collaborative post - what motivates you to write for an audience?
This collaborative post is a project that I (the host) and my friends from our Discord server have been working on for the past few days. Our community is small and made up of mostly bloggers who are active on Bear. We all have a passion for writing, tech, and creative work. If you'd like to join us, then send a DM to crizz89 on Discord to ask for the invite.
Kami
Heya! Kami here.
So, why do I blog in public?
Mainly, it's because I love reading blogs.
Lemme explain.
I used to pretty regularly read random, abandoned blogpost blogs.
I loved getting that sort of glimpse into the life of a complete stranger. It was honestly fascinating. It still is! I think there's something magical about blogs that are written without the expectation of being read. Blogs that are little more than a publicly accessible diary. There's just something fascinating about them, something so refreshingly human.
Anyways, reading all those blogposts gave me the inspiration to start my own blog in sort of the same style. I wanted my own personal digital message in a bottle to share with the world. That's how I started out. The blog still is that, to some extent. I do still write primarily for myself, but the format has shifted. Now, I usually have a topic I want to write about - something specific that I want to say. Back when I started out, I'd just sort of ramble about anything that came to mind. I've definitely changed formats, mainly because I just find my current way of doing things a lot more enjoyable to do on a schedule. You can only do so many consecutive stream of consciousness posts before you run out of interestings things to talk about.
Another reason that I blog is for my own entertainment. And I don't mean the joy that i get out of writing blogposts (though that definitely is fun), I mean that in the sense that I read a lot of my own blogposts. Generally, whenever I get bored, I just go and read my own backlog. Because, well, I try to write the kind of stuff that I would want to read. I write the blogposts that I wish I would have stumbled upon back when I was still reading random blogspot blogs. And, evidently, it works. I've probably read most of my posts five or so times by now. I think that also takes a bit of the pressure off of publishing things. Because, even if noone cares, I will still have more reading material.
I do really appreciate the reception I've gotten on bear, however. I have yet to have a negative interaction with anyone on here. The only emails I've gotten have been really positive. It's awesome to see that there's people out there that like my writing. Before this blog I had never really shared what I wrote publicly. I mean, I had a website, but it wasn't like I advertised it anywhere. It's so strange knowing that there's now over 3,000 people that have seen one of my posts. It's made me a lot more confident in the stuff that I write. It's also just awesome connecting with other people that are also into blogging. I hadn't really known anyone who cared about this hobby before I got on bearblog. But, now I do! It's fun knowing people that share that interest. It's fun participating in these sort of writing events. I don't think I've ever written this much either. It's a shame people never really talk about the community aspect of sharing your stuff online like this. It's all so focused on views, audience retention and monetization, yet noone seems to mention how awesome it is to just share your art for other people to see.
So, yeah. I don't really write for an audience. I write mainly for me. But still, it's been so fun to put it out there, and to have people tell me they enjoy the things I make. So while it's not the main factor for why I keep doing this, its definitely been one of the reasons why I've been enjoying writing so much as of late. So, If you're reading this?
Thank you. I really appreciate that.
Cris
I heard somewhere a long time ago that "writing is thinking".
I do feel that. When I write, my thoughts become more coherent. As my fingers clack away at the keyboard, I can always find the exact words to describe precisely what is on my mind. Not only that, but I can do that at a typing speed of just over 90 words per minute on average, so I don't even feel any significant delay between what I think and what I see on the computer monitor. Typing, like almost no other activity, almost effortlessly gets me into the "flow" state.
However, there's something else that is more important to me: Typing my thoughts away through a keyboard on a text editor feels relieving, and I really want to emphasize this aspect: So very often my head feels like a balloon that is about to pop from being inflated beyond its capacity by all the meandering musings that accumulate inside of it throughout the day. The headache is real. It is physical. I feel it, and I also feel the intense sense of relief when I finally get my thoughts out of my head and onto the screen.
Another aspect that I care about is "legacy". I could have been the author of Meditations, if I had lived in antiquity. Had I been born in any year previous to 1450, I can't imagine that I would not try to learn how to read and write just for the purpose of recording my thoughts. In fact, I might have attempted to become an old-fashioned scribe and used my spare time and the resources available to me to secretly "press" my personal "ponderings" onto parchment or papyrus. I would want to do that to make sure that my "essence" survived along with my thoughts. My personality, my experiences, my opinions, all of that would have continued to exist long after my body had decomposed to turn back into the dust that it was formed out of. I would have passed into the grave satisfied in the knowledge that while my body died, my "soul" "lived on".
I haven't quite figured out why "becoming forgotten", which is a fact of life for almost every human being who has ever lived and breathed, is such an unpleasant thought to me, but I won't digress now. I'll just say that, publishing my writing also "relieves" me from that fear to a certain extent.
In antiquity though, it would have been less likely for me to become a "published author", much less if my mere thoughts and opinions were all that I wrote about. Copying written material was costly, and only the wealthy could afford to invest in that venture (which very of them even saw any value in).
Along with soap, towels, toilets, and wet wipes, this is one of the many reasons why I am thankful to have been born in 1989: I got to experience the Internet, which enables even a lowly, almost illiterate peasant like me to write out and publish his own "meditations", thereby potentially immortalizing them with very minimal costs and effort. Anyone can have a "legacy" now, one that is even more likely to survive into the ages.
I am convinced that far more exponentially than even Gutenberg's movable-type printing press, the Internet completely democratized freedom of expression, and with that, for better or for worse (and I'm sure you'd agree that we've all become keenly aware of "the worse"), it once and for all unified the collective human consciousness. We've become a mega-organism of sorts, an interconnected processing unit parsing the thoughts of billions of individuals. As decadent as society may appear, I like to dwell on how awesome (in the sense of giving me "awe") this new reality is, and how this "interconnectedness" also sped up our development, thereby greatly improving our overall quality of life.
I digress yet again though... It's easy to do that when a limitless canvas in the form of a text editor so invitingly offers its space to the never-ending fountain of thoughts that my brain is.
Anyway.
So, releasing the pressure valve that keeps my innermost thoughts pressing against the inside of my skull is one of the reasons why I write. Leaving behind a legacy that will (hopefully) continue to inspire, encourage, and educate dozens, hundreds, or potentially thousands of people, who might get exposed to the life experiences that I aggregated in my writing, is one of the reasons why I make my writing public.
There's another reason though.
I hate to "because of how I was traumatized as a child" you, but it's a fact: My father was mostly absent in my life, not because he wanted to, but because he mistakenly thought that he needed to. Simply put, he was always working. I mean, always. Those Nintendo consoles and games didn't pay for themselves after all, nor all the food, and clothing, and school materials that four small children (me being the oldest) needed. It was an agreement that him and my mother made, that she would make sure that the house and the kids were taken care off, so that my father could basically come home to eat and sleep, and not worry about anything else. That part of the plan that they had planned for, well... worked out as planned. They only realized when it was too late though, that I grew up feeling invisible, because they never had any time (let alone patience, since they were always feeling completely burnt out) to give me attention.
Video games were one console-ation (I'll see myself out) that kept me distracted from my neglect-driven anxiety growing up. Forming close bonds with "the wrong crowd", desperately seeking that attention from outside of the family, was the other coping mechanism that got me into so much trouble and led to some truly traumatizing experiences in my life, even into my mid-20s.
Yet one day, sometime when I was probably around 13 years old, I found myself in my bedroom with a computer and an Internet connection.
At first, I searched for websites related to the video games that I cared about. The Internet, however, even back then (or maybe even more so than today), had a way of naturally leading those who journeyed through it to the kinds of services that allow any of them to "log their travels", if you will. The Internet, naturally, as Tim Berners-Lee designed it, wants to be user-generated (and I'd argue, mostly text-driven). It doesn't want to be corporate (which is why it feels so dirty, and corrupted, and confusing, and, to use a technical term, enshitified now). In that spirit, some of the old services offered around 50MB of space for hosting static HTML websites. I taught myself some basic HTML, and I was off to the races. I had discovered writing and online publishing. That period felt magical. It was so romantic. Truly. I remember it with fondness.
I then later discovered blogging, and the rest is history.
Going back to my "trauma" though, it "tickled" my brain right from the very first day that, when I "surfed the web", I could write something on there, and someone would read it. Honestly, it still tickles me. Doesn't it tickle you? Isn't that just such an insane thing? I almost can't wrap my head around it. It just feels so empowering. I don't know how else to say it.
It gets better though: On top of that, you can get feedback!
This leads to the final reason: I journal in public because I want the feedback.
I think that it goes back to the "legacy" aspect, but in a slightly different way. It feels good to vent into the void, but at some point, that ceases to feel satisfying for me. What does fill my need for attention, is when my thoughts bounce off those of another person. Then I feel seen, heard, and acknowledged. I write and get feedback, therefore, I exist. That's how I would word it if I was a philosopher. Said differently, I (specifically) "journal" (meaning, I don't just write essays, but I also write about "myself", even about mundane aspects of my personal life), because when I get feedback from doing so, I feel connected to other humans. In real life, I can get that feeling from only a small amount of people, on occasion. On the Internet, I can get that from potentially thousands. Again, for better or for worse, that feeling is addictive.
This leads me to a final aspect of my experience blogging throughout the years:
Some of the parts of my personal life that I want to share with and connect with others through... aren't exactly appealing to a lot of people. Sometimes, I even end up feeling embarrassed about them myself. Yet other times, like when I used Facebook as a young adult, I even get in trouble for airing my thoughts out in public.
I have, therefore, many times, attempted to suppress my real need to write, publish, and engage with feedback online.
It never lasted for long.
Maybe I am traumatized. Maybe I'm just self-centered. Maybe this is just who I am. (My parents hate this about me, by the way. They are incredibly private people.) Either way, I need to write. I must write. In public. If I don't write, I lose my mind. I truly do. I've experienced that many times before.
I can still be insecure about my writing though. So, it should not surprise you, that I designed and deleted hundreds of my small little static HTML pages in my teens. I did the same with blogs. The longest that I ever stuck to a blog, was during 2024, when I tried out Substack. I then got tired of that, deleted it, and found Bear Blog. Here, I have started and deleted at least a couple dozen blogs already, and that's despite the fact that I pay the monthly premium (I think that this platform really deserves that money).
Yet here, I have also finally found a community of like-minded writers, and they have encouraged me to stick to my blogs for once, even if, with time, I feel embarrassed about something that I wrote in the past, or start to dislike the system or the style that I made use of before, because I found a new and shiny alternative. I won't have a legacy otherwise, and I won't be able to build enough of an audience to finally get the feedback that I crave (which might not always be positive, and I'll have to live with that).
At the moment, I am running four blogs on Bear, each meant for a different topic, along with a secret blog on a completely different platform that is the place where I anonymously share my most intimate thoughts: those that I don't want my real name to be attached to. It's all tame stuff, but I feel embarrassed about it still. I've been getting some positive feedback though, so that's also working out. I highly recommend this compartmentalization if your brain works similarly to mine: Have a persona, a "pen name" if you want, for the writing that you want to be unshackled by your societal duties and reputation.
Somehow I ended up turning this into an over 1,900 word-long essay, and I don't have a fitting conclusion for it. Anyway, the question is answered.
Winther
The primary motivation for me to have a public blog, is to add the type of writing to the Internet that I myself would like to read myself. Obviously, because things I am interested in is both topics I like to write and read about. Sort of the “be the change you want to see in the world” way of thinking. I also keep a private journal, but it doesn’t get the same kind of effort as public writings. It is a challenge to think about how to convey your thoughts so it makes sense to others. Compared to writing for just myself in a personal journal, usually end up in a “I know what I mean” type of writing.
It is sometimes easy to think that what you want to write about has already been covered by someone else, and that may be true, but I do think everyone can have an unique perspective that can be valuable for others to read. Like many people here on Bear Blog write a lot critical posts about social media. Sure, many of them have similar points and conclusions, but there is always a unique personal story behind. And that is what I like to read, and I hope that some of my posts has some value to at least one reader. One’s own experience and perspective can often feel banal and uninteresting to others, which it might very well be, but I often come across a personal blog post that manages to put into words a recognisable thought or a feeling I couldn’t formulate myself. The “why didn’t I think of that”-effect. There is value in putting something online, even though it might seem trivial or mundane. It can be inspiring to some random Internet surfer.
I have previously spent too much time discussing with other people on Reddit and other online platforms. The famous XKCD was me for at least 15 years. I don’t see it as a complete waste of time, though, as I did learn a lot, expanded my horizons on many blind spots and it has hopefully have given some me perspective for other people as well. But it was all ephemeral. Accounts and sites now gone or anonymized. A personal blog has the benefits of a personal journal in that I am in total control of my writing and how I present it online. Communication is slower, there is more friction involved in making a post responding to someone else, but that has many benefits. It puts a damper on the most quick kneejerk reactions. A post can stand on its own, be referenced to later, linked to and responded to. Unlike the endless discussions threads on sites like Reddit that is quickly drowned in the data masses.
edit: Pirate
There's a few reasons why I chose to write on a blog over writing in my journal. My journal is a bit more mundane, personal, intimate. I put thoughts in there and little notes so that if say my wife or daughter pick it up, they get a glimpse of who I am or what I'm going through in that moment. It's much more personal, and I want to keep that off the internet as it's a deeper dive into my day-to-day and my private life.
When I write for a blog, its to spread something. Awareness of an issue, a laugh, a critique, hope. I write on my blog in hopes that maybe it'll get read by some random person and it'll leave an impact in some way. I feel like in the vast ocean of the internet, the human experience gets widdled down for the sake of ad agency appeal, marketability, and appeasement of an algorithm.
Sometimes blogging can serve as a form of rebellion, a refusal to remain silent in a world that demands of you to shut up and conform. I could just keep my words on paper and never publish them, but would that help further the message I want to convey?
When I blog on a particular subject, the aim is to give anyone who stumbles upon it a different voice, something to attempt to break the infinite drone of online discourse. I want to make it more personal. I write on my blog like I'm writing for my friends, which in a sense I am.
If my blog post makes even one person laugh, helps one person see something differently, or realize they aren't alone in this world, I'll write until I can't type on a keyboard anymore.
Ava (me :))
I find it difficult to find a definitive answer to the question of why I blog in public and not keep it all private. I have repeatedly wondered why I don’t just keep it as text files on my laptop, a note on my phone, a page in my notebook.
Generally, I write to express what’s going through my mind, connections I see in the world, and to develop opinions and good arguments for the hunches and feelings I have. I always loved interrogating myself internally about why I think a certain way, had imaginary conversations in my head to argue for and against something.
Foremost, I would love to keep the results of that somewhere I can easily access so they aren’t lost or hard to find. I enjoy that a public blog is more readily accessible to me than just a file or paper somewhere. I can search through the contents and view it on any device whenever I need it, so it’s a great way to save arguments, or interesting tidbits and links for when I need them, and also to get myself back into the headspace of when I had these thoughts.
I don’t always relate to my older writing, but I have gotten more consistent, and less likely to wake up each week feeling like past-me is a stranger. Reading old posts has helped me empathize with someone I am no longer, while still technically being me. It’s great to view your own evolution, spotting things that are improving while others stay the same.
None of this requires the public to read it, though; so why is that?
The aspect of publishing for others to see seems to be a drive to make it known that someone thought this way once. It’s probably way too self-important, because writing on the internet is not likely to last, and who knows who will dig through terrabytes to analyze something? Maybe it’s just human to want to ram a flag into the ground, showing we were there, and that very flag giving someone reassurance when they stumble across it. I don’t want to spread my posts or be highly visible, I want them to randomly end up in someone’s lap just when they need it. I prefer to be a niche, an open secret, building a back catalogue by myself that I can look back on. I love that it exists for real life friends to look into and get to know me in ways they would have never thought to ask.
My relationship to being read is weird though - while I want someone to eventually discover it when they need or want to, I want it to take time, meeting people when it makes sense. I don’t write with the intent to be read immediately, or to get quick feedback (I don’t mind or reject it though, it is just a side effect I don’t plan to attract). I remember when I still used Tumblr years ago, being fed up with feeling like someone was always looming over me and what I shared. I used a sideblog to not show up in someones followers with it, I hid metrics of a post, I didn’t use tags, I hid the follower count via uBlock, and once introduced, I restricted the posts so they couldn’t be reblogged. I occasionally even went through the follower list and blocked and immediately unblocked people so it would make them unfollow me.
There is something weird about a fresh post, and you can see it in the way that I hide certain posts from the feed, or even hide them from the RSS. It feels off how it draws all the eyes waiting for entertainment to pass the time, hungry for novelty, alerted by a notification, and then enters the void of the feed, likely never to be seen again - at least on social media, which I am sure influenced my feelings. Blogs like this one are a bit more forgiving about the void by design, but still.
I like to think of my published posts as a library where one day, you choose to check out a post that is months or even years old, and it still feels like it was written for you that day, even if it was written for me. Like music, actually.
Also, now that I think more deeply about it: I have been feeling like we are losing something, and feeling the need to write and share things that inexplicably hold the essence of it, hoping we won’t forget, hoping that together with others, it paints a bigger picture of what was and why it’s worth fighting for. It doesn’t get more specific than that, but I feel it to be true.
Edit: Updated to include late submission from Pirate!
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Published 03 Sep, 2025