What has your personal website or blog deprived you from?

Not exactly sure what the question is asking but I am 100% positive I once missed out on a great job at a forensic technology company (pen testing) because of my book review blog. I had A LOT of negative reviews about Trump books and was in general very political and kind of a shitty person online.

Trying to do better in life :)

Having a (relatively) successful blog deprived me of the opportunity to understand earlier that I was just faking it and that tech wasn’t a career I should go after.

Lesson learned: sometimes feeling hurt or lost or out of place is much better than faking everything is ok.

I suspect if you weren’t blogging you would be twittering and facebooking a lot more which (a) would also be equally available to those employers, (b) would have less context so your tweets/Facebook posts would have appeared more shitty/indefensible, (c) because you would have had the algorithms giving you little dopamine boosts with likes, etc. it’s possible it would have been much harder for you to come to the realization that you needed to tone it down…in fact, the shittier you are, the more you’re rewarded in these networks.

So it may not really be a blog issue, and quite likely the blog prevented it from being worse than the alternatives.

I'll interpret this as "what design choices that you made for your blog deprived you of something you could have had?"

Maybe others can find answering it in this light interesting too.

I have no analytics tracking and host my site on GitHub Pages, so I have no idea how many people have seen my work or read my stuff hosted there (I've tried out substack too which does give page views and referrers).

So my personal blog (tech choices) have deprived me of understanding what people tend to like, finish, read, re-visit, how they found it etc or (if I had more intense tracking) what type of people tend to visit, where they live and where they work etc.

I also have no comments sections, so I've deprived myself of the potential for engagement or constructive feedback etc

I very likely could find ways to improve content and increase personal motivation using those types of tools, but it's a personal blog and I just rather let everyone be anonymous.

I host on neocities so somewhat similar story here. I do know how many people are showing up but I have no clue what pages people are reading or if they are at all and I have no clue what anyone even thinks. So despite Neocities telling me how many people are visiting I effectively know nothing.