Squidoo

As of a few moments ago, I have deleted all my Squidoo lenses and my Squidoo account. It is sad, really, because Squidoo used to be such a great place to write. But they have become so controlling about what can and cannot be part of the lenses, basing everything on precious Google, so that creativity was being stunted. Apparently the concept that creativity is important was being overridden by the desire for more and more money and sales. I don't write sales articles. But they continually were saying that our lenses had to meet certain sales requirements. I was what was called a "Giant Squid" because I had more than 25 lenses. In fact, I had close to 50 lenses. Then they started censoring lenses to say that people could not have more than a certain number of particular modules. Then they started saying that Giant Squids needed to reapply by writing 3 specific types of lenses, two of which I rarely, if ever, even write. So that meant I could not be a Giant Squid anymore. That meant I lost different creative perks that Squidoo gave to the Giant Squid members. I followed rules and regulations to keep my lenses active, but they continually found reasons that many of my lenses did not qualify for their new rules. Finally, I just had enough and deleted everything and closed my account for good. Blogs are good, but Squidoo had these cool modules that made writing more creative and fun. But they started removing some of them and they changed the rules about how we could use the others. There are other websites that are somewhat like Squidoo. I may check them out to see how they operate but I am not sure I will try any others. I did enjoy that I could write creatively and sometimes make some money. Although I had given up using Squidoo as a way to make a living from my writing, it was still fun. But once they changed everything, they ruined it. There was no fun in the creative process any longer. How sad.