Careful what you wish for

Being a popular blogger is a double-edged sword. You put yourself out there everyday. You share intimate details of your life and thinking. You talk about what you're doing, where you're going, who you're seeing. It's very easy, in this situation for other people to start to think that they know you. It's also easy for them to forget that there's a human being behind the blog. We've become very used over the years to the idea that "media personalities" aren't real people, or that the real people are somehow insulated from what we think about them by their lifestyles and usually large amounts of money. If people earn their living by being visible, we say they shouldn't expect anything else, after all, we pay their wages, don't we? And they're asking for it, aren't they? They know the game, they benefit from grabbing our attention, but they don't like it when it's the "wrong" kind. Well yes and no - now that we can all play the game we're getting to see the other side of that experience. We want to be popular, but not that popular...

So be careful what you wish for:

• I wish more people read my stuff
• I wish more people would upvote and comment sensibly
• I wish people shared my posts on social media
• I wish people asked me to write stuff for them
• I wish everyone on Steemit knew my name
• I wish people listened to what I had to say
• I wish people respected my opinion on X

because if they come true, they can turn into:

• Why do people hold me responsible when they do things based on what I've written and those things go wrong?
• Why do people only remember the bits they want to, not my caveats and warnings that things are more complex?
• Why do people bad mouth me all the time and talk in the comments like I'm not really here?
• Why do people say things about me here that they'd never say to my face?
• What are people saying about me that I haven't seen yet?
• Aaaargh! Are they talking about me?

This isn't just Steem and blogging about crypto, although some of these behaviours are becoming exaggerated now that money is in the mix, it's a long-term observation of behaviours over the last twenty years or so of writing online. And you shouldn't take it as a reason not to write anything, more to think more carefully about what you write, who might be listening and how some people just like to pull others down (sometimes for the best of reasons!)