I haven’t participated in NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), an event every November where you post every day for the entire month, in a few years. I near-completely lost interest in NaBloPoMo when it was taken over by BlogHer, a blogging platform for women (duh), and not just because the transition to BlogHer scared most of the men off, but because BlogHer is a cruddy, cruddy website.
Here, have some reasons why I hate BlogHer:
- First and foremost, BlogHer is exploitative. Most of the posts on the website are written by unpaid community members, while the website is riddled with ads. Community members provide them with content for free, which brings them pageviews and ad impressions, and in return they get, I don’t know, a sense of community or something? You can join a community on BlogSpot or Tumblr and both of those services allow you to put your own ads on your blog, so that you can get paid for your writing.
- BlogHer puts outbound links in frames, placing their branding and ads on unaffiliated websites without their consent. This is just plain rude and frames went out of style in the 90s anyway.
- The current BlogHer website features a tessellated layout and infinite scroll. I’ll probably do a long rant on why I hate these two design trends at a future date, but basically, they screw up navigation and reading comprehension.
- Their post editor sucks badly.
- Their name is a stupid pun.
Now, don’t construe this as me being against women having their own safe space for expressing their opinions. I just think that it’s best that such a place doesn’t exploit their talents for monetary gain. When you’re a writer, never work for exposure, or on spec.
So, yeah, this is probably the last you’ll hear about BlogHer from me, because I’m taking NaBloPoMo back from its massive corporate interests for the little guy, or something, I don’t know.
Anyhoo, join me every day this month for more inane rambling.