It’s hard to find new sources of written content these days. X deprioritizes links (even though they said they have brought it back). Social media, in general, prioritizes keeping the user on the platform. This means people rarely write outside social media, and it’s harder to find the ones who still do.
Hacker News and Lobsters are some of the last remaining places that surface content from individual blogs often, so those are my go-to places for finding interesting writing, but those are limited mostly to tech.
Finding interesting blogs is hard, but that’s a post (and maybe an app) for another day.
When I do find an interesting post, I do a quick check of other posts written by the author and occasionally, I end up spending an hour reading the archives.
I binge read blogs.
It’s that moment when you click on the archives and see at least 5–6 interesting titles. You know you are going to be spending the next hour or so reading every single post, multiple tabs open, going through them one by one, with each taking you closer to the author. By the end of it, you feel like you spent a long time chatting with them.
That’s what a good blog archive can do.
And this got me thinking… “What does this mean for me?” (and maybe for you)
When we are starting out or still small, we feel like we are writing into the void. Even posting tweets feels this way when you have few followers. It’s discouraging.
But what we are doing with every post, and every tweet, is building an archive for the future reader to find and binge.
The greatest gift we can give the reader of our blog is the archive. In return, the greatest gift we can get is the reader’s time, the fact that they stop whatever it is they are doing and give us thirty minutes or an hour to read through the archives.
This may not happen every day. It may happen only a few times. Even if it happens just once, where a reader binge reads our blog, the time you spent writing each post is suddenly worth it. It just takes one reader.
When you write your next post, don’t write it for the immediate reader. Write it for that one reader who is going to binge read your archive.
Your blog is a free streaming service, and you are building the catalog one post at a time.