Roy Tang

I haven’t been blogging too much recently. I got busy for a while and had to skip a few weeks, and then general laziness prevented me from resuming a regular posting schedule. (Hopefully that ends now.) Most of the time my ranting was on social media, which got me thinking: Is writing on your own blog still useful in this day and age of social media?

I’ve been blogging for a long time – my archives say 2002 – waaay before Facebook or even Twitter came around. If for some reason you felt like digging through my older posts you’d find that I kind of used the blog like Twitter or FB: I’d have some short posts, updates about what’s going on, share some links, and so on. These days we have social media for that, so why blog at all?

Well, social media is a perfectly valid channel to post your thoughts obviously. But I feel like blogging serves a different purpose. And when I say blogging, I mean on a platform dedicated to blogging, preferably on your own server.

Here are the obvious differences/advantages of blogging:

1. Blogs are publicly accessible commentary. Contrast this with Facebook, which I use mostly for interacting only with family and friends. I sometimes make some FB posts public, but mostly on request because people want to share it. It would make more sense for me to have such content on the blog so that people can share it directly without me having to fiddle with post privacy settings on FB.
2. Blogs are long-form. Contrast this with Twitter’s post-length limitation and even Facebook where I also tend to spout out one-liners or short paragraphs. I like a blog post for longer, more detailed content. Twitter users use workarounds like the “1/N” format to post longer text content, but I’m not really a big fan of that.
3. A blog should contain your own content. Contrast this with almost all social media where your own content is interspersed with retweets, shares, reblogs, and so on.
4. Blogs are searchable, either using your internal search form (I have one on the sidebar!) or via Google search. It’s a bit annoying sometimes trying to scroll through your FB or Twitter timeline trying to find something.
5. The above point means social media posts feel a lot more… ephemeral, maybe? I consider blog posts a lot more “permanent”, while social media are more of “at this point in time.”
6. Blogs are under your control. You’re not subject to someone else’s moderation. Of course that also means you’re on your own if you get DDOS’ed or such hehe. Well, there’s pros and cons of course.
7. You can still push your blog content to your other social media channels. I have systems set up to push my blog posts to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

That being said, the various social media channels have their pros too, so I still use them for various purposes. (I thought about splitting this blog post into two, but I literally just wrote about long-form content, so let’s try to justify that a bit!)

1. Facebook – I use this mainly to interact with friends and family and for sharing family pictures. There was a thread on reddit a while back about how a lot of people recommend quitting FB (or even social media altogether) since it’s not good for your self-esteem to be always checking how other people are doing. I find that this is really only an issue for people who already have low self-esteem and feel a need to compare themselves to other people (I guess teenagers mostly?). I don’t have any such issues. I like seeing how my friends are doing even if they’re people I don’t see often anymore and it gives you good convo material when you randomly run into them. I also tend to share on FB things I know will interest my friends and family, or at least some subgroup of them: family pictures, tech stuff, hobby stuff (gaming/MTG/comics), cat pictures, puns, memes, etc. I try not to dive into public groups too much, since FB has a low barrier of entry, the content/discussion is not that good IMO. My public Facebook profile is here.
2. Twitter – my twitter stream is public. I use it for interacting with strangers. (Sophie Turner never replied to me that one time!). Twitter has a higher barrier of entry compared to FB, so the discussion is a bit higher quality. When posting to Twitter, it’s typically a stream of consciousness thing for me – I just randomly decide to post things. On FB I tend to filter myself a bit as I don’t want to be too spammy, but on Twitter, I spam away about what I’m doing. If I’m playing in a big Magic tournament I’ll probably be tweeting every round about my horrible misplays. I will oft tweet about games I’m playing, books I’m reading, and so on. Same philosophy applies to sharing/retweeting: it’s a lot more impulsive, I’ll just share anything that looks interesting. My twitter feed is basically my FB feed except with less pics of people I know and more random thoughts throughout the day. If that sounds like your kind of thing, my twitter profile is here.
3. Instagram – quick story about how I got an instagram account. I tried to create one but found out that someone had already registered an account using my email. Of course I went ahead and used password recovery to take control of the account. It wasn’t very active so he probably didn’t mind, although I think some of his followers still follow me lol. I mostly post pics of food, board games, sketches, or random things I buy. You can view my instagram here.
4. Reddit – I use reddit more for content consumption. It can be shallow sometimes, but you can also find some good/witty/insightful convos. If I want to find some discussion about recent events or tv shows or movies, reddit is always a good place to look. The barrier to entry here is very high, so discussion tends to be higher quality than either FB or Twitter. (Still lots of shitposting though, that’s the internet for you.) I don’t publicly acknowledge my reddit profile, but it’s very easy to find haha.
5. Tumblr – just random odds and ends. It’s not very important, but I do have it. I used to use it only to reshare tumblr content I found amusing, but these days I also push sketches and blog posts to my tumblr.
6. LinkedIn – terrible! I’m not a fan of LinkedIn, as it seems to be mainly a way to get harassed by recruiters who didn’t even bother reading my profile. Still, it occasionally has a use so I keep it around and update my profile sometimes.
7. Quora – I’ve been reading Quora for a while now but recently also started answering questions every so often as a bit of writing practice.

Takeaways: Blogging is great, even if you’re already using social media. Try it out! Social media has its place too, but don’t let it control your life!