Don't Read This Unless You Want To Waste Your Time

lol. I think I said, in one of your early posts, about how lots of people just aren't very comfortable interacting with such a young person, and how that can also be partially due to in their own diaries having "mature content," and such. And then there's the other aspect of due to your age, of not having much in common due to being in such a different place in life. Also, Bloop is a pretty small community, there's not a huge number of really active people here, either.

I thought Bloop was a very popular diary/journal website? Or did OpenDiary steal the spotlight? Lol.

lol well OD is older and has always had many more members than Bloop, there's hundreds of thousands of diaries on it, whereas there's only several hundred here, and only maybe a couple hundred people who use the site on even semi-regular basis. OD has slowed down a lot over the years also, with the advent of "microblogging" on FB & Twitter and such (ugh), but it's still got a ton more people than here. If you look at the recent entries list here, it moves very slowly and you mostly see the same small handful of names popping back up. A few years ago it was much more active, but I'm not sure even then I'd have called it "very popular." LJ, OD, even Xanga probably has a good percentage more members.

And yeah, I know you commented that on my earlier posts 'cause I was reading my Journal again and I thought I'd just type about my realisation (which was actually from a few weeks back lols). You didn't say anything about "mature content" though.

I did, I remember you asked me what I meant by it! hahaha

Do you also go round reading and commenting other people's diaries, asking them questions, being friendly, getting to know them? That's essential if you want to get comments - you need to make connections with people.

The age reason is another one, but there have been kids on Bloop in the past, and it won't deter everyone. But people generally don't randomly comment the diary of someone they don't know - they have to get to know you a bit, by interacting with you. In any community, it is generally the newcomer who has to make the most effort - people who've been there a while already have their friends and most don't feel the need to go out of their way to make more friends. But if someone approaches them and seems like a friendly/nice/interesting person, then they might be more interested.

Also, you could write entries where you're interacting with the Bloop community - rather than just writing about yourself, you could also ask people reading for their opinions. Like, talk to them, through your entry. That's what I did a lot at first - I had loads of questions about the site. Well, I still ask questions in my entries - I like to hear different people's points of view. If someone reads an entry with questions in it, they're more likely to comment, because answering the question is quite straightforward. If they just read an entry full of someone's random day, they might not know what to say, specially if they don't know the person.

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Also - a practical tip, based on the Bloop bug - if someone comments you, comment them back on their own diary. Like, Atropos and I have not been the only people commenting you (I totally took a look at your comments! ). So when a new person comments you, go back to their diary, reply to their comment, and maybe comment on their entry too. Otherwise, they're unlikely to come back to your diary. Just like you want comments on your diary, others want comments on theirs - it has to be mutual.

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