Giving It Away

Maybe you think I quote Mimi Smartypants, my favorite blogger, too often. But, but … she says it so well:

Hello comrades. Let’s sneak one in under the wire so my archives page continues to look nice, with at least one entry a month. Good thing I didn’t follow the crowd and try to start a paid Substack thingy, huh? Because you sure would not be getting your money’s worth! I will just stay on the internet and give it away (give it away, give it away now).

I do wonder sometimes what the next thing will be. Blogs are mostly gone, no one can reasonably pay a whole bunch of fifty dollars-es per month for a wide variety of personal newsletters,* and the Instagram-influencer thing is increasingly considered a joke even by people who consume that kind of content. Something else must be just around the corner. WHAT WILL IT BE? I demand to know so I can make fun of it and then decline to participate, like the crabby Gen-Xer I am.

*I realize that lots are free, but there’s still like…a mental load? To getting an email, even a fun one, that you “have” to open and read? As opposed to just browsing around, wasting time on the internet, going to your favorite sites? I don’t know.

Yes, that. What she says. I like blogging. Expressing myself in words is its own reward, and for my purposes, writing a blog — giving it away on the internet — is the perfect solution. Paul’s Thing isn’t going anywhere.

I don’t know how many people read my blog. Maybe a couple of hundred. But would there be more than a dozen if I didn’t use social media to alert the world when I put up new posts? Up to now, that’s been my rationale for staying on Facebook. Say what you will about how stupid and awful Facebook has become, it’s usefulness as a giant bulletin board anyone can thumbtack notices to is hard to beat.

It’s no secret I want to split the blanket with Mark Zuckerberg’s data-mining empire. Now, after humiliating myself by falling for a crude Facebook phishing scam and spamming my entire roster of friends, more than ever. But wait, I keep telling myself, if I quit Facebook, how will anyone know when I’ve posted something new? Will my readership dry up and blow away?

Maybe not. I checked my friends list on Facebook just now: after the spamming incident, I’m down to 206. Over on Twitter, though, I have 391 followers on my main account, plus another 244 on my Eagle Bot account.

So what happens if I throttle back on Facebook and concentrate on Twitter? I’ll just note in passing that Mimi Smartypants posts updates to Twitter but not to Facebook. And she’s doing all right.

We’ll see.