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Been doing some thinking about social media and blogging, and thought I'd put it in a thread. There's some cranky old guy energy ahead, so be warned.
On this site, you occasionally see nostalgia for the golden age of blogging. I share that nostalgia for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that it was the thing which allowed me to become a professional journalist.
A lot of blogging remembrances seem to treat it as a sort of proto-format: a weird thing that persisted for a little while until technology and media economics brought us to this new media landscape—which, for better or worse we’re now stuck in.
But it’s worth entertaining the idea that it was strictly superior to this social-media world, and a thing we ought to try to bring back. Blogging could be bad, obvs. It wasn’t “real journalism”, the critics said. You could write what you wanted, with no editors or fact-checkers.
People railed against the proliferation of “snark” and “smarm”. There was plenty of disingenuous bullshit and trolling, lots of bad-faith arguments, ad hominem, and what not. But these criticisms all look absurd in light of the social media world which subsequently emerged.
As we think now of ways to improve social media, it’s ever more apparent that blogging was ahead of the game. It seems increasingly clear to me that one useful way to improve social media is to throw a bit of sand in the gears (see this, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/29/social-distancing-social-media-facebook-misinformation).
Blogging accomplished that. It was an extremely democratic, low-barrier-to-entry medium. Anyone could set up a blog at one of a number of free blogging sites. But sending a new post into the ether was just that bit more costly than firing off a tweet.
Blog posts could of course blow up. But the potential for instant mass virality was smaller, because drawing attention to blog posts meant creating a post of one’s own, and even link roundups took a bit of effort.
As snarky as blogging could be, the medium generally demanded a minimal level of argument and contextualization greater than what’s asked of twitter users: if, at least, one wanted to attract others’ time and attention.
People will RT some tossed-off nonsense in a heartbeat, if only in order to add their own, equally irritating one-line takedown on top of it. Generally speaking, if you wanted people to engage with your blogpost, you had to do better than that.
As we worry about the dominance of individual social-media platforms, and the editorial power that dominance gives them, the distributed nature of blogging recommends itself. You could blog from different platforms, or even host your own, and still contribute to the conversation.
I know why we all signed on to the social media platforms which displaced blogging. They were a fun way to engage with friends and colleagues, and a useful clearinghouse of content from other places.
Blogging suffered as mainstream outlets hired up talent to do “real” journalism, and thanks in part to the loss of the single-best blog aggregator (Google Reader). Meanwhile, network externalities did their work.
But this is no reason for fatalism. Social media is bad in a way blogging never was. It’s sufficiently bad that users and platform operators recognize that it needs to change. Just look at this mess! Think about the cognitive resources that go into creating this shit show!
Are there good tweets out there? Of course there are. Twitter can be an extremely funny medium, and nothing beats it as a place to experience a public event—a playoff game or a debate, say—with lots of other folks.
But a lot of people whose blogging I respected now spend much of their time publishing tweets that are useless at best. When there are tweets that are genuinely interesting, they'd almost always be improved by at least a little more exposition. They would be better as blog posts.
We’re not prisoners of existing technology. We can do something different. I know people feel there’s nothing to be gained from leaving the place where people are to go to the place where people aren’t.
Fifteen years ago, a good blog post would get at least a few bloggy responses: posts that actually engaged with what you’d written. Now, they don’t. That’s a hurdle to overcome. But we’re autonomous individuals. We choose how to spend our time. We don’t have to settle for this.
Tech changes would help. The big platforms should change in ways that make their content less prone to unchecked virality. And clever people could spend a little time and money developing better blog aggregators.
The fact that we’re all on phones all the time is a problem; blogging is much easier when you’ve got a keyboard. But many of you are tapping out thousands of words in tweets on your iPhone as it is. Would it really be so different to put them into paragraphs?
As a professional journalist, walking away from thousands of followers isn’t easy. But I think maybe it’s worth it. Be the change you want to see in the world, right? This isn’t a “why I left twitter” thread. But if I leave in the near future, you’ll know why. Maybe join me!
