3/3/26
For good and bad, I cannot tell who reads my blog.
On social media, I could tell if my post was “good” because I got likes. People replied (rarely, Twitter didn’t really encourage meaningful replies on the kind of content I was sharing). I know people get into interesting discussions on that platform, but I didn’t see that so much.
On my site, I have a visit counter and can tell a blog post got twenty visits. Are those just bots? Is it just me checking the page? Is anyone out there?
I wish I could tell how many people downloaded my RSS feed, but I’m statically hosting it and don’t have access to that information. I wonder if this is all for the best… do I really want to think about if a post was good or not? Do I want likes to shape the content I post?
I have occasionally interacted with someone in person who says they liked what I wrote. Or I share a post and someone responds to it in conversation. That has felt rewarding. I do feel like I might want more signal that I’m not just screaming into the void.
I publish my writing as an act of communication. I want to reach people. I don’t need it to be likes. I don’t want it to be reduced to just a numeric score, right? Maybe this is why people add comment sections to their blogs.