10 Things I Hate About You (As a Blogger)

You broke my heart. So you leave me no choice: I have to break up with you.

Don’t get me wrong; it was fun while it lasted. You were always making me smile with your clever headlines and funny captions. And I’ll never forget all the times you thoughtfully gave me advice.

I thought we were a match made in heaven. I thought we’d be together forever. But you ruined everything. You took advantage of me. You weren’t faithful. You shattered my heart.

And now I have to dump you.

I’m sorry. Just know that I feel terrible doing it like this, so publicly, so abruptly, and so callously.

But someone had to. Or else you’d keep on trampling on innocent hearts of other readers.

Not that you probably care, but my therapist said it’d be good to get this off my chest.

Here are the 10 things I hate about you (as a blogger):

1. You neglected me.

We used to interact every day. When I woke up in the morning, I knew I could count on you having something interesting to say. But then you sort of just disappeared. Daily conversations turned into weekly, then monthly, and now you don’t post with any regularity at all.

I’d @mention you on Twitter and bare my soul to you in your comments, but all I got was radio silence.

2. You made it so hard to stay in touch.

You just weren’t available to me – I couldn’t find your RSS feed button, there was no obvious way to sign up for email updates – you didn’t even have an about page. I wanted to reach out to you, but you were never there. And from now on, I won’t be either.

3. You lied to me.

I used to hang on every word you said. Every sentence was an a-ha moment I could take with me to work. But then I started to find out that your intellectual advice didn’t hold up in my practical world. You presented statistics without verifying their accuracy. You broke news that turned out to be rumor.

I trusted you and you made me look like a fool when I presented your best practices to the rest of the people at my job. It was humiliating. And you told me I should just get over it – that it’s only a blog!

4. You started to sound just like everyone else.

You used to be so unique. You had your own voice and you played by your own rules. You didn’t care what the suits had to say – you called it like you saw it. You were a rebel. But all the attention is softening you. The other day you used “leverage synergies” in a headline. It broke my heart to see you go so corporate.

5. You seemed so desperate for attention from other readers.

I can live with the fact that you might have a wandering eye, but you didn’t have to be so obvious about it. You know I’m a loyal reader but you keep asking me to subscribe with long, invasive forms, begging me to Retweet you and insisting that I share your stuff with my friends.

I used to tell them how great you were in my own way, but you wanted me to use that formal template on your website. It felt so … clinical.

6. You were too needy.

First you wanted me to subscribe, and that was fine. But then you jammed the ebook down my throat, wanted to charge me for access to your most intimate thoughts, kept interrupting our dates with pop-up ads, every link I trusted you enough to click on tried to sell me something, and you didn’t give me any warning!

Listen, I’m here to support you, but I’m not in this for charity. I need a relationship that centers on respect.

7. Your attention drifted.

When I met you, you were so focused, but you’ve drifted and now conversations with you feel like I’m flipping through TV channels and I don’t have the remote.

Why are you telling me about the 10K race you just ran and your recent trip to Target? I mean, it’s nice to know those kind of details, but don’t forget that I’m not a captive audience. There are a lot of other bloggers out there who will respect my time and attention.

8. You let yourself go.

I understand that you’re going to go through rough patches – maybe you’re having server issues or you tried something new and it didn’t work out – it happens to everyone.

But it’s just sad to see you with broken plugins, images that don’t load correctly, weird alignment issues with your fonts and ads running amok in your posts.

9. You only ever talk about yourself.

And not only do you only talk about yourself and never ask me about MY day or MY experiences, you just drone on and on and on and on. Our relationship has become a test of endurance.

10. I felt like I was talking to a 7th grader.

It started when you made some gross comments on Twitter. And then it leaked into your blog. And then you stopped caring about punctuation, spelling, and well, grammar.

Listen, I don’t expect you to be a polished as William Strunk Jr., but you do have a high school diploma, why not use it?

So for now, I’m going to see other bloggers. I hope we can stay friends and maybe there’s a future for us. But are you willing to change?

I’d love nothing more than for us to have a happy future together, but you need to be willing to make it work.

[Image: r00s]

This post originally appeared on Jason Falls’ SocialMediaExplorer.com.