Three different blogs of mine

Which do you prefer, a blog that has 0 follower and 1-3 read per post, or a blog that has 6k+ followers and 60- read per post (still declining) ?

It's somewhat strange to say that I want the first but need the second. The first, which is just this blog, is literally a bubble, because I have no social network account on the use (I have deleted my only one on weibo, Chinese counterpart of Twitter/X, like 8 years ago) and I haven't told anyone except one about it. So this place feels like the perfect bubble I need whenever I want to say something out loud and not bear the social pressure that might come out of it. So writing here is always fresh and cool and delightful.

But I need the second one, which is my Chinese blog that I've run for like 6.5 years (with the first 3.5 years fooling around and the next 3 years making it my "learning device" and got almost all the followers from then on). I have complex feelings for it. I owe a lot of my worldviews to it, but I do not want to continue my previous projects any longer (there were three on-going projects, a William James psychology, a Randall Collins - Max Weber sociology, and an original Chinese history) because they all felt somewhat outdated. I am working on a new project called "Nietzschean Philology" but the data is getting worse and worse. I find myself kind of stuck in between. This blog here feels much easier and freer to write, so that I can form a habit of writing daily. Not that I didn't write daily before, but the routine was quite different. The articles I post on my Chinese blog before were much longer and naturally required more time to write, some of them even called for extra reading and researching time, like the Kantian philosophy series. And so the process was much nastier and less stable compared to, say, last month's output here. But the articles then were, to my mind, much hard work and the quality was there, while the sketches here, I dunno, half-minded?

Actually, I also have a third blog on Substack, but for security reasons I shall not reveal it here. It has a lot of damaging to the image of nowadays Chinese rulers. It also has received quite good feedback given the relative short time (~3 months for 500 subscriptions) and small scale of Substack compared to, say, X or Youtube, but the growth is slowing down mainly because I haven't posted anything for over a month. I have placed this blog as my important but not urgent project, although for my PhD plan it ought to be urgent, if I intend to apply next year. The outdated-ness of my previous projects comes from this new "fight the power" blog, because the free writing experience gave me such unparalleled satisfaction that I don't ever want to go back to the censored environment and do all the self censorship and write like a mental eunuch anymore. It just feels different. I mean, in mainland China you can never talk about totalitarianistic traits the regime has, the disgusting brainwash the civil exam has on youngsters, the emptyness of all the political jargons and official documents, the shitty economy and the no-hope-for-future atmosphere on the society. All these can only be adressed outside the country. And once you adress these problems you start to analyze and understand more of it, and the more you understand the more you need freedom of speech to go further. Which is why all those three projects were indefinitely postponed by me. I mean, theoretically I can surely use the doctrine of the stream of thought to analyze individual or social psychology of the time, or use Weberian sociology to break down some social phenomena while very carefully avoiding all the taboos of the regime. How enlightening that would be is debatable, but is out of my concern. I want it to be a "learning device" and, while I did learn a lot from all those writings, now I have passed the line and have to have some freedom of speech to learn further. So, however selfish and irresponsible it may seem, goodbye my old followers, I am no longer at your service.

I guess I'll just continue writing on all three blogs, all in different and new ways. Hopefully when I look back on them in the near future, there will be some changes, good changes.