“You should post about this more!”

When I tell people I started an old-school micro blog, this is often the response.

To be clear, there are no problems with this response — I take it as a compliment. People think this is a cool idea (hey, thanks!!) and wish more people knew about it.

But I also think it highlights just how entrapped we’ve become in the idea that everything needs an audience, especially online. The thing itself is almost secondary: it’s a means to an end; the audience is the end goal.*

Except…

What if I’m mostly just happy to do this for myself? I’m glad to have a place to record work related thoughts and processes and ideas and how I think about things. If other people find that interesting, I’m very glad to share it! Let’s be friends.

But I don’t need it to have an audience for it to be valuable. And I wonder how much more valuable (some) content could be if it was created for a much smaller audience, rather than trying to scale it to huge audiences.

(*Typically because that audience represents a unit of people who can then be sold to and “monetized”. And there’s nothing wrong with building an audience around your work, btw. I’m just suggesting it doesn’t have to always be the only or the primary end.)