During the fallout from the Pastor Steve Lawson scandal last fall, I spent time thinking about the downside of creating content that includes other people.
For example, Kuiper Belt Productions on YouTube creates hilarious clip collections of various Reformed pastors engaged in good-natured verbal battles. Generally speaking, it’s Baptists and Presbyterians going after each other about points of theology where they don’t agree. I’ve enjoyed many of those videos because some of the men he features are quick-witted and funny.
Unfortunately, some of them are also now either compromised or disgraced. So now the creator has to decide what to do with all of that content.
Such is the problem of creating content that depends on other people. You can spend hours researching and writing an excellent post only to have it blown up by someone who decides to run their ministry off the rails.
The same thing goes for writing reviews or affiliate content for homeschool companies, etc. They change their terms or end their affiliate program and you are left with these great posts that now do nothing for you. I have had to delete so many posts for homeschool companies, products, etc. that either folded or ended their affiliate program. Every one represents time invested.
A blogger really is better off just writing her own content and depending on herself.
In any case, I’ve been thinking about this.
A.W. Tozer and Simplicity in Christ
I’ve been thinking about that too, or I have posts I wrote back in the days when my kids were much younger and we hadn’t thought about the ethics of putting people’s faces on the internet, so I had pictures of all sorts of people on my blog. Now, as I’m going back and updating or just outright deleting old posts, I’m going in and putting emojis over their faces as I don’t want to have other people’s kid or even adults faces on the internet. I’ve somewhat gone back and forth on my own kids, and that’s partially because I have a child who is upset about that now, but at the time for most of those posts the child was asking me to take the pictures and put them up there.
Sigh, the complexity and logistics of content.
I hear you about the logistics of content. It’s just so much to manage.
I’ve tried to be selective re: what I’ve written and shared. There is so much more I could write about in various aspect of life, but since it involves other people… The stories I could share and the content I could write would be so valuable. But I can’t. The stories behind the content I do write… I don’t write things in a vacuum, but most people don’t understand that.
I have taken a step back the past few weeks and just decided to let it all simmer. I avoided (mostly) going on a deleting or moving to draft spree. Everything is so weird right now in real life and online that it’s hard to see how it will all shake out.
That said, I told David that I haven’t thought for one minute about bringing back my news website. I’m relieved I at least know I really have no interest in that any longer. That simplifies things substantially.
I am not a content creator, merely a reader, but in my mind, content creators write about what is going on at the time, with the knowledge, skills, and people available. I would never expect a post to be “evergreen”, that is, always relevant, even into the distant future.
With small online businesses, they come into existence quickly and fade out just as quickly. If I were searching for a post on “purple widgets for homeschool projects” and I came across a blog post from a year ago extolling the virtues of the purple widgets from XYZ business, then I clicked a link to go to XYZ and find they are out of business, I would not be upset with the content creator who wrote the post a year ago. If it was something that I truly could not find anywhere else, I might post on that old blog and ask if they knew of anywhere else that had purple widgets, but I would not get mad at the reviewer blog.
I actually prefer that content creators leave their old posts, even if things (and people) change. It’s frustrating to me sometimes when I know I read a post somewhere, but I return and the post is nowhere to be found.
If a reader gets upset that circumstances changed and that company went out of business or a certain leader fell from grace, they need to check their grasp on reality. 😉 Everything changes. I prefer to be able to look back and see how things were, even in the past, even if things are not that way any longer.
Just my 2 cents. 🙂
Hi Amanda,
Thanks for leaving such a thoughtful comment. It’s good to hear from people on the “other side” of content creation.
The big problem with older content is broken links. They work against your website (or so Google has said). So that’s an ongoing problem as blogs shut down, businesses close, etc. If you linked to them, you now have a dead link.
Re: people falling from grace. I was thinking about this earlier today. I have many posts that discuss the fact that we were attending or joining a Reformed or Calvinist church. I would never do that now. So I feel a need to go in and add an update or a disclaimer since I would not steer people in that direction. I don’t want to remove the stories because they are part of our family life. But I have changed my mind about things over the past 20 years and I would like people to know that in some cases I’ve changed my mind in significant ways. There are other people I no longer recommend. In most cases, I’ve just quietly removed the content without making a big deal about it.
But it’s difficult to stay on top of it all. All the time you spend curating your old content is time you don’t spend writing new content. That’s why I think, in retrospect, it makes sense to just focus on your own content.
As I said to Ticia, I’ve taken a step back before deciding what to do. I have a lot of content that I could pull that features other people’s CensorTube videos, etc. I don’t know if I want to keep adding that kind of content. I want to make choices now I won’t regret in three or five or ten years (as best as I can).
Every link, every video, every featured image, etc. has to be managed. Every plugin and paid service. Multiply that across hundreds or thousands of posts and it’s a huge task.