are you a glancer? for 08/08

content/post/2023/08/are-you-a-blog-post-glancer.md

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+---
+title: Are You A Blog Post Glancer?
+date: 2023-08-08T16:00:00+02:00
+categories:
+    - braindump
+tags:
+  - blogging
+---
+
+I know I am. Allow me to explain myself. I'll be brief: the ratio of weekly new posts in my feed reader is just too high! Stop writing stuff everyone! No wait, wrong advice. Start trimming down blogs in your reader, Wouter! 
+
+Certainly, I could do that. But it doesn't solve the problem---_my_ problem. Which is: depending on my interest in the post at hand, I tend to glance over it instead of giving it a thorough read. I recently caught myself reading blog posts more and more diagonally instead of vertically. This evolution has a couple of reasons: our daughter is a time-sucking vampire, my RSS reader has too many subscribed feeds, my interests are shifting towards less technical blogs, some posts have zero content relevant to me, some posts are just too damn long, and some bloggers churn out posts faster than I can blink my eyes. 
+
+To be honest, I _should_ unsubscribe more often, but some bloggers now and then write something very interesting to me and most of the time release technical nonsense I don't care about into the wild. If I unsubscribe, I could miss out on another post that shifts my foggy brain cogs into gear. 
+
+So I glance over posts, I mark entire groups as read, and I slowly but surely transition from _reading_ to _categorizing_. I hope I'm not the only one doing this. I don't like the fact that I became a _glancer_. And I very much don't want other bloggers to think about a potential audience when writing: you're writing first and foremost for yourself. They don't like the length, the subject, or the amount of posts per week? Then they're not your reader. The last thing I want blogging to become is yet another commercial word engine optimizing for an audience and views. There's enough bullshit out there that dictates the length of an average post, suggests the best choice of words to optimize your SEO, provides 10 tips on making your post easier to read, and another lovely one: how to get people to read your entire blog post.
+
+Here's a question: do you read blogs the same way as you read books? I don't. That's not to say that I don't dare to skip pages or entire chapters when reading a book. But the formats are entirely different, and to me, so should the approach of the reader be. A book has been carefully curated. A blog post _could_ be as well, but usually isn't. For me, the physical shape of a book makes it somehow easier to digest its contents. I know this might come across as silly, but it somehow is, and I wouldn't know where to begin to explain that feeling. 
+
+I don't think blogging is useless, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it, and I very much love the resurgence---or at least my discovery of amazing online writers. I just think I need a better approach at digesting the content, apart from more aggressively curating my RSS feeds. I just can't handle the fire hoses and the pure technical blogs anymore. And that's okay. This problem isn't limited to blog posts, by the way: I recently gave up trying to be up-to-date when it comes to video games and attempting to play them. It's just too much. I'm starting to move from FOMO to JOMO: the _Joy Of Missing Out_. Partially out of necessity.
+
+A search engine query for _how to read a blog_ yields surprisingly little relevant results, while _how to read well_ spawns heaps of results related to books, including reading advice by C.S. Lewis et al.
+
+How _do_ you read a blog? By first glancing and then diving in?
+
+If so, I'm on the right track. 
+
+Meanwhile, I struggle to keep the _Brain Baking_ posts published at a steady pace, even though the ideas keep popping up...