Blogging for Attention

April 15, 2025

I read a few blog posts recently¹ by Robert Birming and Joel. Among other things, they talk about their worries that they are just blogging for attention, or appear to be doing so.

Their experiences and feelings are their own. I do not mean to contradict them, only offer my own experiences here, and those are a little different.

Of Course I’m Doing This for Attention

I want attention. I want people to read what I write here. I want (hope) to be a familiar face in feed readers. I want to be linked to. The internet is a network and I want to be part of it. Maybe I’m a little desperate for it, even. There are posts on here that wouldn’t exist if I had more people to talk to in real life.

There is plenty that I don’t write for attention. I have a private journal. I have written pages and pages that I have not and will not share with you.

But the things I write here I want to share, want other people to see. I’m shameless about that.

But Not Very Well…

I don’t only blog for attention, of course. I blog when I get an idea that I want to share with the world—or at least an idea that I don’t When I write a post I am not imagining how many views or likes it will get.

That being said, my second thought is that blogging is really not a very good method of getting attention. I get very little traffic here. There’s a few more people reading via RSS, but it’s hard to know how many. I am beginning to doubt if webmentions are real; I’ve never seen any sign of one. It’s not quite yelling into the void, but I’m not very far from it either.

It’s partly my own fault. I’ve gone and stomped off into my own little corner of the internet. It’s hardly fair to walk away from all the platforms where people actually are and then complain that there’s no one around. And yes, even the indieweb has it’s own platforms. How much more attention would I get if I were on bearblog popping up on it’s discover feed?

Normally none of this really bothers me. But I do feel a little frustrated sometimes, and writing this post is intensifying it, since doing so necessarily means dwelling on it.

P.S.

This post is on the rough side. It’s taken me a few days longer to write than I thought it would. There’s a part of me that wants to polish it more. To put more polish on all my posts. They are not all high-effort, I confess. But I know that if I do that it may never go out. Writing for attention but never actually showing it to anybody is the worst of both worlds.