The truth is, folks, I don’t maintain a blog purely for the joy of doing so. I do love to write, but one doesn’t blog unless one wishes not just to write, but to be read. Even on a somewhat high-profile platform like Patheos, even coming with the cred of being the mouthpiece of a major secularist organization, and of having been the substitute-Friendly-Atheist a few times, this little blog simply isn’t making much of a dent in terms of readership.
I’d like very much for that to change. There are surely lots of things I could do to make some progress: I could post more often, I could fashion my posts to be more in line with click-bait principles, I could write about things that interest a broader range of people, or conversely, write about things that drive a small number of passionate people nuts. But the fact of the matter is that I want to write what interests me, frame and express it in a way that reflects who I am, and do so as often as I am inspired to do so. Perhaps that mean I am an entitled and privileged. Go ahead, you can say it. You wouldn’t be the first.
Given all this, the best way I have found to generate at least temporary spurts of traffic is to get my material posted to sites like Reddit or into active communities on Google+. But very often, these communities and subreddits and whatnot live by an ironclad “no blogspam” rule, which means simply that they don’t want the authors of written content linking to their own stuff.
Which I get! I’m sure, given the opportunity, thousands of “bloggers” would clog up whatever feeds they could with their own material. That’s spammy, and online communities are right to police this kind of thing.
But here’s the situation I run into: I have a piece I’ve written and that I’m proud of, and I think it will resonate with a particular audience. I can go find the appropriate subreddit or Google+ community or what have you, and share it with them. But then I get a message from a moderator telling me that I’ve violated their rules against blogspam, that the post is being removed, and that I now risk being banned.
Now, if I made a habit of plastering my material willy nilly into these communities, they’d have me dead to rights. But is there no middle ground between never promoting your own material and spam? Shouldn’t there be some allowance for an author deciding that a particular piece is relevant to a particular group and sharing it? It can always be ignored or downvoted if the community in question doesn’t like it or isn’t interested. Being immediately policed seems to me to be overkill.
Again, I appreciate and share the desire to keep unscrupulous self-promoters from sullying online communities. I have to think that when one of those people come around, though, it’s pretty obvious, and that the occasional sharing of one’s own material, when relevant, is equally obvious. But since I don’t have that kind of community moderating responsibility, I could be missing something.
Maybe there’s a better way, a way that allows me to do the work I want to do and earn the attention I think it deserves. Or perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe it already is.
Near-Earth Object 