Why bloggers stop - overjustification is the prelude to the decline
rzwitserloot posted in Uncategorized on August 5th, 2006

Here’s an interesting essay that deals with motivation. Specifically, two observations about motivation:

1. Explicit motivation easily replaces and pushes out implicit motivation (implicit motivation is doing it ‘for yourself’)
2. Explicit motivation is easy to lose - and implicit motivation does not return

   For more details including a description of an experiment that tests this theory, read the article.

   So, here’s a thought: Perhaps this applies to blogs?

   A lot of people, apparently, start a blog mostly for themselves or for a close-knit band of friends. So did I. However, at some point, you get your hopes up, or you make something for general consumption.

   For example, I had high hopes for the bush countdown widget which Alper and I posted to digg and reddit (bombed, though since then on digg a site with a very ugly widget did make it. I’m not bitter ). A post with critique on a temporary measure by reddit, a news aggegation site, did not bomb and generated a lot of traffic.

   Almost immediatly since then, I sort of lost interesting in blogging, and eventhough I did have plenty of time, this is the first new article in over a month. Trying to analysing my own reasons for starting to blog, and then losing interesting like this, I do get the feeling it’s a simple question of being no longer satisfied to do it ‘for myself’, since the more or less ‘external motivation’ of having a popular blog.

   Interesting? Maybe it applies to you? Eh. I think so.