this question intrigues me and I have some thoughts that I might update when I circle back to thinking about it.
Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow)
Have you ever convinced someone close to you to start a blog? What is the most compelling argument that works? Been having a hard time getting those near and dear to me to start blogs and I need a new argument.
Let's ask this another way - what do you think the top barriers are for most people to start blogging?
personal experience: when I had a blog on tumblr, I simply just uploaded content to share with people that I knew IRL/online: instead of having to recap things over and over with people, I could be able to show everything in one go for a conversational ice-breaker, and if it goes viral it's whatever.
there is a practical barrier, and it's one I ran into when I was setting up my personal page, is that since the majority of people who want to use wordpress, github and other [self-owning means of productions], so much of the settings and catering these days are for people who get sucked into making the best e-business card than making good work for one-self, and first-timers are drowning in plugins and themes designed to be all-in-one weird one-shop-stop functionality: stores, META tags for SEO reasons, link 90 social media accounts, insanely impressive galleries that also seem like a dime-a-dozen, over-produced frontend UI.
so much of how various blog hosts advertise themselves, encourages people living a shell-fantasy of what they actually want to do, and to spend hours on [being a brand], overly relying on the opinion of others and projecting self-worth.
the key to overcome this barrier, is to define what it means to have a blog in the first place in this era of the internet, with realizing the mass-saturation of content and the ability/inability to make, or consume said content. the growing power of social media made the free expression of the internet into a digital rat race: the more you make content that appeals to an audience, the larger net wields a profit that basically dictates how you can express yourself.
belated - patreon and social media exists in an interesting ecosystem where, if people didn't rely on the internet to make money, or were forced in a system of living where you have to keep chasing money, the content on patreon, would be content that you'd normally see on blogs. many artists for example, would post a web-presentation of their work on twitter, have a presentable gallery on a furaffinity/deviantart/related site, and the content, normally [progress shots, high resolution artwork, sketches and workfiles and experiences going though the creative process], would show up in patreon. in a sense blogging as a concept is paywalled in terms of appealing to a wide audience.
