Image: Incygneia at Pixabay
So the Happiness Engineers have obviously been tinkering. Again.
The blogging community is just getting on with it. Have we given up railing against the changes, or are we just grumbling away quietly, knowing we are at the mercy of engineered happiness? There is a spectre of doom and gloom hovering…
Since the reblog button went missing with all the ‘redundant code’ they deleted a few weeks ago, things have not been quite right around here. Blogs are being unfollowed arbitrarily… odd new functions have quietly slipped beneath the radar, minor-looking tweaks have been sneaked in with little or no warning and the available stats seem to be riding a rollercoaster without rhyme or reason.
Although that last is not unusual… stats do weird things. Go away for a few days and it is a real eye-opener. You can understand it if you just stay off the computer, write nothing and keep quiet. You would expect a drop in the figures. What I will never work out, though, is why, even if you leave exactly the same amount of posts scheduled as usual, have computer access that allows you to read just as many other blogs as normal and you manage to answer all comments in a timely fashion… the stats will still drop. I find that incredibly strange.
And it happens when your attention is simply called elsewhere too… when life imposes its demands and you just do not have the freedom to spend as much time at the screen as you normally would, even though you do everything you usually would! That is even stranger. It is as if, by some arcane process, the blogosphere knows your attention has been diverted.
In spite of all the weirdness, there are other, and equally incomprehensible factors that make blogging worthwhile. Disappear without notice for a few days and there will be emails from people you have never met in your inbox. Write about a problem, and there are helping hands reaching out.
These are people you may never meet… and yet who have, in this new and mysterious ‘virtual’ realm, become friends. Not just the generic, social media-esque definition of ‘friends’ either, but real people who know you, with whom you have ‘clicked’ and with whom you converse behind the scenes.
If you are lucky enough to actually meet them, these virtual friends are just the same in person… but, like the difference between a photograph and an eye to eye smile, their presence is warmer and richer.
When it comes right down to the nitty-gritty, blogging is about the people, not the words. No matter what the programmers play with, what the stats might do or how much weirdness we encounter, it is the people who read the words that bring them to life… and, in turn, the words bring people into your life too.
Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 
Keep it real. 🙂
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Nowhere to hide 😉
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Reblogged this on The Militant Negro™.
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Thank you for sharing 🙂
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I love this Sue!
No matter how much they tinker, we keep our friendships and contact going! Blogging isn’t just about words, you are absolutely right!
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I had this weird impression that it was when I began. I was wrong… and glad to be so. 🙂
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🌝
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Great piece Sue absolutely agree with you this for me it’s been just the same surprisingly the people have been the thing that has influenced me and had an impact on me more than anything and I did not expect that at all
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Me neither, Michael…and yet the people are the reason I love what I do here.
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Reblogged this on New2Writing and commented:
Lovely post to have a quick read of about the realities of blogging, stats, friendships & the unexpected “changes in the code”.
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Thanks for sharing, KL 🙂
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Reblogged this on anita dawes and jaye marie.
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Thanks for sharing, Jaye x
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We seem to be surrounded by ‘tinkerers’ at the moment. Not just WP, Buffer, FB and Sky are all tweaking like mad and they are just the ones who have driven me bonkers this week!
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I am so glad I really only have to deal with WordPress. There is only so much patience available 😉
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Sometimes I do regret having so much patience!
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I can have patience with most things, but technology tried it sorely.
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Doesn’t it just!
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🙂
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XXX
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All true. Maybe because even the most discreet of us (not me) we can’t help but let our dearly held convictions appear in our posts. Anyone who objects will just slip away unnoticed and never come back. Those who stay are probably like us in many ways. I wouldn’t be afraid of disappointment in meeting any of my blogger friends. I’m certain we’d get on.
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That’s one of the great things about blogging, as opposed to some of the other social media platforms…you really do get to know how people think and feel through what they write (even if that is sometimes more than we think we wrote 😉 ). So far I have found people to be exactly as expected when I met them 🙂
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It’s hard to invent a completely different persona and keep it up on every blog post…unless you have problems…
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I couldn’t do it…but I’ve come across a few who tried and they always come a cropper.
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You have to be a pathological liar to get away with it.
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You would. But why on earth bother?
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Why be a troll? Some people are just plain weird.
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Each to their own. I have nothing against trolls… though I prefer the ones who live under bridges 😉
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They are definitely the best kind.
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I count at least one amongst my friends 😉
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Lucky you 🙂
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I couldn’t agree more, Sue. Blogging is all about the wonderful people, and the community that we have built up. I have made some wonderful friends here some I’ve yet to meet (yourself included)! 🙂
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I do hope we’ll be able to hook up one of these days, Judy. I have loved meeting the people I know through blogging. 🙂
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So very true Sue. I love the interaction with comments and the feedback I get. Stats are an enigma, and my number of followers bounces up and down, some of which ‘follow’ yet the site is no longer available. I notice when ‘regulars’ don’t post and wonder if I’ve been dropped as a follower. That’s happened a fair few times, and not of my doing!
I’m glad to be part of the blogging community, to read different things and get ideas, tinkerers and all, though sometimes I do wish they’d leave well alone.
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Sites I follow keep getting unfollowed behind my back…and I know some friends have found they have unfollowed me without their knowing too, only realising when I ‘wasn’t posting’…even though I was. The vagaries of WordPress remain a mystery, but the people are what make it worthwhile.
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🙂
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The blogging world & community I love! The technology surrounding it needs a lot of patience. Very good post Sue 😊
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Thanks, Sam. That is one thing the happiness gremlins can’t break 😉
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yes, in the end, with all the machinations and tinkering behind the scenes, it is the people who connect and read and write and worry with us who matter, not the engineering happiness gremlins.
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It is, Beth, and it is those people I value more than anything else around here.
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Love this! Not so much the tinkering, but the friendships that go beyond the screen! I have met so many wonderful people. It’s very heart warming. Now if we can get WP to stop their nonsense, that would be a plus! 😊
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I fear we are fighting a losing battle there, Dorinda… they are paid to tinker and, ultimately, we are the ones paying them, even if they never consult us as to what we would like them to do 😉 If they would talk to bloggers as much as bloggers talk to each other, we might get somewhere 😉
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Wouldn’t that be novel! The happiness engineers remind me of Facebook programmers (do they have a silly name, too?). Make a change, don’t test it, let’s see how many complain, then maybe we’ll fix it. lol
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That seems to be how it goes down 😉
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I do spend more time and energy with my WP friends that I have never met than my FB friends than I have (at least on line – I do have family, close friends, etc that are FB friends, but I interact with them in live, not on FB!) I never understand how stats work. If I post as mush as usual but read half the number of posts, my stats go down by 20% or more. If I post as much as usual but stop reading, my stats go down 50% or more. This isn’t tit-for-tat viewing, I think it is something about the WP algorithms rewarding those that view, like and comment and punishing those who don’t.
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I’d rather sit down with a coffee and a friend than chat on social media, but the blog has proved a wonderful place to meet people I would never have encountered elsewhere…and be able to get to know them enough to really call them friends.
As to the stats… they fascinate me for all the ‘wrong’ reasons and are a constant source of amusement. I cannot for the life of me work out how they are worked out 🙂
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I’m a self-professed stats nerd, so… I agree. That is one plus of blogging that I didn’t know about when I started, the connections from all over the world.
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A really nice surprise to find that to be true 🙂
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Yes, a very nice surprise 🙂
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🙂
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Sue, you are so right! More than anything, blogging is about the friends we’ve made. Lately, it seems I’ve been popping in and out a lot but when I pop in everyone is here and it’s as though I never left. People are concerned if you are suddenly gone for an unexpected absence. They celebrate your joys. They comfort your losses. I know I’ve made some really strong friendships through blogging and I value these friendships as much as those I’ve made in person.
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I agree, Michelle. There are friends out there that I know I am unlikely to ever meet, but I value their friendship, advice and support. The blogging community shows an awful lot of support when it is needed.
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Yes blogging is all about the people, and I love them all.💜💜💜
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❤
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Reblogged this on Die Erste Eslarner Zeitung – Aus und über Eslarn, sowie die bayerisch-tschechische Region!.
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🙂
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Blogging friends were the unexpected gift of blogging that I did not anticipate. It keeps me anchored!
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I had ths odd idea that a blog was just a place to write… I have found it to be so much more and my gratitude for that goes deep. Especially for the support my son has been shown.
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It proves to me that most people are good and it counterbalances all the bad news mainstream news tries to feed us. 🙂
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Agreed… but I never doubted that 😉
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Starts pale in comparison to a really well thought-out, and/or cool, comment. 🙂
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Absolutely 🙂 And preferably one to which you can respond with more than simple thanks 😉
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Oh, yes, that endless tinkering of the so called Happiness Engineers… Never got used to it during the ten years of my blogging “career”… Yesterday evening every comment that I have made on other blogs vanished into spam…
I have some severe problems at the moment, dear Sue, so I cannot keep my head clear and free enough for writing English short stories for your #writephoto project. I hope things will get back to normal in a few weeks, and then I will gladly again take part of your wonderful project.
Have a fine weekend. 🙂
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I wondered where you were, Martha. Hope all is well and the problems clear for you x
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I’m down a couple of hundred views a day and I’m not getting all of my mail. I keep going and trying to jiggle the people I follow, but i think I’m getting MAYBE a third of what I normally get. But y’know, they keep doing this. I can’t let it drive me crazy. It’ll sort itself out eventually. I’ll keep going and trying to delete and re-follow all the posts and see if that helps. Eventually it will and JUST when it sorts itself out, they’ll mess with the software again. Is this how their engineers stay employed? By creating problems, then fixing them?
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Same here with the views, Marilyn… and not as many notifications either. You just have to shrug and wait it out…till the next time. I keep noticing odd tweaks…just small stuf that probably has big stuff behind it. They’ll stop playing again eventually…also till the next time.
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I should mention that I get blocks of posts from you and other people. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then 20 emails at a time … then more nothing. So I either have an overwhelming amount of mail, or nothing at all. In waves. But i will not let them make me crazy again. I’m trying very hard to stay sane this year!
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It is not worth getting too frazzled over.
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No, it really isn’t. They’ll fix whatever it is eventually. In the meantime, no amount of carrying on is going to get it fixed any faster. But it can be hard to remember that in the moment.
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It can. I had yet another email today from a friend who had mysteriously ‘unfollowed’ the blog… een though she hadn’t…
They need to get things sorted…
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Yes, agree, it’s all about the people, Sue. And, when you get to meet some of those people in real life…😀
Have you noticed that WordPress has swapped around some of the buttons under the notifications button? ‘Like’ used to be next to ‘approve’, now ‘spam’ is next to ‘approve!’ I’ve almost, on several occasions, marked genuine comments as ‘spam.’ thinking I was ‘liking’ them.
As for stats dropping, I’ve noticed recently that not all my posts end up on the WP Reader. Report it to WordPress and they will magically get it onto the reader and say it’s there, but they haven’t been able to explain to me why nobody has ‘liked’ my post. I mean, I always get ‘likes’ from the WP Reader. They are still looking into it, along with another problem I’ve reported where the tick in the ‘open in a new window’ box disappears when I create pingbacks. I have to go back to the post when it is published and add the tick in again! Grr!
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Yes, I agree, Hugh…and the Bash is wonderful for that!
I nticed that too…but approve of the ‘edit’ button they have added for comments. Something we have long been asking for.
The one that is bugging me is that several close friends from the blogging community have emailed to say they ave been unsubscribed from my blog… some were quite concerned about me, not having heard from me online. Makes you wonder how many less close friends have benunsubscribed behind their backs too. I had noticed the ‘follow’ figures had done some weird things lately.
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Yes, for some reason, I was unsubscribed from Sally’s and Graeme’s blogs recently. Horrified when I found out, but how many more have the gremlins unsubscribed me from? I do, occasionally, unfollow blogs, but only if I no longer find them interesting or they haven’t posted anything for a year.
I’m still waiting to hear from WordPress (they emailed me on Wednesday to say they were looking into the bugs I had reported). I live in hope.
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I hope they can get it sorted. I unfollwed Judy…apparently… a little while ago. Twice.If I don’t hear from partiular bloggers in a while, I always check… but it is really annoying when you are unsubscribed from blogs that post really interesting stuff once a blue moon.
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I’m not getting posts from blogs to which I AM subscribed. It’s like the subscriptions aren’t WORKING. So I unsubscribe then resubscribe, but they still aren’t working. It is extremely frustrating.
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I bet they are mucking about with the Reader thing again.
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I really wish hey would quit it. They aren’t making things better. I can’t remember the last time they improved their software. It’s been a long, painful downhill slide.
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Me too, Marilyn. The only useful thing lately has been the addition of an edit function on the comments notification drop-down…though there was always the function available.
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I wouldn’t mind the mess they make if in the end, it accomplished something that had some value to their customers — US. Mostly, I think they keep tinkering because that’s their job. Tinkering. Making a mess. Fixing the mess. Making a NEW mess. Fixing it again. If they don’t do anything “new,” then they probably wouldn’t have jobs. I’m all in favor of keeping people employed, but there has to be a better way.
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I’m very sure that if they asked the blogging community what we would like to see, there would be work enough 😉
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What a unique concept! Ask the users! I bet they’ve never thought of THAT.
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I’m sure we could keep them busy 😉
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As someone who migrated across to the blogging community from Twitter I found it really hard to engage with other people in the very beginning; even when you post what you would consider to be an innocuous comment over there you adopt the brace position! It’s so wonderfully refreshing to realise that people are actually nice for the most part and that it is possible to have a debate without people throwing verbal missiles at you. Thanks so much for the post Sue :O)
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The blogging community is about as good as it gets, I find. They can be a hugely supportive bunch of people and, as yet, I have never seen a fairly expressed opinion attcked n the way you see on some other platforms. You can actually talk about things here.
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You are so right. It’s a real pleasure 😊
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