This is me when I was 17-years-old. Just look at that jawline. Young, naive me had no idea what his silly journal would turn into.
Back when I started this journal, I had a simple goal:
Gain a better appreciation for my life by writing openly and frequently.
It was based on some wonderful advice I had read in Psychology Today on improving your quality of life. Journaling forces you to record and examine one’s thoughts and feelings, which can improve your perception of your life.
This has worked pretty well for the first 10-years of my blog when I had, like, ten LiveJournal friends who casually read about my depressing teenage life.
Now I’ve got ~2.2 million readers and everything is terrible.
I really enjoy having a large audience, but I find I cannot write in my journal like I used to. I have to use coded language to describe uncouth activities, censor myself, or (worst of all) pander to the lowest common denominator by posting sexy photos.
Writing for an audience is difficult because text and photos is an imperfect medium for communicating the nuance of my life. No matter how eloquent, detailed, or verbose I am, folks can take things out of context.
How bad could it be?
- I wrote some sexy fantasy stuff, and now there are people online who believe I use hypnosis to brainwash people into becoming my sex slaves.
- I talk about race issues in the bear community, and now some trolls claim I’m racist.
- I post sexy photos that get reblogged a lot, and am accused of being a narcissistic psychopath by people who cannot spell, let alone provide accurate psychological diagnosis.
It can’t be helped. Every year my audience inexplicably grows. Many of my readers are wonderful, delightful, intelligent people with good taste…and a few are trolls.
That’s just how it goes on the internet. You know you’ve “made it” when you get hate mail. Just ask Beyonce.
So, what do I do?
I miss my journal. I want to be able to write openly again…but, how? Some ideas:
- Make a private journal?
- Pros: I can be as candid as I want because I’m the only person who reads it.
- Cons: I lose the valuable audience-performer interaction that is so critical to my creative work. (Pretty good paper on this here).
- Offer paid-access content?
Backstory: I ran an experiment last month selling “I hate Noodles and Beef” shirts to determine the lowest possible price a troll would pay to harass me. Prices ranged between $1 and $10, and any purchased shirt would result in me donating $10 to the AEF. Turns out trolls are so cowardly, that they can’t be bothered to spend $1 (costing me $25 for the shirt and $10 for AEF donation) to harass me. A payment gateway of $1 would stop all trolls. - Pros: write about whatever I want, donate 100% of proceeds to AEF or LA&M.
- Cons: While effective in stopping trolls, I would alienate readers that are too frugal to pay for content.
- Move to Facebook or some other access-controlled blog platform?
- Pros: I am mostly free to post what I want, still get some audience-performer interaction.
- Cons: Facebook doesn’t allow adult content, Livejournal is a russian dating scam, I guess I could build my own platform but I’m lazy.
- Fourth option: you guys tell me.
I’ve been struggling with the big-audience problem for a few years and its only getting worse. It is time for me to make a change to my blog so I can start enjoying it again.
Any ideas?