blogging for traffic

There's a particular line in Jedda's most recent post that really struck me:

Unless your primary goal is to monetize your blog over self-expression, cover your ears (or eyes).

I think, without really meaning to, it gets at the core problem here: do people understand why they're doing what they're doing?

In my experience, humans are pretty bad at that. People can start blogging with any number of conscious goals (creativity, personal expression, communication, community building) but it's simply in the water that sometimes, people get rich and famous and important by doing what we're doing. We all know it happens, and I think it can loom in the back of our minds, a tiny little what if.

I've talked a bit before about how my calculations for my personal strategy of internet privacy are basically reliant on never becoming particularly noteworthy.^[1] Despite that, I sometimes find myself in the middle of making decision based on that what if. It's a stupid enough thought in my particular circumstance that I usually catch and dismiss it pretty quick, but it still pops up.

The biggest thing? My bees.

The background image on my site is a repeating vector pattern of bees. I like bees; I'm terribly proud of my bees; I designed this site around my bees. But I built my site framework from the ground up and it's generally pretty lean—the JS comes in at about 12 KB, and my home page's HTML file is only 1 KB. My bees are almost 40 KB.

This means that, every so often, I read a post extolling the virtues of lightweight webpages and I run my network tests again and I consider removing my bees. There's a reason most major sites look so similar—there are only so many variations on lightweight and minimal styling. But then I remember that I am not running a commercial enterprise; I don't need to consider how many people click the back button for every millisecond of load time. I try to be responsible with regards to accessibility, but this is a bit excessive on that front.

So, the bees stay.

Even for people who make sites for other reasons, and occasionally for explicitly anti-corporate reasons, I think the presumption of profitability really gets into a person's head. It's easy to let half-conscious wants, which might not align with our well-stated and carefully considered goals, lurk beneath the surface. Honestly, they don't even have to be your own—you also have to consider the implicit goals of the advice you're taking.^[2] It requires some amount of occasionally uncomfortable introspection^[3] and a good deal of attention.

But if you're trying to do something specific, then letting that mindset sneak in can be not only unhelpful but actively counterproductive. I want to make art that's personal to me, and sometimes that requires a bit of extra weight on the page, but I can only justify that if I keep my focus on what I'm doing here.

It's worth being careful and intentional about what goals you allow to take root, even if it requires a bit of careful digging.