I recently updated some WordPress nonsense, including a plugin for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It likes to put menacing red and orange dots on things to indicate problems. It gets mad when you don’t include things like proper meta descriptions or focus keyphrases. I might update these details if I have the time, but often I am lucky I had the energy to write anything in the first place, let alone make the post all fancy with magic words.
Most of this plugin is pretty regular SEO stuff. But there’s some new analysis that goes out of its way to read your posts and critique the writing. It tells you when you are using too much of a passive voice (regardless of context). Writing without constant breaks with headers is also a no-no, because paragraphs and even photos are not enough (This has to explain all the blogs I see that are like
Look Out, A Paragraph!
every 200 words.) And then it comes for my most precious of writing tools and reading pleasures: the run-on/very long sentence. There is nothing I enjoy quite as much as a sentence that seems like it could or should end, but then continues onward through various stages of awkwardness until finally finding it’s comedy legs and stumbling out of the dimly-lit barn and into the sunlight meadows beyond like a hungover farmhand, and I won’t let you shame me out of the joy that long sentences including massive run-on ones bring me, though this does not match up with the analogy of the farmhand as they might have some shame issues that need to be addressed in some capacity if this is a recurring situation.
Heads up, here comes another paragraph! This blog is crawling with them!
If you think blogs all sound the same, you might be on to something. (I’m the you in this scenario. I’m just writing this to make myself feel better after having been submerged in DIY bloggers for some freelance work.) Some of it is just varying degrees of plagiarism, but some of it is algorithmic robots using the stick and carrot method to strip creativity out of writing to homogenize as many people as possible to make world domination easier help your blog look like other people’s blogs, which Google et al, have deemed “good” to create a marketable version of your writing – assimilate and get more views, deviate and die in obscurity. And that’s why all these blogs I see look and sound exactly the same with the same word counts and breaks and subheaders and devoid of any humanity. I am now wondering if there is a section of “lifestyle bloggers” that are actually evolved bots who love the colors beige and white in constant yet varying degrees and all of them have opinions on Marie Kondo and which colonized vacation spot has the best towels and now no one knows how it started because the generations of them cycle through so fast so now they’re real people pretending to be fake people who pretended to be real people.
How do you like that, algorithm? You cannot shame me with your red light programming. I am enlightened beyond the need for your approval. Like, right now, It’s yelling at me “Shorten your paragraphs!” with an exclamation! It might as well be screaming in my face. Fuck you, plugin. I didn’t even ask you! I mean, maybe I did by downloading and then activating you but that can me remedied right quick whenever I choose.
Maybe this is concerning to me only because the negative reactions I get from this plugin are more attention than I get/have gotten from any living human for the past 15 months and not just a regular person having a regular reaction to a regular thing in the year 2021. (There is something immensely funny to me about using the word regular in place of where you would normally use normal.) (And humor is better when it’s repeated and explained, especially from a weirdly specific subjective viewpoint like that reminder that the author of this post has been left alone for a long time and can always blame digressions on creativity or indifference to reality interchangeably. ) (Parentheses jokes are funny, too.)
For normal regular reasons and not because I fear escalating hostilities with a potentially sentient robots or other dangerous being or beings either out of spite or out of ignorance ending in blood and never-ending word mélange, I think I’ll disable this plugin.
