There are several bloggers and writers I used to love, but now I find them dry or irritating. I’ve gone through the same cycle with each of them. If you want to go through it too, follow these steps!
1. Go to a popular blog. The Daily Dish will do in a pinch. Click around for a while until you see an interesting paragraph quoted from some other blog, and then check out that blog. Keep doing this until you find a fresh voice making arguments that you’ve never heard before, or never heard quite in that way.
2. Subscribe to this Fresh And Interesting Blog (FAIB) in your RSS reader of choice. Repeat step 1 if desired to find more FAIBs.
3. Read regularly, comment occasionally. You should start your own blog if you find that your comments regularly exceed three paragraphs. In this case, you will want to find several other FAIBs, and put them on your “blog roll.” A good way to do this is to follow links on the primary FAIB. After a few months you will find that you have a pretty good handle on how the primary FAIB will respond to anything. At this point, the FAIB has become a Predictable But Still Interesting Blog (PBSIB).
4. Realize that the writer who drew you to the PBSIB repeats himself or herself quite a bit. At this point, two things might happen:
(4a) The writer realizes this at the same time, and, through a combination of posting less frequently and actively aiming at new ideas, turns the PBSIB back into a FAIB. Return to step 3.
(4b) The writer, cozened into complacency by fawning readers or edged into defensiveness by hostile ones, stays in the rut and becomes boring at best, self-parodic at worst. The writer now produces a Predictable And Boring Blog (PABB). Continue to step 5.
5. Let posts from the PABB pile up in your RSS reader. Scroll through them out of a feeling of obligation once every two weeks or so.
6. After a month or so, ruefully remove the blog from your RSS reader, wondering whatever happened to that fresh and interesting voice you were so excited about.
Note: If you find that the writer hardly ever repeats herself or himself (step 4) over a long period of frequent posts, congratulations. You have found a very good blog.
Yeah, that’s why I date a new chick every 4-5 months. Hang around one too long and you find out she’s a crazy cat lady or something.Report
(I specifically got permission to post that comment before I posted it, for the record.)
More seriously, it depends on why you visit the blog.
I see The League, for example, as a group of guys at the bar. They take over the big booth in the corner and talk. This guy is the “libertarian nutball”, that guy is the “liberal nutball”, that other guy is the “paleo nutball”. Are they predictable? Hell, yes. They all go to the same bar, after all, and sit in the same booth, and yell about the same stuff. The beauty of the blog is that the folks all seem, pretty much, to like each other and argue with something approaching good humor.
Now there are other blogs that go out of their way to *NOT* be like a bar.
The mister-linky blogs like Instapundit round up links to everywhere but don’t offer up much of either community or commentary (there is a slant/bias, of course… but he’s got tons of plausible deniability if you try to corner him). Other blogs write (long!) essays much more infrequently and it’s hard not to see those as like sermons… and, yes, as a former evangelical, I can tell you that your minister will repeat himself. As a former evangelical, I can also point out that that is probably why he is your minister and not some other guy. When you tire of hearing about The Grace Of God for the umpteenth week in a row, you can go to the Babtists and hear about the fires of Hell or the ‘piscopalians and hear about how we need to be better stewards of all that God has given us or you can go to the Unitarians and hear about Christopher Columbus slaughtering the Indians who engaged in the practice of Gay Marriage… and you’ll quickly find out that the best indicator of the topic of next week’s sermon will be the topic of last week’s sermon.
If one really wants to be challenged, I find, one goes to the bar where people disagree with one. With good humor, of course. That part is important.Report
makes sense to me. i have read a few hilarious liberal blogs that make great fun of conservative hijinx, but I don’t expect to learn anything from them, nor do I bother to post at them.Report
A good point, Jaybird. This is just about the sermon blogs. Maybe it’s like growing up Presbyterian, then hearing your first Baptist sermon and being fascinated, then realizing that after a while it’s no more interesting than where you started out.
That being said, a good pastor is far more than a sermon machine, whereas the blogger-reader relationship doesn’t really go past posts and comments.Report
Until we can invent beer distribution via internet connection. Or maybe find some way to have an online first person shooter installed on the blog so that we could exchange rounds with the commentariat….
Just thinking outside the box here. Good post, by the way. No pressure or nothin’.Report
Would it be in bad form to note that Point 4 (Realize that the writer who drew you to the PBSIB repeats himself or herself quite a bit) is almost immediately preceded by a post from Freddie that begins: I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating? 🙂Report
Oh dear. Has the League reached PABB stage?Report
Jamelle gave us a new lease on life…
A thing about group blogs: like action teams, they need looks, brains, and a wild card. If you’ve got a good wild card, like Charlie from It’s Always Sunny, you’re good to go for an extra three or four seasons, I mean years.
I think we’re a PBSIB — but, remember, these labels are necessarily from the perspective of the reader.Report
As an individual blogger, I consider myself to be a clear example of BBRUWNFOMB. Fifty bucks to the first person who can decipher my code.Report
Big Brown F@#!ing Bomb?Report
The problem is that politics is cyclical and our problems endemic, and sometimes certain things have to be said more than once, and if the consequence of that is people getting bored, I guess that’s how it has to be.Report
There are some blogs I started reading only for their novel perspective. As Jaybird said, there’s other reasons to read blogs. I’m not a regular Greenwald reader, but when I go to him it’s not for the new or unexpected perspective; it’s for the argument. Know what I mean? We cool?Report
Of course we’re cool. Just saying.Report
Yes, mine is predictable and boring, but that’s the price you pay when you’re on a mission. I say the same thing ten different ways, then start over.Report
Meh. Repetition isn’t the worse blog-crime. I’m guilty of it on my own blog. Sometimes it can be like a call-back to an earlier joke in a stand-up routine, sometimes it can be like the chorus to a song. Others it’s like a signature or a catchphrase. (If I had a dollar for every time Glenn Reynolds used HIS catchphrase, I’d be a rich man indeed. Heh.)
The herd mentality (and its bastard cousin, knee-jerk contrarianism) is a much bigger bloggy annoyance, I’ve found.Report
The thing about repetition is that it can be perceived as just that when in fact it’s more of a process. I repeat myself endlessly but it’s mainly because I’m trying to work something out – publicly, like thinking out loud – and sometimes that means you end up repeating yourself but with a somewhat new spin. Or you are trying to unearth something deeper but to do that you have to cover old ground. I’m not saying this quite how I mean it, but I think what I mean is that sometimes the repetition is only part of the whole picture, and in reality it’s a work in progress rather than merely stale. Maybe I’m wrong.
Freddie’s point is also spot-on.Report
I keep trying to start my own blog, but I feel like I rarely have enough to say – and when I do, it’s easier to say it here.
But you’re right generally. This, combined with Jaybird’s point, is why I don’t much read the Dish anymore, but still frequent the Atlantic for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blog.Report
Will:
That reminds me. When was the last time you saw Kausfiles linked to from a high- or near-high-profile blog?Report
P.S. – This is seriously the most depressing post I’ve read in ages. What a trajectory we all face.Report
There’s yet one other constituency at issue here: the blog author himself. See: http://snipurl.com/thmvt [underbelly-buce_blogspot_com]Report