Before I start with this, I want to take a moment to summarize a 2014 blogpost, “Why should we blog?“
- It allows for the accelerated exchange of ideas.
- You’ll make friends. If you write about what you care about, you’ll find yourself surrounded by people who care about the same things
- You’ll learn to think and write better. You’ll develop a record of your thoughts, and you can psychoanalyze yourself over time. The people who disagree with you will help you think more clearly
- You’ll save time. If you find yourself repeating yourself in different conversations, you can just write a blogpost about it and share the link with everybody.
Alright.
There was a period of time in my life where blogging was my favorite activity. And then I stopped. And now I’d like to start again.
In my Internet infancy, I used to have a website that was a “home page”, a sort of “about me” with my favorite jokes and links to games and so on. I used to post on forums like GameFAQs as well as a few semi-obscure message boards.
When I was about 13, around 2003, when food blogging used to look like this, I started blogging. First it was on Diary-X, and I was motivated by my peers. Diary-X closed down in early 2006, and all of those early blogposts are gone. I was pretty devestated by this, but a while after I started posting on LiveJournal. I worry that my LiveJournal will die the way Diary-X did, so I exported all of it at some point and I think I moved it to visakanv.com/archives – though now that I’m glancing at the two, I’m not sure all of it went over. Which… is something I’ll have to deal with.
Anyway.
I posted on livejournal fairly regularly, and had other friends who were on livejournal too. Blogging back then felt like confessionals – people were talking about their feelings more, their doubts and fears. I wonder if that’s a thing that young people do more than adults, and I wonder if concerns about “professionalism” and careers are what dampen “real talk”.
At some point I had written a blogpost about Singapore that I crossposted to sg_ljrs, and it got a bunch of comments. That made me happy and excited (to get a bunch of comments) so I did more of that, and developed a bit of a reputation and a following. I decided that that was going to be my beachhead into my new life– that I was going to become some sort of blogger/writer type person. I figured that if I did it well enough for long enough, I’d get some interesting opportunities that I wouldn’t be able to imagine yet.
(I think some of this thinking might’ve been from some of the books I read, but I can’t quite pinpoint it to a single thing. The Internet always seemed like a magical land of opportunity to me, and I didn’t understand why other people didn’t see it that way.)I decided that I was going to re-take my A’s as a private candidate, and document that process, and become a tutor for underachieving smart kids.
In 2009 I wrote to the Straits Times about some misleading statistics in one of their articles. The response and the public’s response got me motivated to keep writing and analyzing whatever was going around.
Eventually, in 2012, I actually got invited to the Istana to chat with the PM. The post I wrote about that got a lot of attention, and I got a bunch of invitations and job offers. I met @dineshraju for coffee and ended up working at ReferralCandy, where I worked work happily for the next 5.5 years. During that time I helped to grow the ReferralCandy blog from about 1,000 hits a month to around 120,000 hits a month.
I started work in February 2013, and in June 2013 I found myself feeling overwhelmed by Singaporean politics and “the sociopolitical blogosphere”. I posted about it on Facebook:
I think I need to take a complete break from thinking and/or talking about Singaporean politics/journalism. It’s incredibly exhausting just to keep up with everybody. Every 5 minutes “we are finished”.
If there’s a divide, both sides think the other is trying to screw everybody over. Trying to plead moderation gets you labelled a “pappie apologist” by one side, a “blogger with a personal agenda” by the other.
What are we fighting for, again? For people who fight over Hello Kitty dolls and sell N95 masks at profit?
I’ve had enough. I need a time-out.
I don’t know what happened, exactly. I think I was feeling in over my head at work, like I didn’t have enough time and energy to be growing in my role while also running my own blog. I had started /1000/ at the end of 2012, and I wanted to write there, too.
I guess Facebook also started becoming more popular – it’s easy to forget that Facebook itself has changed a lot over the years. The Like and Share features were game changers. My Facebook statuses became increasingly elaborate, and they became a more direct and addictive way to share my thoughts with my friends – and I think quite a bit of my “blogger impulse” was funnelled that way. I was also posting on Quora a lot around 2012.
So somehow or other, my blog started to sputter. I didn’t want to blog about local politics anymore. I was busy with work. I was working on a writing project on the side. I was posting on Facebook and Quora. I didn’t really have a clear direction or goal for my blog any more, and it sort of dissipated.
I was still definitely writing a lot. I’ve been tweeting a lot in the past year or so. I’ve been a free agent for a couple of months at the time of this writing, and I find myself being drawn here again. I want to blog again. I think I’ve been using this space as a sort of public-facing notepad – I thought it would be clever to have a sort of ‘keyword-driven’ perspective, where I could type in visakanv.com/blog/word for any word and see what my thoughts are on that. But that turned out to be a bit of an overextension, and I found myself overwhelmed and confused.
Anyway.
I want to blog again. I’m a little nervous, because a part of me thinks that the blog is dead as a medium. But I don’t think that’s true. Ribbonfarm still exists. Slatestarcodex exists. I think there’s definitely always a demand for high-quality blogposts about interesting matters. I saw this happen at work, I’ve seen it happen elsewhere online, too. I think where I “messed up” was… I was so anxious to stop being so public-facing, to stop pre-empting what I thought people wanted to read, that I went into this weird, fragmented, disheveled, incoherent headspace. There was something interesting about that, but it’s not wise to make a blog like that. A blog should be welcoming to readers. So… I’m going to start cleaning things up around here.