My blog – alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com, hit 300,000 views the other day. I’m not celebrating. I’m annoyed. Nope. Let’s call it what it is. I’m angry.
Some background.
I wrote my first blog post on July 29, 2012, more than fourteen years ago. Geez. Those were some tough times, but also truly some good old days.
I’d just returned from a fantastic writing conference in Taos, NM and was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, chomping at the bit, all the easy idioms. The writers I met with kept talking about the importance of honing your craft by writing every day. I pictured myself in an elegantly appointed bedroom, sitting at a fancy-pantsy Queen Anne-legged writing desk, re-arranging my voluminous satin skirts with ink-stained fingers. The only noise besides the scratch of my pen? The negative whoosh of snowflake dots outside hitting disks of snow. Ugh. The idea of writing in a vacuum, for nobody but myself, creeped me out. My interiority isn’t rich enough to sustain that life choice. Emily Dickinson I am not.
I need occasional pats on the back, so starting a blog made sense. Publishing my work in a public blog form was a way to hold myself accountable. I didn’t care a ton about getting views – and to some extent I still don’t. I just wanted to make sure I wrote every day and wanted to set up a situation where I’d be successful.
Over time, the viewing numbers for my blog started creeping up. Ten views here. Twenty views there. They started accumulating like empty candy wrappers the day after Halloween. Yes, I’m eating candy right now. Just finished a Twix. Working on a Snickers. Might have another Twix. Who knows. The night is young.
Last year, on December 22, 2025, my blog views hit a whopping – for me – 75,000. I was over the moon Here’s the post I wrote on that:
https://alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com/2025/12/happy-75k-to-me.html
That 75K mark seems to have set off some sort of tidal wave-type technological event. Within a few days, my blog views started jumping, bopping from a relatively sedate twenty -- thirty views a day to at times hundreds. By May 12, 2026, less than half a year after reaching that 75k, which I thought at the time was an insane mark, my blog hit the big 100K. Here’s the post I wrote on that:
https://alwaysatthestartingline.blogspot.com/2026/05/100k-no-way.html
And then the really insane stuff kicked in.
Suddenly, my blog was infected or something, grabbing hundreds and hundreds of views per day. Yay, right? Nope. These weren’t/ aren’t “real” views. It’s easy to tell. The blogger dashboard is not super sophisticated. You don’t need to be a computer genius to figure out that most of the views from 75k on were not living, breathing humans.
While I can never see which individuals are looking at my work, I can see the anonymous number of views for the day, month, year, even total blog lifetime. I can see how many views per country for each of those time periods too. I can see which of my 212 posts were read and how many people read them. Up until last year, the number of individual views consistently matched the total amount for each day. Fifty views a day added up to fifty sets of human eyes, spread out over ten or so blog posts. This made sense.
After I hit 75K, everything went nuts. For example, I’d see 450 total views for one day, but adding up the post-by post breakdown showed only 63 actual humans looked at my stuff. That’s a discrepancy of 387. That means on that particular day, my blog was “read” 387 times by bots.
As the months passed by, the views continued to spike. Seriously, the daily view graph sometimes looked like an outline of the Himalayas. Now things are truly insane. My views for today stand at 4,635. But that number has no basis in reader reality. I know this because I can see that readers opened only twenty posts which in total have 35 views for today. That means my blog was hit by bots 4,600 times.
So in other words, today my words and thoughts were stolen 4,600 times. Yesterday, bots stole from me almost 5,000 times.
I am so angry about this.
I like to write. I like to share what I write. Sometimes my writing is decent. Sometimes it’s horrible. Sometimes it’s meh. But I'm putting myself out there and doing it. These little acts of courage matter to me. And when I see that people read my writing, that makes me happy and motivates me to keep going. But this stealing thing? I hate it.
I’m in process of moving all my writing to Substack, which offers some protection against bots. I’m moving the good, the bad, even the embarrassing. So far, I’ve moved four pieces. In the last three days, they’ve gotten about eighty views total, peanuts compared to the close to 10,000 bot views my blog got the last two days on blogspot.
Writing then publishing this stuff only to have it stolen/ mistreated by bots and by extension their creepy billionaire owners feels futile, like I’m emptying the ocean one handmade, fourteen carat gold, carefully curated teaspoon at a time while earthquakes keep knocking me down.
I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the bots catch up to Substack. They're taking over everything, it seems.
Yet I’m not quite ready to quit. I still have lots to say.
Forward.
Now the daily views for today are up to 4,877. Ugh. I hate this.
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