Fri, July 3rd, 2026: All of these articles were in the Top 12 on Bubbles this morning: You Don't Have to Blog Like Me, Stop Writing for Bubbles, Re: Your Metablogging is Lame, Your Metablogging is Lame as Hell. If you went further there are a lot of similar articles, especially articles talking about blogging platforms. Yeah, so there is a writing obsession running through the Bubbles community. Well alright! Time for me to get on this train to fun and profit!!

Okay, okay, I'm joking. Mostly. Kinda. Definitely.

I agree with the sentiment that writing about writing, and writing about blogging platforms is (potentially) weak content. And that writing targeted simply to get clicks / become popular is lame. Do you know what is even weaker than those styles of content? Yup, you guessed it: complaining about those styles of content.

Metas in the world of writing have existed for just about forever. Longer than any of us have been around. And, guess what? There will continue to be metas in writing long after all of us have joined the ranks of a million monkeys banging on keyboards in another world.

Metas are something that come and go in communities, they are like the waves: sometimes larger and sometimes smaller but if the tides stopped completely we'd be in an even worse situation. Want to achieve low meta-tides? The best solution is to ignore them.

In my experience the thing that matters the most is having your own reason and purpose for writing, and not deviating from it. It's too easy to get distracted by the meta high tides. It can make you want to jump aboard that wave and ride it as far as you can. But in the end you are just left standing on the shore looking for the next big wave to ride.

I'm in the middle of migrating all of my old websites to this platform. Why? The platform I had been using has become a completely unusable mess over the last decade. It is, in my opinion, a top example of the enshittification of platforms. I mentioned it already on this blog as part of a conversation. But, I'm not turning it into content. Why? Covering the enshittification of that platform is a little too on-the-nose for me. Instead, I can stick to my guns and write about the things that I want to write about without the distraction (although, enshittification is well within the range of topics I'm interested in exploring).

The writing in communities like this is at its best when the authors have a sense of why they are writing. They find a core set of values and range of topics and ideas that they want to explore through those values. That makes for more diverse writing: everyone brings something different to the table even when covering the same topic. That makes for more natural and interesting interactions. Much more than everyone riding the next big meta wave.

Categories: #Opinion Tags: #meta, #metas, #enshittification, #blogging, #communities, #community, #waves, #writing License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.