ATVBT Year In Review
Happy last days of 2025! Here's a review of the year in Blog, for those meta-interested in blogging.
By far our most popular post this year was 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties. A lot of you probably know that writing online is very power-lawed, but maybe not quite how extreme it is: I think Party Facts already has 1000x more views than our average post, and the gap will probably keep growing over time. Enormous thanks to our editor friend A., who "commissioned" it, and needs to give us more blogpost ideas since she's clearly better at it than we are.
Another highly-reacted post from this year was How Weird Do You All Want This Blog To Be?, which generated more direct comments and emails than anything else we've written, and generally made the blog feel worth doing again. Overall it's kind of shocking how much blogging feels like shouting into a void, so thank you to everyone who turned that void into more of a soiree.
We started this blog almost-exactly four years ago in order to share the good news about Monosodium Glutamate. I had read a bunch of people online claiming that if you blog consistently for a year or two you will naturally start to develop an audience and... I don't think that's actually true? We had a bunch of unfair advantages when starting this blog, a higher-than-average connectedness in the graph of existing successful bloggers, and I would still say that mostly our audience is staggeringly small because the audience for almost-any writing like this is staggeringly small: if people could see the actual reader numbers for various prestige magazines they would cry.
Towards the end of this year I got a few big benefits from the blog that might singlehandedly justify all the time that's gone into it: I met two exceptional teachers/guides who are helping me with two major areas of existence, and made one outstanding real-life friend, for which I'm exceedingly grateful. Someone once said that posting online is a complicated, indirect search function for finding people you resonate with, and I think I'm finally feeling that. But it's probably not restricted to posting, it's more like... making stuff and sharing it with the world is a search function for finding people you'll like.
I blog largely because I have too many thoughts in my head, and left to themselves they keep repeating themselves at me, and blogging lets me clear them out and make space for new thoughts to happen. I do feel like there's a certain magic to writing, and ways that it's uniquely good at letting you think through an argument, and review and re-edit and sharpen what you actually believe. (I think that seeing something in text that you don't really believe is viscerally uncomfortable, and you therefore have to delete it, and therefore help yourself understand what isn't true).
I also think there's a physical dimension to the glory of writing, that trying to structure your thoughts on a 2-D page is inherently Good, and that physically moving segments around helps you figure out which parts are most important, and which bits are pre-requisites for which other bits, and where there's actually massive gaps that you didn't notice while thinking because of the non-linearity of internal experience.
That said... blogging has taken up a vast amount of my time, and I can't honestly say if the opportunity cost was worth it. (Well: to the extent it keeps me out of trouble, maybe that goes the other way). I often suspect that there are some people who just love writing, but other people who love idea-wrangling and then just happen to end up path-dependently doing their idea-wrangling in writing. I think if I could make myself switch from blogging to video or audio I would be better off, and if you're thinking of blogging but feel like you could channel your thoughts through games or short-form videos instead, you might realistically be better off cultivating that.
Happy end of Q1 21C to all! And wishing you an excellent Q2.