Social media and motivation for blogging

December 28, 2024

One of the unstated benefits to having a blog is it allows you to know for certain whether or not you have written about a topic. I write all the time, but did I end up sharing the video from Protesilaos Stavrou about social media?

While I think I spend way too much time discussing social media I want to focus in on his experience because he found the interactions on social media less than meaningful.

He shared a link to one of his posts and immediately received likes and comments even though his post is 4,000 words long. He became doubtful on how genuine these interactions were because people clearly didn’t read what he wrote. Can you really measure the impact of your writing simply because a few people have liked it?

Even though social media is superficial this does not mean it does not have utility. It seems rather obvious how superfluous interacting on social media is. I use social media for promotion and keeping up with musicians.

I’m reminded of Cory Doctorow’s latest post, Proud to be a blockhead where he talks about his motivations for writing and how he doesn’t pay much attention to metrics:

What do I pay attention to? The qualitative impacts of my writing. Comments. Replies. Emails. Other bloggers who discuss it, or discussions on Metafilter, Slashdot, Reddit and Hacker News. That stuff matters to me a lot because I write for two reasons, which are, in order: to work out my own thinking, and; to influence other peoples’ thinking.

Doctorow also discusses another motivation for blogging as his other motivation for writing, “When your commonplace book is a public database” in The Memex Method. If you don’t publish your thoughts, how else will you know if your writing has an impact?