Community, moderation, and blogging about nothing
I'm not going to name people or post a dozen links to example posts. I don't even check the Bear Discover feed every week, let alone every day. But it’s clear that one blogger called out another blogger here for, supposedly, meta-blogging positive posts about nothing and gaming the feed consistently. This produced a chain reaction of replies and follow-up posts. The included list of synonyms for boring and the personal naming was unnecessary in my view.
Discovery feeds tend to attract posts for attention anywhere you find them. Maybe it’s more prevalent these days because so many people have been engineered to expect a return on the time they take to write blog posts - attention and engagement is the payment for time spent writing. I'm sure there’s a transactional aspect at play. It may be annoying, it may encourage certain kinds of posts, but it’s not wrong. Having come from Wordpress, it’s all quite familiar.
To what extent should posts be moderated? What kind of community should Bear be? What are the lines around censorship? When one person - Herman of Bear Blog - runs the show, you have to accept their community standards. Nothing is perfect. No-one is perfect. This is not an operation founded on deep discussions about ethics and it's wise to recognise the limits of one developer running a community - the more it grows, the more diverse the opinions and writing. Some people will conform, others will agitate, and others will do their thing in a quiet corner. What's important in any such community is the willingness to reflect. But not everyone will be pleased. And sometimes, as in this case, a single post will be hidden from the feed for encouraging conflict and will ruffle feathers.
Personally, I find little meaning in blogging each day. I understand that some people have developed an expectation of what blogging should be - almost daily thoughts that don't have to be deep and meaningful - but this doesn’t interest me or reflect who I am. If blogging is to be authentic, it should reflect the core part of oneself - whatever that really means. I don't find lightweight daily blog posts interesting, but they're just a variation of self-expression and aren't inherently wrong. I take time out, reflect, write when I have something personally meaningful to say, and go back and edit. It's important to me that it reads well and isn't replete with errors. That’s my authentic self. Yours will be different.
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