If posting here is frequently frustrating and irritating, why do I keep doing it?
Appreciator wonders, if I find posting here frequently frustrating and irritating, why I keep doing it anyway? Imagine I announced one day, “This is too frustrating and annoying. I’m going to stop now.” To the rest of the world, this would “mean something.” People would discuss in hushed tones—and for the Internet, hushed tones means in a normal voice, or perhaps even louder than normal—what this “means” for blogging, for Microsoft, for whatever. People would start speculating as to what pushed me over the line, maybe muse about what this means for other bloggers, or question my actual motivations. “Is this really a cover so Raymond can quit Microsoft and work for another company?” It’s easier just to avoid becoming news by not doing anything newsworthy. I guess I could stop if I made up some bogus but less controversial reason for stopping, say, because I wanted to “spend more time with my family.” Generally speaking, change is news. Contrapositively, no-news requires no-change. I prefer not to be news.
(In the same way that if I decided to change my policy and start opinionating more, people would make more of the change than if I had been opinionated from the beginning. I often envy Michael Kaplan for having established himself as an opinionated blowhard early on, which gives him the freedom to spout off on whatever he wants without creating much controversy.)
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