I’ve found that no matter how hard you try to keep the quality of your blog high you’ll eventually end up posting something that’s utter crap, even more so if you go for the silly idea of blogging on a regular basis. This particular blog is a good example of that as whilst I’m overall satisfied with the level of quality stuff I’ve written over the years there’s more than a few examples of me trying to shit when I didn’t have to go and ending up posting something that does little more than keep this blog alive in Google’s search algorithms. Still this won’t stop me from pointing out when others crap out posts that add nothing of any value to anyone, especially when the articles are pulled directly out of their asses.
One of my favorite blogs who I regularly use as a punching bag here is Techcrunch. Don’t get me wrong there’s a reason that I keep coming back to them everyday for my fix on up and coming companies (I’m mostly watching for competitors) but they do have a habit of making news out of innocuous crap in order to generate some page views. From creating recursive posts with 0 content to wild speculation on new products without little to no research they’re no strangers to peddling out shit to their readers and seemingly act surprised when a vocal bunch of them begin trolling them. With the volume they put out though its inevitable that a percentage of their content will end up like this, but that doesn’t make up for the fact that it adds nothing to the value of their site or the wider Internet.
And rightly meta-blogging like this is similarly of low to zero value as all I’m really doing here is belly-aching about a much more successful tech blog. I try to avoid posts like these wanting instead to give my readers the information behind the news so that my posts can stand by themselves (and as a result age well) but a combination of lack of inspiration, seeing one of these 0 value posts and having this thing in draft for a couple weeks finally pushed me over the edge. You’d think the irony would be getting to me, but I’m just happy that I can satisfy my OCD for the day by getting this thing written.
I think the biggest issue I have with this kind of blogging is that when big sites do it the smaller ones follow suit turning the non-news story into a story in itself. I pride myself on not laying on the bullshit too strongly here and if I can’t verify something I just don’t write about it (or flag it as opinion). Unfortunately in the rapidly paced world of online news there’s really little time to allocate to fact checking a story when it hits, leaving you with the undesirable option of either reporting it verbatim or missing the boat by attempting to verify the story. My rule of posting once a day negates this problem (and also helps keep me sane) but also negates any benefits of posting on hot news as I’m often behind the times. I’m not a news reporting site however, so the impact on me is quite minimal.
When you’re making a living from the number of page views that come to your site it is understandable that you’ll do anything to keep that number high. Hell even just having a higher page view count can make you feel pretty good (like it did back when I first started this site) but in the end being proud of your work feels a lot better. I might change my tune when I finally think about monetizing this site, which could be coming soon since I moved this to a proper server, but that won’t change the fact that I’ll hate on those who aren’t providing any real value and I encourage anyone to point back to this post should I start playing fast and loose with the quality content just to keep the page views up.
