I started Murrmurrs in the heyday of blogging, which was a long time ago, children, back when pixels were tiny and new. Anyone could publish their scribblings for free. Naturally everyone wanted an audience so there was this whole thing about visiting other bloggers, leaving comments, and thus enticing them to come see your blog and maybe become a follower. It was actually a lot of work, soldiering through Content night after night in search of something to comment on (Hi! I like green-bean bake too!).

It was a little like that thing where if you send everyone on the list a quarter and promise not to break the chain, you’ll get $10,000 in the mail within six weeks. Simple math, really, hard to argue with.

But it did sort of work for me, in that I had about 25 readers initially who were personal friends, and then made friends across the blogosphere who added me to their blog list, and my number of official Followers started to climb, until—a few years in—the trajectory was suggesting I might get 20,000 followers! At some point! Waaaay later on in the graph!

Pretty heady stuff. I was retired on a pension and not concerned about making any money at this, which was a good thing, but a writer does want an audience. Doesn’t matter how many trees you take a chainsaw to if there’s nobody in the forest to hear them crash and die.

Then my personal trajectory got swamped by the the general blogging trajectory. A huge percentage of blog commenters were other bloggers trolling for attention. It was an incestuous enterprise. But it’s not easy to produce Content on the regular for years on end, and most bloggers quit. There I was hammering away on my keyboard and after a while there was hardly anyone in the room with me. The great era of blogging was over. The remainders are mostly people with a niche who found a way to monetize, and people like me.

My heroic trajectory flat-lined and then took a dip on its way to going in the tank altogether.

And then my Feedburner burned up. Feedburner was the outfit that sent out notifications whenever I had a new post up. It was pretty basic. But it went out of business, and this new outfit, “follow.it,” came to the rescue. Seamless transition: they scooped up my followers and took over without me having to learn any code.

Right away, though, I noticed a slight problem. Even I couldn’t recognize the new notification emails at first. They started with a large, irrelevant ad. Say, NO ONE KNOWS THIS TOOTHPASTE TRICK FOR CHAPPED NIPPLES! You’d have to be interested enough to scroll down to see the next bit—that would be my blog post notification—and then there’s another ad: PACK ON MUSCLE WHILE ON THE TOILET!

But my blog notification in an ad sandwich is still not enough. There will be up to four more delights at the bottom of the email, like a side of pickles.

KELLY RIPA SHARES PERSONAL TRAGEDY
THE COCAINE-SPOON EARWAX HACK YOU NEED TODAY
FOUR WARNING SIGNS OF DROPSY: #3 IS CREEPY
SOLVE SNORING FOREVER WITH FENTANYL AND AN ORDINARY PLASTIC BAG

When I get an email like that for the first time, I instantly look for the Unsubscribe button before things get out of hand. And that is what about a quarter of my followers did. And then they wondered why I stopped writing. Two years later, I was still occasionally getting notes from people who just tripped over me again. “I thought you’d quit! I didn’t get any notices!”

Well, I’m truly sorry. I have indeed been chainsawing trees at a regular clip all this time. Maybe I just don’t know how to operate this internet.

Then my friend Walter, in charge of solving the universe, told me I could get a version of follow.it that was not obnoxious. And all it took—you probably saw this coming—is a little bit of money. (Please feel free to read that in Marge Gunderson’s voice.)

That’s just modern business. They get you used to some free version of something wonderful and then start salting it with nuisances, and then send you a digital ear sliced off the original version and tell you you can have it back for a ransom.

Well, I paid it. I did it for you. You’re welcome. I may not be in this for the money, but I’m definitely not in it for the chapped-nipple hacks.