I've touched on this before. The LJ days were different. Enough people I knew were on the site that I'd spend some time browsing my "Friends" page, commenting on updates by my friends, responding to their comments on my own updates, and doing silly stuff. So content, in some form, flowed naturally. And it seems that there was a kind of migration to Facebook around 2008 or so. I don't like it. Not a topic that comes up much, but I check Facebook almost every day because it has essentially replaced the "Friends page" function that LJ had. Some people have deleted their Facebook accounts. I don't want to because its sheer success has given it the useful feature of linking me to people I hardly ever see in real life. But if it weren't for that, I'd get rid of it. And I loathe Twitter. Completely despise it. Twitter is cancer.
Blogger is fine, I guess. On LJ, I felt comfortable posting just a couple of sentences or a link. That meant I was posting more often. Combined with the social aspect, I was coming back to the site more often, which meant I was doing more long-form updates too. This is also why at the CPA, I write so much more than I do here. So I've been wondering about a change of format. There are posts floating around in my head, some of them have been floating around for years, and I don't take the time to write them because Blogger just feels like I'd have to sit down at my computer for several hours and type out the whole thing in one go. It's not even technically true. I could make multiple short posts, or save a post as a draft and come back later. But I'm just not on the site often enough. It feels like a chore. If this seems silly, I agree. It is silly. But that's where we're at.
So for about a year now, I've had this idea that what I should really do is change format, that I need to either change the way I think about Blogger or I need to use a different site. Updates here are depressingly sporadic. And browsing the volume of my content at the CPA, it occurred to me that maybe what I want is a message board. And that led me to two conclusions...
- This is silly. Message boards are for communities. I am not a community. I mean, I am a community of cells, but that doesn't count. I am one person. Starting my own message board for me would be crazy.
- Yes, that is exactly what I need! I could organize different fora for the major topics I like to talk about, start threads for more specific subjects, and add new posts to those threads as it suits me, sometimes long and sometimes short.
