Getting Something Off Your Chest about Blogging!

Darren over at ProBlogger is inviting folks to write about what bugs them about blogging!

* Tell us something that you’ve been wanting to get off your chest about blogging.
* It could be a frustration, a problem you have, a concern you’ve been keeping to yourself – really anything that you want – just try to keep it to the theme of blogging.
* Attempt to keep it to 150 words of so maximum (I’m not going to police this – but it’d help us all to digest everyone’s comments if they were shorter than longer).
* No personal attacks please – while I don’t mind if you critique things or even others – try to keep things civil and don’t get too personal in bringing others down.

Hopefully this won’t be too negative (crossing my fingers) but can actually be a constructive experience and lead to us learning something about the medium of blogging.

So here goes:

What bugs me about blogging is that new bloggers and commenters don’t seem to understand blogging and how traffic works. I’ve had some bloggers become absolutely dumbfounded and even offended when I linked to their blogs! As if traffic is a bad thing. (And if it is a bad thing to them, why don’t they blog privately?)

Some commenters don’t understand why I would take an article from a blog and then talk about it on my blog. Of course since most bloggers don’t know how or won’t use backtracking I guess the commenters can’t be faulted for not knowing that back in the day, this was pretty common practice. Blogger doesn’t even offer the backtrack feature!

Bloggers bug me when they mistreat their guests in the commenting section by not posting their commenting criteria and then just not posting comments at all. It makes the commenter think first off that maybe they sent the comment in wrong or that the blogging comment software is not working right. It’s quite aggravating when it finally clicks in that everything is alright, the blogger is just not allowing certain comments for some reason!

Along the same lines, I also dislike commenters who just troll the page to tell the blogger how dumb, fat, wrong, stupid, ignorant, or hypocritical they are without ever tying it in to the actual topic! “You’re wrong simply because I don’t like you!”

Lastly, I wish commenters would actually READ what they are commenting on and stay on comment. Many times I’ve had commenters accuse me of saying things that I never said. When asked to provide me with an example it becomes apparent quite quickly that they misunderstood or misread but by then bad feelings abound on both sides. I really dislike it when the topic has degrades into talking about who-said-what-and-when.

This medium has a limitations. You can’t read “tone.” Assume the best!