I’m not old enough to have been a part of the personal BBS chat tradition, so my memories of the burgeoning days of the internet instead involve joining public chat rooms and forums. I didn’t really engage in those types of online communities too much because chat rooms were too chaotic and fast moving for me, and forums were usually created around a particular topic or fandom, and talking about the same thing over and over again would get boring. It wasn’t until I discovered the “blogosphere” that I found an online community that I understood and really enjoyed.

The “blogosphere” was the colloquial term that folks used to describe the loose community of bloggers who would comment on, promote, and respond to each other’s posts. I realize this is probably just the blatherings of an old man at this point, especially to folks in their 20s and younger, but to me, this was the internet in its near perfect form. What made the blogosphere great when compared to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and the various other social media platforms of today was…it wasn’t a platform at all. It existed across a multitude of platforms — Blogspot, WordPress, Livejournal, Freewebs (which I’m pretty sure is dead now), and even places like Yahoo’s GeoCities.

It wasn’t just that blogs could exist across multiple platforms. I loved the pace of the blogosphere. It wasn’t uncommon for folks to update their blogs with brief paragraphs or single sentences, or simply link to a YouTube video and/or another post in a manner very similar to how we tweet today. But even that required just a tad more effort to post than a tweet since you still had to worry at least about formatting and such. And that tiny amount of extra effort meant it was harder to fire off some of the truly stupid, top-of-the-dome stuff we’ve all seen on Twitter. While flame wars and inter-community drama was and will always be a thing — look up RaceFail ’09 for instance — it also meant that it was easier to write a thoughtful, nuanced piece about a topic, and it was harder to take things out of context. Still possible, mind you, just a little harder.

That’s the thing that I find most nostalgic about the internet of old: that minor extra amount of effort can act as a deterrent from engaging in some of the worse impulses that sites like Facebook and Twitter engender — those sites feel ephemeral, and they’re very fast moving, so it incentivizes you to post quickly and often and not think too much about it. There’s also something to be said about being able to control your feed. Basically all of the modern social medias except things like Mastodon have algorithms that are programmed to monitor you and provide things that it thinks you’ll find engaging. However, since those algorithms don’t recognize any distinction in engagement, and since anger and similar negative emotions are powerful motivators of engagement, you end up in a negative feedback loop of doom and gloom. And that’s not even touching the way that those algorithms can be written to control and influence you.

“The [Facebook’s] algorithm that determines each user’s news feed . . . is built around a core mission: promote content that will maximize user engagement. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, perform best and so proliferate,” wrote New York Times writers Amanda Taub and Max Fisher in an article about attitudes toward refugees in Altena, Germany. Heavier Facebook users found themselves in a world of anti-immigrant posts. Thinking what they saw represented the majority view in their town, those users became more hardened in their views toward refugees. Residents less involved with social media retained a moderate or welcoming attitude toward immigrants.

from “Social media’s algorithms lead us down dark, divisive rabbit holes” by By Dick Lilly, The Seattle Times (Opinion)

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/social-medias-algorithms-lead-us-down-dark-divisive-rabbit-holes/

I remember a few years ago — maybe around 2016 or so? — when newsletters started becoming more popular among certain circles online. Lots of folks I followed started newsletters, and I remember thinking at the time that newsletters were just blog posts being emailed directly to subscribers. I think I may have even idly tweeted that I hoped it was a sign of the return of the blogosphere. And now, as Twitter flames out in a beautiful, spectacular fashion, I’ve seen repeated references to this very idea. John Scalzi just wrote a post about bringing back “the artisan, hand-crafted Web.” And in Charlie Jane Anders’ most recent newsletter update, she even mused about RSS readers and blogs returning to replace newsletters:

I’ve seen a few people saying in the wake of Twitter’s turn towards autoanalingus that they’re going to start using RSS feed readers again, and that seems like a way better way of curating stuff. (And here’s a good place to mention that you can subscribe to my newsletter, Happy Dancing, using RSS to get it in your feed reader of choice.) It would be hilarious if newsletters started evolving back into blogs, but also kind of a good thing? I miss blogs, tbh.

From “Not Another Think Piece About Twitter, I Promise!” by Charlie Jane Anders, Happy Dancing

https://buttondown.email/charliejane/archive/not-another-think-piece-about-twitter-i-promise/

Personally, I would absolutely love if we returned to blogging more. I enjoyed some truly excellent and fascinating long form discussions as complex topics made their way around the blogosphere, and reading each person’s perspective was often extremely illuminating. Plus, as far as community went, unlike with modern social media where it feels like you’re trying to shout over a rushing wind, blog communities didn’t usually feel overly large unless you were commenting on, like, John Scalzi’s blog.

In Scalzi’s most recent post, he suggest posting on your blog once a week minimum, and that’s what I loved about the old blogosphere. For one thing, as I already mentioned, the slower pace often made for more thoughtful discussions, but it also meant you didn’t feel compelled to spend all day checking on blogs. It was a bit like how my parents used to read the newspaper every morning with breakfast — you’d wake up and enjoy posts from your favorite blogs with breakfast, shut it down and go about your day, and then end your day by catching up on any posts that may have dropped throughout the day. There also wasn’t that sense that if you didn’t respond the moment someone posted something that you’d basically missed the conversation entirely.

I realized recently that although my updates have been extremely infrequent and often only every few months, I still come back here regardless of which social media platform is en vogue. I have an archive of life updates and thoughts that spans back 12 years. And that’s neat. It’s neat to look back on old posts and see how I’ve changed and how I haven’t.

I’ve started using WordPress’s RSS reader to subscribe to a ton of blogs and websites for folks I enjoyed reading on Twitter in the hopes that maybe they’ll start posting on their blogs again. You might be wondering why I wouldn’t want to use something like Tumblr, which is a blogging platform, but also has sharing functions and an all-in-one-place dashboard feed similar to Twitter and other social media platforms. On paper, that seems great, but in practice, for me, it felt like drowning in text. Plus, posts dedicated solely to dozens of gifs and images all crammed into a single post leave me feeling way too overstimulated and overwhelmed.

I did try to use Tumblr as a blog annex at one point, but gave up because I realized that in many ways I gave up ownership when I posted them there, specifically the way reblog feature works. One of my posts about gun control was reblogged by a pro-gun Tumblr run by a Very Stable Person, and although I could block that user so they couldn’t view more of my posts, blocking them didn’t remove that post from their page once it was posted. It was just…there now. Even on Twitter, if someone quote tweets you, you can delete the tweet and all that remains is a message that the tweet being quoted no longer exists. Maybe I just don’t understand how Tumblr works — it’s not only possible, it’s very likely — but the only options I could determine were to turn off re-blog sharing, which sort of defeats the whole point of using something like Tumblr, or keep my posts shareable but lose the ability to truly take anything down once it was shared out.

I apologize for making another post about social media. I promise that’s not all this blog will become. It’s just been on my mind a lot lately. As I mentioned in my last post, leaving Twitter, a site that had become an internet staple for me, has me reflecting a lot more on how I engage online. It has certainly made me realize how important this blog is to me. I really want to think more about this space and how I can utilize it in the future. Even if we don’t see a blogging renaissance sweep the internet, at the very least I can facilitate a personal blogging renaissance. If you’re a blogger, or if you’re someone I talked with on Twitter that’s starting to blog again, comment and share a link to your blog so we can visit your site and drink up your word soup. …that’s an expression…right?

Anyway, in the meantime, that’s all from me for now. Till next time!