The password on a blog post
What exactly is the point of putting a password on a blog article?
And before that: what is the point of writing a blog at all?
Isn’t one of the reasons people blog to let their voice travel a little farther, to put their thoughts somewhere outside their own head?
Of course, it comes back to why you are writing in the first place. If the answer is, “I write only to please myself,” then why publish it? Is that really self-satisfaction, or just a convenient way to comfort yourself when the site has no traffic? If nobody is meant to see it, then the only conclusion I can draw is that you have both money and energy to spare: money for servers and themes, energy to maintain the server and the site. At that point, why not just write it in a notes app?
Publishing something means, at least in some sense, wanting it to be seen.
Or is the blog just a stage, a persona being performed for some particular audience?
I have always hated the way major platforms force registration on people. Want to copy a piece of code? Register first. Want to expand the full article? Register first. Want to open the comment section? Register again. So when I first started using a dynamic blogging system, it never even occurred to me to make readers sign up before they could comment.
This question still leads back to the purpose of blogging.
If you run a blog to make money—scraping together a miserable trickle of traffic from a little SEO weight gained by leaving garbage comments all over other blogs, copying technical articles from who knows where without even fixing the formatting, or dumping piles of so-called free resources just to funnel people toward a WeChat public account—then forcing registration for profit is not shameful. Is it?
It is shameful as hell.
Readers are already being fed someone else’s waste that you dragged over and repackaged, and then you still try to trick them into your own latrine. Even if you make that money, it is dirty money. You had better think carefully about what is mixed into it.
And if it is a normal blog, then requiring readers to register before they can comment or view an article is even harder to understand. Under a technical post, a reader may have run into a problem or want to discuss something in more depth. Under a personal essay, an opinion piece, or a slice of daily life, a reader may have found an interesting mind and felt the urge to respond. A forced registration wall kills that impulse almost instantly.
Enter an email address or phone number. Wait for a verification code. Type in the code. Log in. Add to that the sluggishness caused by server location, configuration, or any number of other technical reasons, and every second, every required action, quietly pulls apart the connection that the words had just built with the reader.
In the end, all that remains is the familiar line:
I write my blog only to please myself.