I had in mind a post whose central thesis was, "Ragequitting a blog (as a reader) isn't very effective at whatever it's supposed to accomplish." Ragequitting is when you announce loudly that you're going to stop reading. This hasn't happened to me recently or anything, I was just thinking about the general phenomenon.
Alas, this will not be a very substantial post, since my argument is too brief. When you quit reading something for political reasons, the blogger knows all too well that you are vastly outnumbered by people who quit reading for much more mundane reasons. For example, length.
For my part, I have stopped reading a number of blogs simply because there were too many fluff posts. I stopped reading Skepchick because I didn't care about their various regular posts. After many years I stopped reading Bad Astronomy, because of too many posts about... I don't remember exactly. Nothing political about it, and nothing against those blogs.
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
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2 comments:
I can see ragequitting being effective if you're influential and you take others with you. Given internet call-out culture, there must be blogs where the owner has said something that the crowd disagreed with and then a large chunk of them moved away, and started badmouthing the blog on their own sites, that've never really recovered.
It's not an effective strategy for the *individual*, maybe, but if you're willing to actually spend some time over the ragequit and manipulate others to follow you, it becomes very effective.
The End of Ragequitting.
No endorsement or condemnation; just an interesting perspective.
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