I agree :( I'll try to do more blogging. I tend to have ideas for posts more than I have time to write them out. Another possible strategy is for people - especially people like you with extensive and interesting back-catalogues - to reblog old posts, to expose them to your new friends/followers who didn't see them first time round, and to reignite discussion, perhaps in the light of any relevant social/political/technological changes that have happened since.
Also, the dwindling numbers should huddle together. There used to be Friending Frenzy memes. I can't remember quite how it worked. I think someone with a relatively large following would start a thread in which their friends could say to each other "friend me, I blog about X, Y and Z". The friends-of-friends page is a good feature for finding second- or third- degree connections who look interesting and who you want to follow, although I don't have a high enough tier of membership to have access to it myself. I used to use atreic's friends list as a pretty good substitute, because she knows everyone, and her friends list includes a pretty big subset of my friends-of-friends list.
That could work. Though personally I'm averse to identity and thrive on nuance and diversity. For me, "I blog about X, Y, Z" feels perilously close to "I am an x, y, z".
To some degree, it feels as though old-school blogging was more about following people who approached subjects in ways you found interesting than about following people who approached subjects you found interesting.
It doesn't have to be "I blog about X, Y and Z" - just any short blurb about why people might want to read your blog, which could be about its style or approach rather than its content.
Oh, and another thought: do you read Slate Star Codex? I find that (and its comment section, and its associated subreddit) is now my main source of the kind of long-form, erudite discussion that used to happen on LJ.
It's possible I should be on reddit, actually. It seems it's quite active in the fields of making and board-game design; if it's also active in Slate-Star-Codex-ism (whatever that is), that's another indicator.
Slate Star Codex itself is one of those curious things. People keep pointing me at fascinating articles there, but then I go take a look and find it quite bland with a slight lunatic fringe around transhumanism. I'm probably happy letting other people read it and feed me edited highlights. (-8
I miss it too. I tend to feel like I'm frantically short of time for anything like blogging, though. I've never been very prolific, but my blogging frequency took a nosedive probably about when the kids were born. A few years ago I remember I used to have a "potential blog posts" mental list similar to woodpijn's (though much shorter than hers), and it was rare for me to get around to making any of those posts.
Nonetheless, I did use to enjoy the discussions on blogs like yours, Rob's, atreic's and similar.
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I'll try to do more blogging. I tend to have ideas for posts more than I have time to write them out.
Another possible strategy is for people - especially people like you with extensive and interesting back-catalogues - to reblog old posts, to expose them to your new friends/followers who didn't see them first time round, and to reignite discussion, perhaps in the light of any relevant social/political/technological changes that have happened since.
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The friends-of-friends page is a good feature for finding second- or third- degree connections who look interesting and who you want to follow, although I don't have a high enough tier of membership to have access to it myself. I used to use atreic's friends list as a pretty good substitute, because she knows everyone, and her friends list includes a pretty big subset of my friends-of-friends list.
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To some degree, it feels as though old-school blogging was more about following people who approached subjects in ways you found interesting than about following people who approached subjects you found interesting.
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It's possible I should be on reddit, actually. It seems it's quite active in the fields of making and board-game design; if it's also active in Slate-Star-Codex-ism (whatever that is), that's another indicator.
Slate Star Codex itself is one of those curious things. People keep pointing me at fascinating articles there, but then I go take a look and find it quite bland with a slight lunatic fringe around transhumanism. I'm probably happy letting other people read it and feed me edited highlights. (-8
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Nonetheless, I did use to enjoy the discussions on blogs like yours, Rob's, atreic's and similar.
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Tackle them on LJ, and optionally encourage the friends who tweeted them to respond here?
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