A Xanga Recession!

Alright. I’ve decided to take a break from all the cutesy holiday stuff for today and talk to you straight. There is something we as xangans need to come to grips with. Everyone else is tip-toeing around this, but it needs to be said. XANGA IS IN A RECESSION!

I know this might alarm you. I know it alarmed me when I first realized it. Sometimes you just have to face facts though people. Admission is the first step on the road to recovery. So you may be asking yourself how I came to this conclusion. Well the first thing I noticed was a decrease in my own traffic. I attributed this at first to the fact that I have been blogging exclusively about sappy Christmas stuff and went on not worrying too much about it. Then I noticed that a few of my xanga friends also seemed to be going through traffic dips. The trend started spreading more and more to all parts of xanga. Yesterday as I logged in to the front page I saw the most disturbing evidence yet.

Pay no attention to the fail of a blog circled above. Instead direct your attention to the three most recent featured blogs and their traffic numbers. 8 comments for two of them and a meager 96 comments for aTheologian’s cafe blog! Make no mistake people 96 comments for a Theo blog is a surefire sign of a xanga recession. 96 comments for Dan is the equivalent of 2 comments for most of us (I hate him so much!). Then there was yesterday’s featured question…
 
This really set the alarms off. I could no longer deny the cold, harsh reality. We are in a recession. Look around you people. People have already been struggling to cope with this. Some sites have been forced into hiatus in an effort to scale back costs. Unfortunately other sites have been shut down altogether. Many xangans have fled to revelife or datingish in hopes that they would be protected by Jesus or the dating messiah equivalent (Chuck Woolery perhaps?). Some of us are not willing to flee from xanga. We will go down with the ship if necessary because we are stubborn and do not want to risk losing any of our eight or nine regular readers. So the question remains; How do those of us who are willing to weather the storm cope in this dismal xanga economy?

Well we could wait for Barack Obama to fix it. That could take a while though. He’s got a lot on his plate. Instead maybe we should figure this thing out for ourselves. In order to solve the problem we must first understand how we got here. In my eyes there are three main contributive factors.

1) A decline in content – Let’s face it people. The overall quality of the content has been lacking as of late. We had a flurry of pretty good writing (whether I agreed or not) around election time. A week or two after that people just started going into a winter slumber (or stupor. depends on who we’re talking about). Either people haven’t been posting at all, or they have been posting the most predictable and redundant crap in the world. Even some of the top bloggers have been slacking as of late. I’ll give you two examples:
-We’ll call our first blogger Xangan X. I don’t want to name any names here so we’ll operate under the condition of anonynimity. Now Xangan X is normally a prolific and entertaining blogger. Slowly but surely his posts started diwindling. He was thought to be missing by many a week or so age but turned up a day later. However, after a brief return for one post, he has once again fallen off the face of xanga after acquiring an XBox 360. And his name rhymes with TheWhackRiderMan.
– We’ll call our second blogger Xangan Y. Xangan Y has been ever present, but her blogging has been more predictable then the plot of an episode of Scooby Doo. Here is the pattern Xangan Y follows. Bitch, whine, repost of past whining, rant, try to be funny (fail), repost of past bitching, crying, bitch, whine, repost of past whining, etc. It’s enough to make your head explode sometimes.

2) The decline of the rec – Not too long ago a rec used to really be worth something. Usually a rec meant at least 5 or 6 more comments, and a rec by the right person would mean alot more. Now there are certain entries where I have almost as many recs as I do comments. I recently had an entry that got 19 recs and only 23 comments. Let me repeat that in caps and bold letters. 19 RECS AND ONLY 23 COMMENTS! The decline of the rec is not so surprising. Its kind of hard to take recs seriously when most items you see in your inbox read something like this;  

somefuckingguy recommended Xangan Y’s weblog entry: Even More of My Bitching

The value of the rec is plummeting to dangerous lows. In a little while the value of the rec may even be the same as the value of the dollar. That is a scary thought. The rec’s steep decline in value ties into our last factor… 

3) The Rise of Xanga Whoredom – Now there have always been comment whores on xanga. Xanga and comment whoredom go together like white people and mayonnaise. The difference is that the whoredom was always under control. Now its an epidemic. Maybe its google adsense, maybe its the fact that we have top blogs and featured now, maybe its an undying thirst for credits. All I know is that way too many people care way more about creating alliances and gaining friends than they do about the quality of writing here. Its why we all get five mass messages a day saying please come read my blog. Its why we have shit like surveys, and plugz, and cut tags, and widgets. Like fuzzlers, pantookers, cantucklers, and fidgets! (Excuse my poor Dr. Seuss impression. I’ve been watching The Grinch alot lately). This is why people will comment, read, and rec a blog endlessly even if it isn’t that good. Because they are going to kiss someone’s ass damnit. If you’re lucky it may be your ass. (Or if you’re unlucky. It’s all about perspective.)

Okay that’s all for today kiddies. Its snowing and I have to hit the road. Now that we understand how we got into this mess maybe we can talk about how to cope with it in part 2. Yes there will be a part 2. HAPPY FRIGGIN FRIDAY DWEEBS!