This is a fair point! My search became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts…I had been hoping to find some cool blogging challenges or prompts on some small community, but of course it’s only the SEO optimized stuff coming up in the search, and that SEO optimized stuff will tell you to blog like they do. Lessons learned!
Hi Mike! It’s cool if you didn’t enjoy my post, but there are some rather strange assumptions about me in here just because I happen to enjoy computer games, and was at a bit of a loss as to what I wanted to write about that day. I have a full-time job that I think is pretty cool (I’m a librarian) but I prefer to keep my work life at work, and my internet life on the internet. Never the twain shall meet. I am also a she who has many other hobbies. :) I know there’s a bit of a stereotype that anyone who likes computer games must be a male NEET living in their mom’s basement, but it’s pretty inaccurate to reality!
Hello! I am the author of this post. I never expected more than 10 people to read it max because it was a rambly thing that I dashed off pretty quickly. I’ve received some really interesting responses and emails as a result, as well as many recommendations of cool blogs to read!! Thank you for all those.
I’ve seen some folks expressing their incredulity that a writer would need to do an internet search for ideas, so I wanted to add a bit of context. I’ve got some ideas for future posts jotted down in my notes app, but nothing that I feel I am ready to go ahead with writing yet. I still wanted to write something that day just to exercise my writing “muscle,” as it were. I like to do personal journalling and write fanfiction (yeah, cringe, I know) and in both of those online communities there are lots of ways to find cool prompts from other writers for if you have writer’s block. There are whole lists of questions to answer in your journal to help jumpstart some self-reflection. In fandom spaces, there are tons of “fan weeks” (or months) where there will be a prompt or two per day, and the challenge is to write something based on that prompt. I’ve really enjoyed consulting those to spark an idea when I’m not sure what to do, and I’ve written some pieces I am really proud of based on those prompts. So I (naively, I now realize) assumed that there might be cool blogging challenges or prompts I could find out there to spark something interesting I could write about…and then I got flooded with all that nonsense and I was like, what is this?? I hate it! And I wrote about how I hated it, and here we are. :)
I am relieved to see that personal blogging is very much alive on the quieter side of the web, away from social media and SEO optimization. It’s a space I am increasingly spending time in and still figuring out how to navigate. It seems like the best way to find stuff over here is to talk to people! I’ve received some really nice emails from people sharing their blogs with me and enjoyed reading their posts. I am definitely going to check out the many recommendations in this thread! Thanks to everyone who has been so welcoming to me as a total blogging newbie, and as for answering the question in my post title: Blogging for the hell of it is alive, just much harder to find by the means I’ve been used to up until now.
As an aside, I do also think it’s really funny how people are assuming I’m a guy…I guess because I mentioned I’m playing Baldur’s Gate, and girls don’t know how to do that. ;)
In my (extremely limited) experience, 100% of the people I know playing Baldur's Gate are women.
I suspect it's more of an HN thing. The site is overwhelmingly male-presenting. There may be more women than it would appear, being carefully neutral about using any kind of female-coded language, and content to let the assumption be that they're male.
If you look into any of the threads on gender topics, very few women talk about their experiences. With good reason, I think: those threads are often very hostile to women.
Ah, I see. I had barely heard of this place before I was informed that my blog post was up here and that’s why I got a huge spike in traffic. Unfortunate to hear.
