Blogs Aren't Penises: Why Longer Doesn't Always Mean Better

It's 2am in Finland and I should be sleeping, but I took a nap after work, so here we are. Might as well write.

@ats-david decided to go against the "content crusades" in his post which I agree with.

I'd like to stick my spoon in the soup for a little bit, too, with something that that wasn't mentioned in his post.

And it's this idea that a long post is better than a short one.

The idea seems silly to me since I'm someone who has worked towards making his blogs shorter. I've been doing some form of internet blog writing for at least a decade, and for a long time a big weakness I had was my constant rambling.

I wasn't very good at being efficient with my writing.

The overemphasis on long posts reminds me of school where we had a minimum word requirement for essays. Let's just think about that whole idea for a second.

Lets go back tot he basics: why do we write a blog in the first place? Not just on Steemit, but in general.

Isn't it to convey an idea?

And if so, is the best way to convey an idea such that hooks the biggest amount of readers, or such that drives away the vast majority of them? Studies have shown that people often don't even read the links they share on social media. It seems like the headline is king in a big portion of social media link engagements.

With this in mind, the concept of a having a minimum lack of efficiency required for a blog post or an essay seems absurd. If anything, schools should set a maximum word limit on essays, to teach efficient writing - and granted, that happens, too, but it's usually at the later stages, at least in Finland.

If I had the knowledge, right now, that the earth is actually flat as a pancake, and somehow had the ability to convey that to each and every one of you in a post that only consists of up to five sentences, you bet I'd post a five sentence blog.

Because that would ensure the most amount of people would read and digest the points that I was making, and could perhaps become convinced - which would be my motivation when making that blog post.

The truth is that the longer a post goes, the higher the risk that people just turn away, and all of that hard work you put in was for nothing.

And no, we shouldn't encourage spam, but I'd say spam is a lot more than a "short" post. Spam is something that is disruptive, but a great idea can be introduced in a couple of chapters worth of text.

Also, the length of the post has no bearing on how much thought it took to come up with the idea presented in the text. Sometimes when I post blogs with a comedic tone, I can work on the jokes for a number of days, attempting to perfect them. The post itself may take me 15 minutes to write down, but I worked longer on the ideas behind it.

But even that doesn't matter because an idea or comedy or whatever content it is, shouldn't even be judged by how long it took to create. This seems to be a thing exclusive to Steemit, since I doubt this happens on Facebook when we deiced to like something that amused or interested us. I think it's the monetary rewards on Steemit that subconsciously change the way we think.

I think it'd be best if people just focused on the content itself, without worrying too much about how long it took for the creator to make. If the length of the post and time to make it was the determining factor, then I guess I should be on top of the trending page if I just pressed down "A" for ten hours and clicked "post".

After all, a post like that would take me ten hours of sitting and pressing "A" - highly inconvenient, so surely worthy of a high reward.

I'll try to avoid these meta Steemit-specific posts in the future, but wanted to get this off my chest.

On second thought, I think blogs do have something in common with penises: the most important thing is knowing how to use it.