Well, at long last, here I am with a blog again. And maybe that’s a bad thing. Not sure. Hope not.
I’ve always enjoyed long-form posting on the internet, and at one time, there were plenty of good, widely used, platforms, for that. Not so much any more.
My favorite platform for long-form content was the much mocked Google+. Despite its reputation (and admittedly stupid name) it was great. The interface and design were light, clean, readable and responsive. It ran well on desktop browsers as well as mobile devices. It’s feature set was just rich enough to be flexible. I posted there pretty much every day, and as time went on and problems started to crop up on other platforms, I doubled-down on it, making it my major outlet. I stopped posting on my other blogs, and spent less time on Twitter and Facebook. That, as it happened, was a serious mistake.
As benign neglect, and poor communication by Google, started to drag the platform down, use of Google+ started to trail off. Oh, there were still plenty of accounts out there, but fewer and fewer people were checking them. This wasn’t initially, a bad thing. Google+ became the anti-Facebook. It was the social media platform where everyone wasn’t. You could post with less concern that your boss would be scrutinizing your hobbies, or your your conservative mom was going to be checking every post for “bad” language.
And because it was smaller and mainly under the care of dedicated users, it became something of a tight and exclusive club. Google+ users at least seemed smarter, more creative, and better informed than the average user of Facebook, more articulate than the average user of Twitter, and for sure better behaved and less toxic than the average Redditor. Some of that may have been illusionary, but for sure, the people I encountered on G+ were far more warm and open than I encountered elsewhere.
So, even as G+ became quieter and quieter, I continued to post, and inevitably became closer to the other die-hards who remained around. I still keep in touch with some of these folks on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, even though our major connection was the long-gone Google+. It was — fine.
But then, the rumors started. Google was going to pull the plug on Google+ Soon. Next month. Tomorrow maybe. These rumors started years before the actual end, and came in regular waves until the actual official announcement came. They were a self-fulfilling prophecy, as with each round of rumors, more people left. Some announced their departure. Others just logged off one day and never came back. Even though there was no real or official announcement, G+ was doomed. Everybody knew it! And because everyone knew what nobody knew, it became inevitable.
And that left me without a clear voice in the internet world. I use Facebook, still, because I need to for business reasons and it’s the only platform to keep in touch with some old friends and family members. But I also hate Facebook and would quit it if I could.
I like Twitter for news and timely reports and communications. But Twitter treats long-form content as poison, and discourages it at every turn. Twitter is also noisy and often toxic. I also like Instagram (though I’m sure new owner Facebook will find a way to ruin it) for photos and visual content. And while Instagram is more friendly to long-form text content than Twitter, it is perversely anti-desktop (and therefore, keyboards, which I really need for long-form writing). While you can read, you can’t even post from a desktop or laptop machine for some reason.
So while I use Twitter and Instagram daily, how I use them is very restricted and narrow. I sometimes do long-form threads on Twitter, but they tend to be rants, and I often feel like it’s wasted effort. And the lack of a long-form outlet, had grown increasingly frustrating.
Yes, we had blogs on two different web-sites (including Yorkwriters.com), but they’d gone unused for years due to neglect and various life issues (serious health issues for myself and my wife Chris York, and health issues with family members as well). It quickly got to the point that the sites were so outdated that directing anyone there would have been an embarrassment, and even logging in was just a depressing reminder of how outdated everything was, and how much needed to be done to fix it all.
Which brings us to now. Chris is getting ready to launch a new Patreon-based project aimed at creatives of that age where they are retired, or considering retirement, and dealing with all the huge life-changes and problems that go along with this transition. She planned to blog, but originally to Patreon directly (that plan has evolved). Still, she needed a web-presence of some kind, and we came up with the idea of making it a subpage of the Yorkwriters domain we already owned. And that left the problem of the dated old website there.
Well, I’ve historically been the tech/web person around here, but I just wasn’t enthused about doing that again. So Chris took up the slack, and has dived in, and taken this on herself, from moving our domain registrations, to picking a new hosting platform, to designing the new page. We nuked the old Yorkwriters page, and while we were setting things up, I decided it was time to try a blog again.
So here we are. Long form. I like long form. But I’m paranoid that most social media platforms out there discourage it. Is there a reason for this? Do contemporary audiences reject anything over 140 characters? Is too slow, too out of touch with the modern world? I hope not.
Because I’m doing it anyway.