To comment or not to comment

There's a very interesting discussion going on about commenting on blogs that I feel compelled to add my penny's worth to. Casey Morgan blogged about the lack of comments on some of her posts and wondered why her blog seems to attract less posts than other bloggers. If you've read Casey's blog you'll know it's nothing to do with the frequency and quality of her writing.

Thinking back to my own blog beginnings, one of the reasons that I was reluctant to start one at all was that I knew I would judge myself and the success of my blog by the number of comments I got.

My biggest fear was starting a blog that no-one would ever engage with or contribute to. So my first blog post was a bolshy warning that the blog was for me, not the reader and I'd only post as I felt like it. (Funnily that's the only post on this blog that didn't attract a single comment!)

It was also a while before I told any of the established bloggers about it, sure if no-one knew I had a blog then I could hardly expect to have any comments right? But within a week of blogging, I became addicted to getting comments and posted every day for 100 days, so motivated by what people wrote.

So I can empathise with Casey. As she puts is so well:

"I’ve been giving some thought to the subject of blog comments. We all like getting them. They make us feel heard and appreciated. Conversely, it’s easy to feel, when a post receives few or no comments, that people don’t love you."

In response to her I wrote that I was quite guilty of lurking on her blog and rarely commenting and tried to figure out why that was. It is certainly true that I am less inclined to comment on the blogs of people I have never met which includes all the bloggers across the pond. I'm a much more frequent commentator on the blogs of the Irish and UK players I know. And my propensity to comment increases with how well I know them, often using the blogs to stay in touch in between parties and weekend visits.

But the other side of it is that it's much harder to comment on a post that is powerfully written, or is deeply thought provoking, meaning it's easier not to think about it or try to formulate a reply to, which is certainly true for some of Casey's posts.

Serenity then took up the reigns of the discussion with her perceptive analysis of commenting in general. She talked about the different types of posts, some that talk of personal lives and issues outside of kink that are not always fluffy and light and therefore attract less comments.

I can agree with that, while in general this blog is light and fluffy, there are times when I am quite serious or angsty and those posts get less comments than my giggling over shopping or describing my play scenes. But while this frustrates me sometimes, I'm very conscious that I do the same thing myself when reading something more serious on other blogs, finding it hard to come up with something worthy of a reply to such a great or thoughtful post.

Another great point Serenity made was about the different types of blogs out there, dealing with different things, from the frivolous, to kink and play only, angsty or light, to real life deep issues. Just as each of us writes about different things and to varying degrees, we also like to read different things from blogs. Some don't want to hear about our personal lives, some only want to hear or see the beatings and some want to hear all the details while others likes some things held back. But that's their prerogative and shouldn't influence what we write.

When I started this blog I very consciously decided not to write anything personal on the blog, as in none of the angst of my day to day life goes up here. Just because, like everything else about my kinky life right now, my blog is pure escapism from real life. If I ever get to a stage where I have a partner and kink becomes more than just weekend visits interrupting reality then my blog may change to reflect that. And for different reasons, which I've discussed previously, I purposely don’t write about my sexual experiences here either.

My point is that we all make personal decisions about to what degrees we write on our blogs and we all chose what we want to read. Just because I don't write about personal life or sex doesn't mean that I don't like or don't read blogs that do discuss these things.

Our blogs are our own space and they shouldn't be edited to conform to a populist readership. And while it can be hard not to validate ourselves though the number of comments we get, we have to tell ourselves this is not a popularity contest.

Of course that's easier said than done but I have to remind myself that my greatest achievement with this blog is not all the comments or the level of traffic, but all the posts I've written, the thousands of words that I agonised over and the pride I feel when I read them.