Popularity contests
I read Coyote's Bubbles is a New Way of Recreating Old Problems which expresses so well why I am wary of this kind of thing. Not Bubbles specifically but the general mood. Which is that I try to stay away from anything that feels like a popularity contest.
Pretty early on I removed upvotes from my blog. Because I don't need to know that. But I didn't remove 'make discoverable'. My rationale, if there can be said to be one, is that the most recent discovery feed - the only one I look at - is just facts. These are the most recent discoverable posts. Fact.
The trending page... is opinion? I understand it's a useful metric for people in choosing what to read. I like that Bear has this baked in. But I'm choosing not to participate in that side of it either as a reader or blogger.
Directories versus Bubbles-like aggregators are the same. I've never submitted to any directories, as I didn't submit to Bubbles, but there I am. I like this, though, because it is a fact I have a blog that exists and it can be categorised in certain ways. That's actually very lovely and I link to lots of directories and enjoy using them to find new blogs. There's no algorithm to it, no popularity contest, no invitation to discuss that is so public and so far outside my own sphere.
I love to hear what people think of my thoughts. Email me, say hi, sign my whiteboard! You're all so lovely! At the same time, although I like hearing from individuals, I'm not interested in what the anonymous crushing weight of the internet en masse thinks of what I write. I like the idea my writing could reach anyone but I certainly wouldn't want it to reach everyone.
While I click the upvote button on people's blogs liberally I don't think a one-click metric is useful to me. Hence, I turned it off. I don't have comments and I wouldn't even if they came with the platform. I know myself and I'm not giving myself any excuses to get crazy about this stuff. I don't want to have to explain that 'free speech' doesn't mean you're allowed to break into my house to complain about how I shelve my books, and then invite thousands of strangers round to do the same.
Which is why I'm not on Mastodon and friends. I'm not saying I never will be and I fully understand why people are. I'm just fundamentally not that sort of person. What stopped me getting on Twitter or Facebook back in 2008 wasn't concerns about billionaires and privacy. It was my personality and a disinterest in social media. I still have my personality and the fediverse might be a nicer more private social media without billionaires but it's still social media.
It's perfectly possible to have a blog and use a platform without 'using the platform'. You can use Bearblog or whichever without touching the feeds or 'being part of the community'. No one expects all six hundred million or however many Wordpress users to be on the same page about stuff.
I'm still always coming back to an old fanfic maxim: don't like, don't read. Back in the day it seemed so redundant. Why would anyone click a story with a ship they didn't like and a description that didn't interest them? Welp, hatereading, ragebaiting, engagement farming, Bean Soup Theory, and the internet generally, has proven how illogical humans often are. I'm not clicking on stuff I don't want to read. And if I do accidentally that's on me. I can just jolly well click my way back out again.
Also because I'm old and have been on the internet a long time I can accept this happens and once your words are out your mouth there's very little you can do about it. Death of the author and all that. People who don't know me at all can decide they know what I think I mean (I mostly don't know what I think I mean) and do with that what they will.
Why do anything online then? Why have a blog? Well, these things serve us, the writers, in our own ways. I enjoy writing. It helps me think better. Having some sense of an audience, however nebulous, makes me both think and write better. I like giving other people things to read as they do for me, little gifts all round. I love meeting other people and finding common ground, relating to people across the void, sharing this wild trip.