I recently emailed an old work colleague to reminisce about that old job, and he replied telling me he was not on speaking terms with me because of a blog post I had made a year and a half before. He had disliked it, but decided that we were so far apart there was no point discussing it, so he just unsubscribed from my blog. This overall situation has disturbed me quite a bit.
I think in modern terminology what he did is called "ghosting" -- someone just disappears without a trace, and you aren't informed of it.
I don't know how many people read my blog. When I looked using the simple tools at hand, I found one person subscribed by the simple method, but I know from email replies that there are at least 4 other people who have read my blog within the past year. At least two of them get my blog posts by email, one of them (maybe more) from Google FeedBurner. I have generally been fine with that situation. I figured only a handful of people read the blog, and I was writing for those few. I started this blog in 2007, which is forever ago in internet time, and I am very poor at figuring out how these shifting program configurations connect things together. There was some hint that FeedBurner was itself an obsolete technology. If anyone knows how to figure out who is actually reading my blog, I'd love to know. Then I'll at least have a method to figure out if someone "ghosts" me.
The readers I have heard from emphasize that they don't always agree with everything I say (possible translation: think lots of it is really crazy), but find it interesting. A blog author would ideally get comments from readers and there would be occasional discussions back and forth. I've accepted that my blog isn't that kind of place -- which is probably more the rule than the exception for blogs with few subscribers. Sometimes I toss out ideas that I am not at all sure of, and a few words might lead me to look at it again and happily say (perhaps even with relief) that I take it back.
The post my former colleague reacted to so strongly was one where I said people were eager to make sure Derek Chauvin paid for what he did without knowing the full evidence, and I gave some reasons why maybe he wasn't really guilty of murder. Simply being alerted that "Someone really hated this post" led me to look at it again and see that it was terrible. I hadn't looked at even the basics of evidence on the other side, and it quickly became apparent to me that he was appropriately convicted. The whole post also had an emotional tone to it, where feelings were trumping careful thought. I first quickly posted a reply saying that this was a bad post and I didn't believe it, and then within a couple days decided it was such a bad post I would just delete the whole thing (I do have a saved copy in case anyone really, really wants to see it).
My former colleague was an "inconsistent ghoster", where my recent email brought the whole issue to his attention again, but I can hardly blame him for that. It just happened to bring to light a situation that otherwise would have just lain hidden.
Overall I think what's disturbing is this idea that people who sign up for the blog might have extremely strong negative reactions -- and I'll never have a clue. Of course maybe many or most of my readers are prepared to have very strong negative reactions but just let them go by and wait for the next interesting idea. Perhaps they would think that only if I was actively a purveyor of evil would they be moved to reply or unsubscribe -- but I would never know about the latter course either. If anyone wants to comment to me privately, my email is bart.wright@comcast.net.
In one post from a while back (http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2021/05/racism-as-one-of-many-comparable.html), my reasoning led me to the astonishing conclusion that racism shouldn't be in the top tier of problems we should be working on. I also said I definitely believed it was a serious injustice -- not trying to say there was no racism or white people have it just as bad or anything of that kind. I'm not sure I had ever heard anyone with that combination of views. Could some reader with a few words point me to some article that would explain why my thinking on the subject was wrong? Or maybe they all agreed, or they just let it go -- reading a blog doesn't commit anyone to provide feedback, ever. I guess I'll never know.
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