I’ve never really written this blog with the intent of gaining a massive audience. Mostly, I don’t even notice if people read it or not. As much as anything, I write it as a way to document things for my own purpose or to express opinions that could never fit in a tweet. This is made plainly obvious by the fact that I almost never promote my posts. It’s fairly rare anymore that I even share them on my own social media feeds. I certainly don’t submit them to sites like Reddit.

This is partly because it feels like blog spam, and partly because I generally don’t think very highly of the posts I write. It’s way more rewarding when someone else sees a post and says “hey, that’s worth sharing.” Like my post about the PR blunder made by the elementary team. My friend Andy thought it was well-written and submitted it to /r/Linux. A little while later, it was at the top of that subreddit. Holy crap, I’m a real thought leader now!

Blog Fiasco at the top of /r/Linux

As of this writing, Andy has gained 622 link karma from the post. Karma that could have been mine, but I couldn’t bring myself to post my own blog. (Of course, I pretty rarely submit links anyway. My second-most karmatic submit is a Blog Fiasco post from three years ago. That’s the last time I self-submitted.)

Sometimes I think this pseudo-humility holds me back. I could probably gain more recognition in the field and achieve my dream of being a preeminent thought leader if I would just be more willing to force my writing on people. But that seems like a jerk move. So for the time being, I’ll just sit here and write in relative obscurity. If I get noticed and made into a star, that’s great. If not, well at least I’ll always have post 1652.