Dooce is retiring
After many years of blogging professionally at Dooce, Heather Armstrong is stepping down to focus on speaking and brand consultation. She’s planning to write for fun again.
But what makes this livelihood glaringly different are not only the constant creative strains of churning out new and entertaining content — content we cannot delegate to anyone else because our audiences read our stories for our particular voice and perspective — but also the security systems we’ve had to set up as an increasingly more diverse group of people throw rocks at our houses with the intention of causing damage: passersby, rubbernecks, stalkers, even journalists. We have separate security systems for those who take every word and decision we share and deliberately misinterpret it, disfigure it to the point of it being wholly unrecognizable, and then broadcast to us and to their own audiences that they have diagnosed us with a personality disorder.
“Living online” for us looks completely different now than it did when we all set out to build this community, and the emotional and physical toll of it is rapidly becoming a health hazard.
There’s a lot in what Heather wrote that resonates with me. (See also Amateur Gourmet, Dylan Byers, and Marco Arment.) Two or three years ago, I thought I would do my site professionally for the rest of my life, or at least a good long while. The way things are going, in another year or two, I’m not sure that’s even going to be an option. The short window of time in which individuals could support themselves by blogging is closing rapidly. There’s a lot more I could say about that, but for now, I’ll offer my best wishes to Heather in her new endeavors. Dooce is dead, long live Dooce.
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