I've been online since the late '90s. In that time, I've fallen in love with quite a few websites, and visited many others that left me cold. I've been thinking about what makes the difference. These days, more and more websites, even superficially quirky "personal" sites, are failing to spark joy.
The difference between a good website and a mediocre one is subtle. It's not a simple criterion like "the author is a good writer" or "the author has interesting, unique things to say." Funnily enough, neither is a requirement for me.
As I was thinking about what the difference might be, and reflecting on my own writing, I noticed that most of what I consider my best work is not premeditated, not outlined and drafted, but done in the heat of the moment, when I'm responding to someone's forum post or jotting down an idea. Ironically, quality appears to come, not from an effort to make the thing good, but from an effort to simply make it at all.
There's a causal relationship here, not just correlation. Often, the moment I announce a project publicly is the moment the idea goes sour. I become timid and afraid to post updates. I become a perfectionist. I lose my motivation. The concept that was once precise becomes vague and blurry.
So here's what I think makes the difference between a lovable website and a mediocre one: the authors of the websites I love aren't writing for the general public. They're writing for themselves, or for some very specific set of people whom they know personally.
Usually, when I write, I try to keep my audience in mind. I think about what the people I'm addressing think and believe, what they like and dislike, what they know and don't know. I shape the path of my narrative to fit that terrain. I believe this is generally considered to be "good writing advice" or something like that. It's advice that I imagine a lot of people have heard and try to follow.
However, this advice becomes a problem when I'm putting words on the web for anyone to see, because I don't truly know who my audience is at that point. I imagine an audience, sure, but only in the vaguest terms: the "average English speaker" or "the average software developer" — concepts that do not correspond to anything in reality, or even anything concrete in my imagination. The point is, that's not my real audience. It's an illusion. A phantom.
I call this imagined public "the phantom audience," and its haunting presence is a curse.
When I write for the phantom audience (as I'm sort of doing right now, ironically) my writing gets a lot more structured and accumulates a lot of "fluff." Introductions and conclusions. Transition sentences. Heavy exposition. Definitions of technical terms. A logical sequence. All this stuff is "necessary" by some standard of good writing, but it doesn't make the writing more interesting. It just makes it feel bland and wordy. When I read a blog post by someone else using similar techniques, I find myself skimming and scrolling, trying to get to the point.
The phantom audience doesn't just change how I write, but what I write about. I steer away from controversial topics and niche subject matter that "only I would care about." I hedge with phrases like "in my opinion." I borrow the dominant frames I see around me. This makes my writing inoffensive, unobtrusive... and colonialist.
I feel I have to emphasize this point: language itself is being colonized by big tech (via large language models) to shape how you think, how you organize the world into concepts, how you react to events and ideas, and what you pay attention to. The masters they serve undoubtedly include "management" and "fascists". If you talk like them, if you write like them, you will begin to think like them.
There's another thing that happens too, when people write for a general audience: they start shaping their words to get a reaction. The writing turns into clickbait. I won't name any names, but I've seen bloggers who are otherwise very good writers indulge their knack for putting together rage-inducing sequences of words, which, on closer inspection, don't actually mean anything specific. They're just there to trap attention and make people like, share, and subscribe. Except that the blog doesn't actually have a "like" button on it.
It's so pointless. Clickbait with nothing to click on. Anger-inducing language patterns cargo-culted unconsciously for no reason. What are we doing to the internet?
The curse of "content"
I heartily agree with Eevee:
I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.
There is a certain type of web "business" where you set up a pipe (generally a web domain or social media account) that then lets you shove content at your viewers interspersed with ads. It doesn't really matter what the "content" is. It just has to fill the pipe and be easy to pour into a human brain, and there has to be enough of it to make the ads easy to swallow. That is to say, "content" can be slop. And it often is, because slop is cheap.
Please don't describe what you make as "content." The word "content" demeans your words and ideas — which should be the reason your website exists! — to the status of filler, the stuff that goes between the ads.
Many blogs that do not start out as "content businesses" trend in that direction over time. One risk factor for a blog turning into a content business is a posting schedule. If you ever feel like "you just need to get 1500 words written this week" stop and think about what you are doing. Your audience's best selves don't care about the word count or the schedule. They'd probably rather read a journal entry about what's going on in your life. A description of how you make tea. Whatever's on your mind. Something, anything, as long as it's real.
That's basically what this whole post boils down to: just keep it real.
This goes against everything you've learned
This post contradicts all the generally accepted advice about how to write online and run a blog. That's kind of the point. That "advice" is telling you to write the kinds of clickbait and slop that are slowly poisoning the web to death.
Exorcising the phantom
How do you get rid of the phantom audience? Easy: find a specific one. Write for one friend or your immediate coworkers or a specific other blogger or, closest and best of all, yourself.
Write about the stuff you are interested in! If you are excited about it, that excitement will come through in your writing and get other people excited too. Write notes to your future self, just the way you'd want to find them. Organize them just the way you like. Style your website so that you like looking at it. You'll know it's working if you want to keep writing — not to boost your follower count or fill a quota, but because you have something to say.