Quite a few years ago, back in the early days of blogging before everybody and their brother had multiple blogs, there was a popular post asking readers to tell what they disliked about blogging. Surprisingly, the blogger posting this question was in the How To Make Money Blogging niche, so naturally, his readers were all bloggers, too. Even more surprising, there was a lot of negativity in the comments that day.
It’s one thing to give your readers a list of all the wonderful aspects of blogging and ask if they agree. But it’s quite another to list the things you think are wrong with your chosen profession, a profession you love. As you can imagine, it requires a lot of introspection and honesty, and as you can also probably imagine, it would have some surprising results.
Reading the comments under that original article I was floored. Some of them were so negative and they found so many things wrong with blogging. But then I realized that one of the rules for commenting that day was that nobody was allowed to say anything positive about blogging. It was strictly a day for honesty and introspection.
Remember now, this original article was published almost 10 years ago, so it’s not surprising that some of the complaints revolved around the lack of any reliable or robust blogging platforms. WordPress was still in its infancy and a few bloggers complained about the availability of reliable plugins.
But what I found interesting were the many complaints about the credibility of bloggers. One comment talked about new celebrity bloggers just coming into the blogging scene who couldn’t write worth a darn, had very little to say, yet seemed to attract huge audiences simply because they were celebrities.
Another commentor questioned the credibility of the entire blog because the blogger had a huge misspelling in the very first paragraph, The commentor said if the blogger couldn’t be trusted to proofread his content then he probably couldn’t be trusted to research his sources, either, so what was the point of reading. In his mind, the difference between a blog and a journal was that a blog should have some credibility.
What surprised me the most about this entire post and the comments that followed was that we still have these same “wrongs” today. Bloggers are always looking for a better, easier to use, more robust platform. It’s that quest for the perfect platform that keeps designers on their toes, creating something bigger and better every year.
But what about the comments about quality and credibility? If this conversation took place almost 10 years ago, you would think we’d have overcome these negatives by now, or at least taken a huge step in the right direction. Yet every where you turn the topic of conversation is either content quality or blogger credibility.
So, eight years later, I’d like to put two questions to you:
- What’s wrong with blogging?
- Do you think bloggers have a better reputation now than they did 8 years ago?
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!