The Only Articles I Truly Regret Writing

If you’re any kind of creative individual you will likely relate to the fact that, inevitably, something you create will become something you wind up regretting. It’s extremely rare for anyone who makes anything to not have at least something they feel was a mistake, wasn’t good as it was released, or otherwise simply doesn’t like something they were the originator of.

I have many articles I think aren’t too great — they may have been far too much effort for too little result, may have been too “random” or done simply to “fill a gap” rather than be substantial, or otherwise I just don’t like them. I rarely delete content, although I have made a few exceptions in the past, but I can say even then I don’t inherently regret writing any of these entries, save for a couple of somewhat recent ones.

Those were actually the two main articles I wrote about the PlayStation Classic; particularly, a pre-release entry and a follow up written just a few days after the systems release addressing the fact that the system doesn’t come with a USB power supply and that I felt this wasn’t an issue.

Don’t get me wrong, I still stand by the basic standpoint that it is very likely that any given person who would purchase the device would also have a spare power supply capable of powering it.

What I do hate about the entries and thus why I regret having written them is the attention they got, and how much they still continue to get over a year and a half following the systems release!

Yep, it’s my entries about this piece of garbage which seemed to have gotten the most attention… and are the ones I truly regret most having ever written.

Nearly every day the first entry in that pair is the top viewed article on my site. Seriously, out of over 1000+ entries on a variety of topics, that is the article which gets the most hits, one written well before the system was released that doesn’t even really go anywhere other than to say what I said above. Still, thanks to the nature of Search Engine Optimization, the global spyware that is Google, and just the fucked up nature of the gaming scene, people seem to hit that entry daily, occasionally hitting the follow up but otherwise, well, that’s it.

Yet, for contrasts sake, an entry that’s infinitely more useful, that I poured a ton of time and energy into (namely my entry on “How to care for your PlayStation 4 or Xbox One”) gets virtually no attention whatsoever.

It goes to show a combination of the hell that is getting the right people to see your content online combined with something deeply wrong about the gaming scene in general that a valuable entry as the latter is ignored, while something completely outdated which had little value beyond its one key point still gets hits every day!

Now, to be completely fair to myself that’s still a good thing — it means views are coming in, I get some ad revenue and maybe people will take something positive away from it, but it’s quite irritating to see such a specific and rather meaningless entry be ignored when there’s so much better stuff shared here. Not even my later entries on how much of a failure the system wound up being get attention, but the whole “it doesn’t come with a power supply” problem that isn’t even actually a damn problem still, somehow, gets attention. Go freaking figure.

Ah well, it’s the nature of the internet. That simple. I can’t do much about it, just keep on writing and watch as the next entries hopefully gain popularity of their own.