I just cleaned my blogroll by unfollowing many of the blogs that I used to follow. I know that people are going to whine about how mean I am, so I will explain once and for all why I unfollowed them. There is a blogging etiquette that one should be aware of if one has been blogging for years. Of course, it's anybody's right not to follow the rules of this etiquette but then such people shouldn't complain that they are losing followers.
So these are the reasons why I unfollowed you:
1. You are rude. If I followed your blog out of the goodness of my heart just to give you a single follower, the least you could do would be return the favor. I don't care all that much about the number of followers. Many of my best readers can't be followers because they don't have their own Blogger profiles. I do, however, care about manners. When somebody does something just to be nice, you reciprocate.
2. You keep inundating my blogroll with endless posts explaining why you haven't blogged in a while and promising to write soon. This is simply disrespectful of a person's blogroll. Who has the time to sift through excuses in search of actual posts? I certainly don't.
3. You think that the fact that I followed your blog and left a few nice comments entitles you to persecute me with unsolicited advice on how to improve myself as a blogger, academic, and a human being.
4. You censored my comments that didn't have a single disrespectful word just because I expressed an opinion you disagree with politically while inundating everybody with posts on the importance of free speech. Hypocrite.
5. You are boring. People who know me in real life are aware that there is nothing worse I can say about a person than that they are boring. Every other defect can be forgiven and compensated for but boring people I simply can't stand. I'm willing to give anybody a chance to prove they are not boring but a time comes when the truth can no longer be denied. I can't see any more boring posts in my blogroll.
6. You posted one too many photos of your cat. I can vaguely understand why people might love their cats. What I don't understand is why I should be expected to follow a blog that publishes a dozen posts with cat photos one after another.
As a result of these purges I now have only 203 blogs in my blogroll. This is not a lot since most people publish seldom and interesting posts are hard to find. Out of all these blogs I follow, I read very few on a regular basis. As for the rest, I just keep hoping that they will finally produce something worth reading but that almost never happens.
13 comments:
I have never understood what it means to "follow" a blog. I just click to the url of any blog I want to read. Yours is one of about a dozen that I read fairly regularly.
For some reason you do not list yourself as a follower even though you regularly comment (great comments to I would add). Not that it is a big deal. :)
Oh no, I am your follower. My profile just doesn't have my picture. Which I'll try to change soon.
Who is a 'follower' or a 'followee'? I don't use my blogger account anymore so I don't know. I thought the 'following' thing was meant for twitter.
You can see the followers of my blog in the right hand column of this page. When I follow blogs, I can see the new posts they publish the moment they appear right from my Dashboard. It's very convenient.
That's cool. I follow your blog there though and I still have to come here to see if you have new posts :). Actually I know you always have new posts. Maybe it's because I'm usually on wordpress.
Oh, this reminded me that I need to go and follow some blogs! I usually just put a link up on my own blog to me favourites and forget to actually follow them.
Can I add a reason? People who think that if they can't really be bothered to write anything on their blog, it will satisfy their readers if they just post a picture of every single meal they eat, or snack they have in a cafe, or smoothie they whip up on a grey morning, etc... I don't mind people posting about food now and again, but when once lovely blogs that have turned into an endless series of bad photos showing half eaten food, I'm gone.
Oh, and people who ONLY write about being pregnant or posting pictures of their children. Thank you, but no thank you...
I'd have thought there'd be very little "need" to follow your blog, except to show your appreciation of it. You publish far too regularly for your posts to slip through the cracks, as it were.
The rest are, of course, perfectly valid reasons.
Yes, the cats and the dull people. I don't follow 200 blogs because too many are dull people with their cats.
OK, I still have no idea what it means to follow a blog, nor how to do it, nor whether it saves any time, or what. I cannot imagine that it saves time; I always get to the url of a blog I want t to read very quickly.
I looked at my own blog (to which I post only rarely) and could not see that I have any followers, but maybe I just don't know where to look.
PT: You can see it in your Dashboard. There, you will see that I am your follower. :-)
Thanks! I figured out how to do it. Now i have to figure out what difference it makes.
It doesn't really make any difference. Except that some of us (namely, me) have this weird dream of having 200 followers one day. It changes nothing in practical terms but it will feel nice. :-)
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