So I was thinking about this and decided to write an extended answer.
When I started blogging, I hosted a blog link up every other Friday. Bloggers could submit a post that they had recently written and visit other blogs. I didnt have any rules, really, but it never really took off anyway.
I also submitted my own blog posts to blog hops and link ups on other blogs and was subscribed to many of the blogs that frequented these same "parties"
So, for years I would get 50-100 emails a day from these blogs, mostly run by christian mothers who had 3 or 5 or 8 children and would post sunsets and religious rants.
Some I subscribed to because they were pregnant and I love to read weekly updates and birth stories. But naturally the pregancy is over at some point and I would lose interest when the posts began to shift to diapers and baby-things.
I just got a phone this fall, so email was how I connected to the world outside my home.
This year, I have been slowly transitioning to use a gmail account with the same username more and more and deleting these old yahoo subscriptions. Most of the time, I will not resubscribe to the blog using the gmail account, and instead delete the old posts from my inbox. I will run a search for all the messages from that blogger and delete them all, in sets of 60 and 600.
Having deleted thousands of emails from my inbox, I cant say that I miss reading many of the old blogs. Many of these bloggers hadnt posted since 2015 or even 2013 and some of them I probably havent thought about since. A few dont look familiar at all.
Slowly the number of emails I get has decreased and they trickle in, few and far between. Now, I get only 10 or so emails a day to either of my inboxes, and thats including from colleges.
.
This summer, I realized how little traffic I was getting to my blog and subscribed to maybe 10 or 15 teen bloggers, not because they interested me, but simply because they had thosands of readers and I figured, well, if I leave comments, then someone is bound to click my blog link eventually.
That didnt last long as the posts began to pile up, so I unsubscribed and deleted those emails as well.
They were about make up and excersize and outfits and fandoms and boyfriends. None of this applies to me.
In all, I have probably deleted about 6,000 to 9,000 emails from yahoo and maybe 3,000 from gmail, which never had as many subscriptions being sent there as the yahoo email.
Now, I'm in a very strange period where I dont know where I belong. I want to be subscribed to blogs, I just havent found any that I would like to follow.
I dont want to be subscribed to moms.
I dont want to be subscribed to other teenage girls.
Weebly the website I used to blog with insists I get 400-700 viewers a day. I dont though.
I probably get more like 1 person? 1/2 a person?
The last comment I got was October 1 and the comment before that was August 23.
The internet just feels so dead in general, so far away. Nothing is interesting. Nothing makes me want to click to "read more".
And its just so frustrating. :/