I care about quality more than quantity

By Dave Winer on 1/24/07; 11:49:47 PM.

Mike Arrington: "It's rare for a blogger to take action to reduce her/his own influence, but that is exactly what Dave has done." 

That's what it looks like to Mike, and I respect that, but that's not the way I look at it. 

There are a lot of things I could do to have more influence, but it might not be the influence I want.  

Before I put the robots.txt block in, I basically could, unilaterally, put someone else's ideas onto TechMeme, but I couldn't get my own ideas there. And because people had less incentive to come to Scripting News, they weren't reading the things I really care about.  

I made a similar choice a few years back, when I quit Wired. Believe me, my flow went waaaay down that day. But my freedom went way up. I'm not getting anything like that kind of lift, but Mike is right, I don't care about influence as a quantity.