fucking feel like. There are no obligations, no accessibility and compatibility crap you just don’t want to be bothered with anymore. You just want to be able to blog every once a while, and the only people you would mind reading it would be family and friends. Because let’s face it, everyone has just become boring. Which brings me to my next point…

Your blogging content smells of crap.

I’m not saying that mine is god-like in any way, I’m not here blogging for the people of the internet, I’m blogging for family and friends… and for my own sanity. However, for the people whose main “audience” are random users of the internet, they aren’t doing much of a good job. I thought every decent blogger knew the #1 Golden Rule of Blogging:

Don’t EVER post about how you have nothing to write.

I don’t care if you’re a participant in those shitty “Blog-a-thons”, it’s just horrible blogging manners. Less than five sentences of you explaining how you have nothing to write about? Really? Fucking idiots. And they wondered why people stopped visiting their website and why their stats went down…

Also, most of the popular blogging websites that I knew of have just become former shadows of what they once were. For example, I highly admired Jem‘s website for her interesting topics and blog posts, but it seems that all she blogs about nowadays is her bloody cats and gardening. I don’t want to read the cat-version of a mommy blog and I’m not going to. God I fucking hate cats.

Anyhoo, the point is, if people don’t give their audience something worth reading, its only natural for them to lose interest and scurry away in hopes of finding something else. And where does that leave you? Alone. I’m completely content with people never ever reading a thing I write, because I write it for me. If people read it, then cool. Most people, however, really take it to heart if people don’t care about their voice anymore, and they shut down their website. That’s what happens when you cave in to the common blogging crap of promoting, promoting, promoting, but never delivering, and the stink is only getting worse folks.

People got tired of all the bullshit.

Having been a spectator and even a participant in the blogosphere, I know all too well of the little pointless things that people engulfed themselves into when arriving into this “community”. It began with comments, continued with pointless trends, and ended with posts lacking (interesting) content.

Comments

I remember when despair.nu became the hot new thing around. The whole idea of the website was that you were assigned five random websites that you were required to both visit and leave a comment. When they said “leave a comment”, they usually implied “leave a nice comment that just came out the oven and spread some frosting on it along with pretty rainbow sprinkles.” Thus people started having a problem. While Despair intended to give websites that signed up promotion and exposure to others (that probably didn’t know it existed), and also to meet other people, all it did was promote the plague of useless and pointless commenting. You commented in hopes of them replying back and visiting your website, and the more you commented on people’s website, the more likely you’ll start getting new visitors and more hits. It became so bad that people started commenting policies and they all usually said somewhere along the lines of “…don’t comment unless you really have something to say…” or “… if you’re a commenter from despair.nu, please leave a meaningful comment and not a typical ‘Oh I like you’re site, it’s really nice!’” And the epidemic didn’t stop there, despite the fact several people stopped using despair.nu after a flood of generic comments such as “Nice site!” “Cool layout!” etc.

Trends

Several of the blogging trends mostly had to do with layouts, obscure and ridiculous fonts with tiny font sizes, and colors that make reading difficult (admittedly much like this layout, but hey, it’s free right?). This sparked another epidemic that spawned several review websites, people constantly reviewing each other, pointing out accessibility and compatibility flaws, screaming at you about the Discrimination Act and so on and so forth. I look back and it was just honestly disgusting. And you know what, I was one of them. I had a reviewing website, though I was never mean in any of my reviews (just honest), but just the fact I hopped on the bandwagon is something I’m not too proud of. Anyways, the blogosphere quickly became filled with a bunch of assholes and elitists jerks. Sadly, more than half of them would deny ever being such asshole, claiming they were merely just educating people on validating their website and overall improving their web-designing skills. No, you weren’t, deep down you did it for your ego to show your readers how fucking smart you are. Congratulations, you’re an asshole.

Lacking Content

I think I pretty much went over this already. People stopped focusing on the things that made their websites interesting in the first place and went onto to other things that people couldn’t give a shit about. Personally, in Jem‘s case, it would be her choice in blog topics and in Jacky’s case (webmaster of dubious.nu), it would be her choice of focusing in blogging rather than her artwork. She’s not the greatest blogger, but she’s fucking brilliant at drawing and illustration, and when her artwork gallery went away, I just wasn’t interested in the not-so-meaningful things she blogged about most of the time.

Anyways, to conclude this ridiculously long post, when you ask yourself where everyone went… all you have to do is look past the bullshit and you’ll see. The way I look at it, people got tired of sucking up to strangers they never even met before. So I end this post in the most geekiest way possible, by expressing my final thoughts using simple programming syntax:

Blogosphere = ‘Officially Boring’;