When I share stories on Instagram, they get viewed by 157 people. I don’t think this blog has ever had 100 people read a post. So when people click the link from Instagram and the website delivers a bunch of words, they think, “Fuck!”

I envision the user experience of those 157 people this way: someone sees my name/post come up on a story and thinks, “Do I care what Tom is doing?”

0–40 people — They know me well and are curious about what I’m up to in life. These are what we’ll call my friends. They read.

40–100 people — They fringe-know me. Maybe we went to college together, or we added each other because we were modestly curious about each other for six minutes in 2011. They don’t really give a shit. These people need to be entertained immediately.

100–157 people — They’re so bored, they’ll read anything. Except, apparently, this far.

People want short video. They want to laugh, learn, live, and love, all in 20 seconds.

This blog will never do that. There’s not much reason for someone who doesn’t know me personally to ever read this blog, so the audience is naturally limited.

Yet if I know how to get more attention, but I don’t actually want more attention, what the hell am I optimizing for? I’m looking for less friends, not more friends. The people coming to this post from Instagram are probably not the audience this blog was built for.

How much longer will the blog continue if short form video is a better audience builder even though I hate that audience? Except for the people who have read this far of course.

This isn’t really quitting. It’s realizing that something that made sense for me for 17 years may no longer make sense.

If nobody reads the blog, would I keep doing it? Probably not. I need meaning. Self-reflection and history are nice, but when someone says, “I read your blog,” that’s why I do this.

The funny part is, it’s not even a hard decision.

It’s evolution and adaptation.