With great platform power comes great reader responsibility

You probably recognize the inspiration behind the title. Even though Voltaire coined the phrase, most people likely associate it with Spider-Man:

With great power comes great responsibility.

That quote came to mind as I was thinking about my new choice of platform for this blog.

Micro.blog offers many useful and convenient features: photo albums, a book tracker, sharing bookmarks, a natural way to post status updates, and more…

I’ve been using several of them since I moved here. It’s both pretty awesome and also kind of “awful”.

What I mean by that isn’t that there’s anything wrong with the platform itself. There’s not — it’s great!

What I mean is that the feed can get pretty messy for anyone following the blog. Lots of updates, and many of them showing up as Untitled. Not exactly a great experience. Imagine a reader wading through dozens of untitled snippets just to find a longer piece. It’s not ideal.

The options

Sure, I can tell readers there’s a separate feed if they only want to subscribe to the longer posts, but it’s hard to get that message across clearly. Most people will just end up in the default feed.

Another option is to run two blogs, but that feels a bit clunky. I tried that with robertbirming.com and never really felt comfortable with it. With Micro.blog, it would be smoother, but I’d have to upgrade to a Premium account, which costs ten times as much.

A third option is to take the attitude that it’s my blog and I can do whatever the hell I want. Which is true, of course. But I do want people to be able to read it in a way that makes sense – and it’s the longer pieces I’m most passionate about (along with photography). Providing a good reader experience for the content I truly care about is the most important thing to me.

Then, of course, there’s a slight possibility that most people think a blog that’s all over the place is a joyride. But I doubt it.

Going forward

Anyway. For now, I’ve decided to delete everything except the longer texts and the photos.

I’m not sure what the setup will look like long term, but I feel like the best thing is to start small and gradually add more if it feels right. It’s so easy to want to do too much too soon — at least for me.

This decision, much like the idea of great responsibility, is about being mindful of both my readers and myself.

To wrap up, I’m including my contribution for the MB photo challenge day 14: Twilight. It’s from Koh Chang, Thailand. 📷🇹🇭