I recently subscribed to the wonderfully-designed blog of someone high-profile in the publishing industry — a writer and editor. There was a good amount of useful information for people like me: unpublished twerps waiting in line to get their hopes eradicated. But there was also plenty of drek: two levels of main navigation, advertisement graphics everywhere, an “about” page that read like the Farewell Dossier, tweet this facebook youtube digg disqus drippyduck links, bolded sentences every other paragraph that collecively murder their purpose. He referenced and linked an appalling amount of industry shakers — those regionally famous people who have cloying, monosyllabic first names like Nat, Gip, Mel; names that belong only to midlife Midwest evangelical pastors who enjoy inserting into every sermon slightly inaccurate acronyms for complex theological concepts.
The comments section on every post looked like, if I may depict it overdramatically, a frenzied bumrush of urbanite beggars clawing for soilent green. There’s no way someone like me could pass up an opportunity to flash themselves. There was even a some kind of unlabeled statistic on every page that couldn’t possibly mean anything, but it was a high number so it was somehow important. Click drag scroll-scroll mouse-nudge mouse-nudge mouse-nudge required field submit subscribe you accidentally won a game check your spam folder e-mail tag categories.
The experience in figuring out what I should be doing on this site left me cross-eyed and burnt out. Too many messages equal no messages at all; a million rational whispers in your ear become a grand-unified unintelligible shout in a cave. I can’t really blame the guy, because for the amount of work he’s putting into it he’s most likely monetizing hand-over-fist with the site and helping out a lot of people that need it. I prefer minimalism, like the plain pages of a book, when it comes to writer’s blogs. I want to read something of substance — heck, even if there’s little substance I will read if the writer’s style is good enough. I just don’t want to be compelled to click and type to get the full picture. Sure, one might be able to have it both but I’d rather not subject my attention span to different warring factions on a website. If that’s what you like consuming, then don’t let me stop you. For now I’m going to x out, unsubscribe but bookmark, and breathe a little easier.