The infinite scroll addiction pipeline has segmented the online world largely into two parts: Drooling scroll zombies on twitter/facebook/reddit/etc, and people who don't partake at all.
The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.
“Drooling scroll zombies” is a wildly and unnecessarily uncharitable description of people that visit websites and apps that you (apparently) don’t enjoy.
Disparaging entire mediums makes little sense. There is both enlightening and mind-numbing content on social networks, blogs, television, and books. Are people that read many books drooling page-turning zombies? Is scrolling through blogs inherently superior to Twitter scrolling?
I think it makes a lot of sense when the medium is purpose designed and highly optimized to maximize additive shallow interaction.
Sorry, I've had too many meetings and dinners disrupted by too many different people who couldn't stay off the phone to keep pretending it isn't a problem. ... and had far too many informative long form works ignored by their target audience (members of which also just spent our last meeting glued to facebook scroll).
It is entirely possible to curate a Twitter feed of: experts in nearly any subject, gossip, sports, pornography, spiritual guidance, comedy, hate speech, or journalism. The same can be said of bookshelves. It is also possible to consume both excessively or in inappropriate situations. There are young members of my extended family who are regularly scolded for trying to read books during meals.
The rudeness of your guests does not justify passing judgment on millions of people with an almost infinitely broad spectrum of usage patterns, and makes about as much sense as criticizing those who read words on paper.
What? Not every person who uses X infinite scrolling app is a "scroll zombie". I took scroll zombie as that person you know who wakes up, starts scrolling, scrolls all day, then falls asleep scrolling at night but somehow has the balls to say they don't have time to do anything. Social media/phone addicts if you will.
There are plenty of people who blog and tweet, and who read blogs and read tweets. Back when I used twitter, I used it partly as a sorta glamorized rss feed for when certain people posted blogs.
There are and always have been people who do not read long-form blogs and people who do. I see no evidence that social media has changed that significantly.
>The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother,
I don't really like this focus on the size of audiences that has come with social media. For experts or scientists who want to communicate with other scientists, it shouldn't matter how large the casual audience is but how they can effectively communicate with each other.
"Socrates probably didn't draw a crowd": that's how I've seen this described. Meaning, the amount of people who see your content matters much less than who sees it.
Socrates didn't draw a crowd mostly because he was super annoying. Imagine going to the marketplace to buy food and then this short and ugly man with his two sidekicks shows up to start a dialectic about the nature of forms or something goofy, while you just want to get back home and start dinner...
Socrates' social circle were free Athenian citizens. They wouldn't have "gone to the marketplace to buy food", because food shopping was the task of slaves. Free Athenians went to the agora largely for socializing and hearing the latest news, so philosophical dialogues were less annoying and disruptive than you assume. It was certain of Socrates' ideas that got him into trouble, not his public philosophizing per se.
> I don't really like this focus on the size of audiences that has come with social media.
Neither do I. As a freelancer, I don't care about traffic at all. That's almost the opposite. If you want to choose your clients, that means you need just a select few people to visit your site and then hire you (and not all at the same time, please). In that use case, you optimize for a few people, and what would be of interest to them. If someone else enjoys the site, it's a bonus, but that's not the goal, no matter what the tribe building marketers want you to believe.
The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.