Why do you blog? Do you care who Violent Acres is?

Blogs are like diaries but they are public.  They are obviously meant to be read, to be shared – otherwise why put them on the web, right?  That said, there are some blogs that make you wonder why people are writing that in public.  And I have to admit that lately there’s been a few times where I had to stop myself from writing something on my blog – something I was upset about, wanted to share, but probably shouldn’t share with the whole world.  (For example, imagine you are upset with something a colleague did or said at a meeting and it’s so Dilbertesque that you want to write about it.   I had second thoughts on the wisdom of writing about that …)  People that write blogs like that try very hard to keep them anonymous.

There are a couple of blogs that I follow that I’m not sure why I read them.  One of those is Violent Acres.  I feel like I’m reading someone’s diary and yet I enjoy reading it.  Some of the things she says are things people never say in public but make total sense to me.  Like why are women obsessed with being fat?  Or of course she’s writing for traffic not for herself, or she would have just written in her diary and stuffed it under her pillow.  So I can’t understand why this reader got so upset about it:

This is why I’m done reading Violent Acres:
“For the official record, though, of course I write for the traffic. If
I were ‘writing for myself,’ I’d type this shit up in microsoft word
and put it under my pillow. I’m here to entertain you. If I wasn’t
entertaining you, I’d likely stop writing…despite the fact that this
site does turn a profit.”

That absolutely sickens me. Some of the things that V wrote about
were very personal, tragic, and terrible. Very few people (me being one
of them) would understand what it is like to go through some of the
things that she wrote about. And now I found out that she wrote these
things for a profit? What am I to think about that? Were any of them
actually true? Did she embellish her stories to draw more people in? It
is my belief that anyone who writes for traffic can’t be trusted to
write honest content.

Basically, they no longer plan to read her blog because it was written for an audience!  Did they really believe that Violent Acres was writing a diary in public for herself with no regards to who read it??  They obviously wanted Violent Acres to keep up the charade.  (By the way there’s a lot of hoopla right now – people are trying to figure out who Violent Acres is.  I agree with the group that says "I don’t care."  It’s highly unlikely I know the person anyway … and I’m not really worried if her stories are 100% accurate or not.   I read them because I enjoy reading them.)