No Obligation to Entertain
Bear's simplicity has attracted people of all walks of life. If you ask ten bloggers their reasons for starting a blog, you may be able to get ten different answers. Fifty. A hundred. A large chunk of them though, if the Discovery page is any indication, tend to be personal. We're here to put our voices on a digital platform we can trust. The blogs are to hold musings of random nature, anything we feel like writing down at any moment. Junky? Spammy? It doesn't matter.
For someone who views Bear as a place to get their reading fix, this poses an inconvenience. Naturally, the Most Recent page will track cultural zeitgeist and collective anxiety in addition to the perennial peril of everyday life. We're all affected by the changes in the world, and each person has the right to record their feelings regardless of how many other people have done so. A journal has no obligation to entertain. Some people might want to and check their Analytics obsessively, it's their prerogative.
While the notion of getting all our needs satisfied in one friendly space might sound amazing, the truth is Bear is not a community magazine we work on together. It's closer to a window that lets you peek into strangers' commonplace books or pocket notes, in all their messy glory and unfinished thoughts and so. much. overlaps (we're all human living in the same period of time). You're welcome to take a look, but can't otherwise expect the contents to work together to compose An Ideal Diet of Topics for the larger Bear ecosystem.
For better or worse, it's part of Bear's (and much of the old internet's) charm: a hodgepodge of everything and then some. It gives off the impression of a clunky amateurish space that wouldn't punish you for writing nonsense and just having fun. That you're free to add your own thoughts on a topic that has already been done to death if you so want because you have your separate spaces, unlike in certain forums where regulars might refuse to let you air your grievances because they have already heard it a thousand times before and if Community Leader X has posted their thought about something then it was final, no more to be said.
Requ, don't you want Discovery to show more interesting things? I think Herman has done well on his part. More tools to filter things out might be neat, but Trending and Recent serve their purpose. The last thing I want is to see the space being gentrified, neat rows of thoughtful curated posts from figures who get to say something and none of the back alley chaos. If there's any curation, it has to come from the people, so anyone who might be interested can follow certain blogs made for this in mind, while everyone else can revel in Recent feeds in five languages talking about two letter evils and the banality of working 9-5. The clipper culture from pop media comes to mind. If you want to see any kind of list, start one!
My college used to be well-known for its vibrant student culture. Students lounge almost 24/7 on campus talking about quantum physics one second and baking recipes the next. If it fits, they sit. A group would be testing RC cars on the right and a group would cluster together to paint a giant sculpture on the left. You'd hear ethnic music on the front and Kpop tunes on the back. Multiple groups would blur together, spilling from one space to another, moving between and among them. One day the college management wanted to rebrand, and they renovated the buildings en masse. The first thing they did was to cull the student spaces because those were the busiest filthiest sleaziest area. They banished students from their clubrooms, then put them back in designated officelike areas (lovingly termed 'coworking spaces').
Pristine. Properly delineated. Isolated from bystanders. Long list of rules. Sterile. Lifeless.
Positively Instagram-worthy though.
Jan 15th edit: followup post here, addressing personal attacks to Ire, whose post partially inspired this post.