It seems to me that the blogosphere was not a ZIRP but rather a young Internet phenomenon. Which could exists, like usenet before it, when mere access to it was a filtering mechanism.
Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb.
Either way, I enjoyed it while it lasted. Thanks for the Office series!
> "This blog was sponsored by ZIRP. The future historians who dive into these archives for archaeological research will likely be economic rather than cultural historians, trying to reconstruct the play-by-play impact of ZIRP. Many of the big hits of this blog, such as The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial, and The Locust Economy (a forgotten hit from 2013) had ZIRPy subtexts."
I think the author might he referring to their own blog (ribbonfarm) as a ZIRP phenomenon, not the whole blogosphere.
Those seven billion people aren't very good for the most part, and include a critical mass of spectacularly awful people. It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. The Eternal September effect has been getting stronger ever since it's first been observed.
There's a gap between public fora and the blogosphere though.
Generally speaking there are plenty of blogs that get linked in places like here. Blogs just don't have comment sections hosted on their own as much anymore.
Having discussions happen in separate places is also interesting, because the HN convo and some subreddit convo will be different, for example.
There's a lot more mainstraeam stuff but I think niche communities still exist. Glibly, we're not a part of most of them on account of having gotten older. Or we are a part of some, but there's plenty we're not seeing.
>It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience.
"Checklist for new theories purporting to prove that the social web is presently unworkable:"
...
26. The predicted conflicts still wouldn't be as bad as Usenet flamewars.
27. Your theory proves that Hackernews does not exist. <---
28. Audiences afraid of engaging with an unfamiliar interfaces weren't making websites in 1998 either.
This forum has been decreasing in quality since its inception, currently hovering at not-quite-reddit and that's with an organic audience of tech-adjacent posters. It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.
You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.
There's an interesting phenomenon where any time a long time HN user says that discussion quality has been declining (something many have reported), a moderator will essentially say that people have been claiming that for as long as they've been moderating, but that it does not match their observations.
I've always found that contradiction interesting (and puzzling).
> It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.
This seems untrue? Of course I like HN, but from the perspective of a typical person, HN is an ugly, hard-to-use website with "news" that caters to a small fraction of the population and is likely quite uninteresting to the rest. I think this is why it manages to stay roughly the way that it is - that and extremely thorough and strict moderation to keep it that way.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me.
My HN account is older than either of yours, so I don’t think I can be dismissed as a “semi-noob”. rogers12 is mostly correct, sad to say. dang has done a good job slowing the decline (and I actually noticed an uptick in quality when he first took over) but HN is past its peak.
Given that hn is the forum of yc, I think we should not feel comfortable with it's trajectory even if dang does a great job moderating. Garry Tan is in the ceo chair here and he is currently advocating for a purge of the homeless, democrats, and "anti-tech" people from San Francisco. A Republican who is too ashamed to admit being a Republican (preferring Grey vs Blue or the network state concept) , who drunkenly tweets death threats at his political opponents is not trustworthy.
HN’s association with YC has felt looser every year for over a decade at this point. If not for the Jobs link, the subtle username colors, and the domain, it’d almost be forgettable.
Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twitter once was. If Twitter was to go away, places like Bluesky would unavoidably get worse.
My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site).
When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc.
Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography.
I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users.
When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization.
In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat.
I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.
Even if you accept this at face value (I don’t) note the problem: on Bluesky and Mastodon, you have to look for racy content and then follow it on purpose. It must be a deliberate, intentional choice. For the average user, my experience has been that Bluesky and Mastodon are, if anything, too tame and boring.
Whereas Twitter/X is pushing for whatever brings engagement, damn the consequences.
No. It was profitable in 2019. Under the old ownership it could have easily become profitable again by correcting the overhiring and not pissing off advertisers.
Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app.
Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok
Being in internets from before there were internets... I just cannot believe what I read nowadays.
This tldr I reply to is especially pathetic. If your beliefs are so fragile, if someone's post can crush them then you must, MUST question yourself, not some irrelevant JSON sitting who knows where.
Otherwise you do not deserve any respect or attention. You do not even have a right to be listened to.
This thing is called self-respect. If you do not have it then you are nothing. It follows .. well 4chan follows. For some time I and many others thought that this mocking taken to extreme would tell people basic truths. Alas. Still we had some fun
Don't think it's really systematic. I think this is just a generational cycle. Plenty of content coming from newer people on other platforms through other mediums.
Eh, even in his niche we have people like Gwern pioneering in the aesthetic web movement. I'm not sure I buy the web is dying so much as the cultural conversation revolves around the larger platforms ($$) along with in general web discoverability getting worse.
Substack—and the surviving blogs that aren’t on Substack—are still going strong, and I don’t think they’re going to go away. Maybe Substack as a platform might decline the way Medium has. But the “Eternal September” types are usually either functionally illiterate or don’t like long form reading, and social media is increasingly optimized for those people. If you actually take the effort to write down your thoughts in text, you end up filtering for people intelligent and diligent enough to choose the written word even when video and photo content is readily available.
Substack (together with Medium) appears to be the blogosphere. As usual, venture capitalists managed to take over an open protocol and turn it into a singular product.
If the claim that the blogosphere is dying is true, does that imply the public intellectual commons is dying too? I suspect that while the cosyweb is more pleasant for most, this retreat might hinder vital testing and cross-pollination of ideas, and make it much harder for people to polarize into being intellectually active. For example, I've never been an active participant on ribbonfarm, but Rao's writing has made me a little smarter and inclined towards certain vectors of thought. And you can see ripples of his work in later writing by others.
What a shame it would be for this culture to be lost; while there's a lot of dross in the blogosphere, I don't know if the brightest jewels will still be possible in a future system of local, private, transient clusters of thought.
I would say it's dead. Killed by a change in cultural attitude to one that sees an opposing idea as a declaration of war. Retreat into private walled gardens seems like the only option.
Having access to wikipedia on a phone everywhere you go is what killed the bar conversation. No longer did you have to compare notes and argue over beers to remember trivia.
And in that same way, no longer do people have to ramble on into the aether in blog form to work through some shit. Now they can do that with ChatGPT and actually get responses to their thoughts in real time. And most of the time it's agreeable in tone.
Tech continues to change the world.
Maybe that isn't what is contributing to this particular blog dying, but I bet it's contributing to the larger community of blogs dying, which has probably created some inertia.
From what I can tell, highschooler and younger, there's almost a complete abandonment of mainstream social media in favor of self-curated chats like Discord, and it revolves heavily around gaming. A sort of hearkening to the AIM days, which is naturally what you'd expect from individuals who socialize in friendgroups that are developed beyond "work drinking buddies", lol.
But in general, without being too doom-and-gloom about it, and perhaps this is because of the election going on, it does feel like there is a greater trend going on of internet users stepping away from social media.
There's no easy way to divert this weariness back to specialized forums a la the 00's or 90's, though, which is probably where everything should be for the internet to remain useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that 85% or so of internet traffic is phones, resulting in discussions being comprised of back-and-forth thumbtap-quality posts that nobody (including the senders) really seems to care about. It's also exacerbated by the fact that search engines cannot seem to index traditional message boards or wordpresses etc. properly; there are too many of them nowadays to navigate (most being identical templates like vbulletin).
On the other hand, the smartphone has enhanced the culture of watching TV and movies at home. It is acceptable etiquette in my house for any viewer to pause the show and read out the results of a web search about the writer, director, plot, history, concepts, etc. related to the flick at hand.
The medium is shifting just like it shifted 25-ish years ago. People would write and publish on paper or fax. Then came email and websites. Eventually the blog came up because the self publishing process at the time was cumbersome and people didn’t want to be writing html.
What I see most from people who appear very attached to the Web of 15-20 years ago is a constant iteration of values, branding (cozy, small, open), discussions over protocols and platforms, and not much writing or self expression.
People don’t seem interested in “blogging” as much as they seem interested in building communities, or rather, full-fledged sovereign states.
This might seem a little odd, but I’m trying to “find my tribe” of interesting thinkers to bounce around ideas with and your comments on this thread suggest you’d have some great/thoughtful/interesting takes.
If you’re open it would be great to connect (email in my HN bio).
But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform, which will be set up like a social media site with curated content, otherwise you'll have to spend a lot of time finding them.
Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get.
And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end. In the past you could type into Google "new mothers discussion board" and immediately find organic, non-corporate socialization geared towards Americans. That ease of use is sort of erroneously gone, and probably not returning.
I consider Venkatesh to be amongst the brightest and insightful thinkers of our times (The Gervais Principle being a particularly brilliant eye opener that I share with everyone who could be interested and ready to benefit from it).
I hadn’t quite appreciated how long he’s been blogging for, nor that we was nearing 50 (the latter point gives me some inspiration in my mid-30s that there’s still time to contribute).
In terms of the article, and this doesn’t injure his main point, but I feel he has been overgenerous about how long the blogosphere has lasted (though there are of course still exceptions eg for me recently Ludic’s blog https://ludic.mataroa.blog/, some old gems like Rands in Repose ticking away, and more focused series like Patrick McKenzie’s Bits about Money).
To my mind it was well and truly done (in the way that it once existed) before Covid, with the absence of a resurgence during a period with so many locked down and online proving its end.
By that point there had already been the rise of walled gardens, the fall of Google Search, the rise of social media and influencers (and since the subsequent fall post-Covid), clickbait, smartphones as the primary browsing device, constantly online culture, attention exhaustion, (low quality) content saturation, etc. If the blog had survived all this LLMs adding fuel to the attention harvesting noise would almost certainly have sealed the deal.
On the whole “online” feels like it’s falling apart.
The leading apps and sites are buggy and broken with little innovation in years despite obvious low-lying fruit yet still dominantly crowding out (or buying out and shutting down) challengers, websites are a mess of instinctual clicking past popups like your relative’s malware-infected WinXP desktop you had to fix up at Christmas, almost everyone seems to be an influencer cynically pumping out low quality noise that the algorithms seem almost determined to elevate over unloved crafted quality content (and we still don’t seem to be reaping benefits of AI to sort through this), US politics contextlessly infects nearly every platform and channel globally (thankfully usually not here except when relevant), the subscription sites have bait and switched after hooking us all in and continue to turn the screws, the “gig economy” and “disruptors” have done the same continuing to damage broader society with their externalities while skirting the purpose of established laws and norms and now raising prices to higher than what they displaced, our democracy is challenged by the inability to know truth accelerated by the overwhelm of targeted noise (and old media has just as much guilt in monetising then selling out the fourth estate while governments are now racing towards totalitarianism in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle), attention span and ability to think as humans is being fundamentally reshaped in ways that most consider damaging, digital has accelerated (or at least coincided with) the society-consuming and society-destroying elements of capitalism over the last 50 years as it “cleverly” works out how to turn anything and everything (quality, brand value, trust, institutions, connections, spare time, relationships, attention etc.) into $ and destroy them in the process, and it all seems to have turned into walking through a crowded alleyway of people shouting and fighting and exploiting and vying for your attention and and and and.
The fall of Rome analogy feels figuratively rather apt, because it certainly has a sense of that, and maybe this cozyweb is a nice hideaway answer from all this (I haven’t quite found my online cozy place yet).
For those who haven’t seen it and find any of this resonates (especially as a Millenial), Bo Burnham’s Inside brilliantly talks to this all, and he’s the first I’ve come across to really do so.
Is anyone else talking about this in a way that’s helpful, or at least helpfully relays the problem that’s emerged upon us?
It's so strange when people say that such-and-such-internet-thing is dead. For the most part, I see no truth in that. There's SOME truth in SOME of it. Private mail servers are getting harder to use, because other servers don't trust them.
But blogs will work. The technology is as good as ever, and people can go read stuff on blogs. Maybe masses of people are choosing to do that less. That's not what being dead is. That's being less popular.
I mostly post on LinkedIn instead of my blog, because I like the shorter writing form.
It seems to me that the blogosphere was not a ZIRP but rather a young Internet phenomenon. Which could exists, like usenet before it, when mere access to it was a filtering mechanism.
Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb.
Either way, I enjoyed it while it lasted. Thanks for the Office series!
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
For those missing context:
> "This blog was sponsored by ZIRP. The future historians who dive into these archives for archaeological research will likely be economic rather than cultural historians, trying to reconstruct the play-by-play impact of ZIRP. Many of the big hits of this blog, such as The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial, and The Locust Economy (a forgotten hit from 2013) had ZIRPy subtexts."
I think the author might he referring to their own blog (ribbonfarm) as a ZIRP phenomenon, not the whole blogosphere.
> Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb.
Why can’t you? There’s a logical leap in this statement I don’t follow.
Those seven billion people aren't very good for the most part, and include a critical mass of spectacularly awful people. It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. The Eternal September effect has been getting stronger ever since it's first been observed.
There's a gap between public fora and the blogosphere though.
Generally speaking there are plenty of blogs that get linked in places like here. Blogs just don't have comment sections hosted on their own as much anymore.
Having discussions happen in separate places is also interesting, because the HN convo and some subreddit convo will be different, for example.
There's a lot more mainstraeam stuff but I think niche communities still exist. Glibly, we're not a part of most of them on account of having gotten older. Or we are a part of some, but there's plenty we're not seeing.
>It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience.
"Checklist for new theories purporting to prove that the social web is presently unworkable:"
...
26. The predicted conflicts still wouldn't be as bad as Usenet flamewars.
27. Your theory proves that Hackernews does not exist. <---
28. Audiences afraid of engaging with an unfamiliar interfaces weren't making websites in 1998 either.
...
This forum has been decreasing in quality since its inception, currently hovering at not-quite-reddit and that's with an organic audience of tech-adjacent posters. It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.
You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.
There's an interesting phenomenon where any time a long time HN user says that discussion quality has been declining (something many have reported), a moderator will essentially say that people have been claiming that for as long as they've been moderating, but that it does not match their observations.
I've always found that contradiction interesting (and puzzling).
> It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention.
This seems untrue? Of course I like HN, but from the perspective of a typical person, HN is an ugly, hard-to-use website with "news" that caters to a small fraction of the population and is likely quite uninteresting to the rest. I think this is why it manages to stay roughly the way that it is - that and extremely thorough and strict moderation to keep it that way.
As the guidelines [0] state:
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Context.
That's a rule for jumping into a conversation and making petty putdowns.
It doesn't mean "if someone says HN has never been better, you're not allowed to disagree".
My HN account is older than either of yours, so I don’t think I can be dismissed as a “semi-noob”. rogers12 is mostly correct, sad to say. dang has done a good job slowing the decline (and I actually noticed an uptick in quality when he first took over) but HN is past its peak.
When was its peak, what would you say characterized that peak, and what are some clear indicators of the decline?
That doesn’t seem to be the claim, just that the average quality is trending downwards just like reddit.
It’ll probably never converge because reddit is getting worse at an even faster rate.
Quoting the HN guidelines at people is a semi-noob practice, as old as the hills.
Weeellll. Not every forum has a dang. Just saying.
Almost every one does.
Given that hn is the forum of yc, I think we should not feel comfortable with it's trajectory even if dang does a great job moderating. Garry Tan is in the ceo chair here and he is currently advocating for a purge of the homeless, democrats, and "anti-tech" people from San Francisco. A Republican who is too ashamed to admit being a Republican (preferring Grey vs Blue or the network state concept) , who drunkenly tweets death threats at his political opponents is not trustworthy.
HN’s association with YC has felt looser every year for over a decade at this point. If not for the Jobs link, the subtle username colors, and the domain, it’d almost be forgettable.
Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twitter once was. If Twitter was to go away, places like Bluesky would unavoidably get worse.
My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site).
When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc.
Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography.
I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users.
When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization.
In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat.
I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.
Bluesky and Mastodon, for the average user, are G rated compared to the avalanche of smut on Twitter/X.
> avalanche of smut on Twitter/X
I haven't seen this.
Maybe you only run into that sort of thing if you go looking for that sort of thing?
Even if you accept this at face value (I don’t) note the problem: on Bluesky and Mastodon, you have to look for racy content and then follow it on purpose. It must be a deliberate, intentional choice. For the average user, my experience has been that Bluesky and Mastodon are, if anything, too tame and boring.
Whereas Twitter/X is pushing for whatever brings engagement, damn the consequences.
The top replies to any big viral tweet are Onlyfans models and other spammers.
> It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy
No. It was profitable in 2019. Under the old ownership it could have easily become profitable again by correcting the overhiring and not pissing off advertisers.
Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app.
Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok
Being in internets from before there were internets... I just cannot believe what I read nowadays.
This tldr I reply to is especially pathetic. If your beliefs are so fragile, if someone's post can crush them then you must, MUST question yourself, not some irrelevant JSON sitting who knows where.
Otherwise you do not deserve any respect or attention. You do not even have a right to be listened to.
This thing is called self-respect. If you do not have it then you are nothing. It follows .. well 4chan follows. For some time I and many others thought that this mocking taken to extreme would tell people basic truths. Alas. Still we had some fun
I think that AI generated personas who push an ideological direction on anonymous forums are more of a threat that just stupid people.
Eg: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-int...
There is a NYT op ed titled “The Tyranny of Convenience” that covers the phenomena well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-co...
Old content creators can't keep up with creating content so they blame everything but their own inability to move on from a dead format.
Are bloggers required to meet a quota?
There may be examples of this, but picking on Venkat Rao for not being sufficiently prolific is a laughable argument.
Don't think it's really systematic. I think this is just a generational cycle. Plenty of content coming from newer people on other platforms through other mediums.
Eh, even in his niche we have people like Gwern pioneering in the aesthetic web movement. I'm not sure I buy the web is dying so much as the cultural conversation revolves around the larger platforms ($$) along with in general web discoverability getting worse.
Substack is doing OK, I think. It's the intellectual child of the blogosphere.
Substack—and the surviving blogs that aren’t on Substack—are still going strong, and I don’t think they’re going to go away. Maybe Substack as a platform might decline the way Medium has. But the “Eternal September” types are usually either functionally illiterate or don’t like long form reading, and social media is increasingly optimized for those people. If you actually take the effort to write down your thoughts in text, you end up filtering for people intelligent and diligent enough to choose the written word even when video and photo content is readily available.
Substack (together with Medium) appears to be the blogosphere. As usual, venture capitalists managed to take over an open protocol and turn it into a singular product.
Surprised you lumped Medium in with Substack. I always associate Medium with C-tier tech tutorials at best these days.
I've read some A-tier libertarian noir novellas on there.
If the claim that the blogosphere is dying is true, does that imply the public intellectual commons is dying too? I suspect that while the cosyweb is more pleasant for most, this retreat might hinder vital testing and cross-pollination of ideas, and make it much harder for people to polarize into being intellectually active. For example, I've never been an active participant on ribbonfarm, but Rao's writing has made me a little smarter and inclined towards certain vectors of thought. And you can see ripples of his work in later writing by others.
What a shame it would be for this culture to be lost; while there's a lot of dross in the blogosphere, I don't know if the brightest jewels will still be possible in a future system of local, private, transient clusters of thought.
I would say it's dead. Killed by a change in cultural attitude to one that sees an opposing idea as a declaration of war. Retreat into private walled gardens seems like the only option.
Having access to wikipedia on a phone everywhere you go is what killed the bar conversation. No longer did you have to compare notes and argue over beers to remember trivia.
And in that same way, no longer do people have to ramble on into the aether in blog form to work through some shit. Now they can do that with ChatGPT and actually get responses to their thoughts in real time. And most of the time it's agreeable in tone.
Tech continues to change the world.
Maybe that isn't what is contributing to this particular blog dying, but I bet it's contributing to the larger community of blogs dying, which has probably created some inertia.
From what I can tell, highschooler and younger, there's almost a complete abandonment of mainstream social media in favor of self-curated chats like Discord, and it revolves heavily around gaming. A sort of hearkening to the AIM days, which is naturally what you'd expect from individuals who socialize in friendgroups that are developed beyond "work drinking buddies", lol.
But in general, without being too doom-and-gloom about it, and perhaps this is because of the election going on, it does feel like there is a greater trend going on of internet users stepping away from social media.
There's no easy way to divert this weariness back to specialized forums a la the 00's or 90's, though, which is probably where everything should be for the internet to remain useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that 85% or so of internet traffic is phones, resulting in discussions being comprised of back-and-forth thumbtap-quality posts that nobody (including the senders) really seems to care about. It's also exacerbated by the fact that search engines cannot seem to index traditional message boards or wordpresses etc. properly; there are too many of them nowadays to navigate (most being identical templates like vbulletin).
Do you have any sources to read/learn more about this phenomenon? Would be great to understand why
On the other hand, the smartphone has enhanced the culture of watching TV and movies at home. It is acceptable etiquette in my house for any viewer to pause the show and read out the results of a web search about the writer, director, plot, history, concepts, etc. related to the flick at hand.
I really don't get how and why are blogs dying.
The medium is shifting just like it shifted 25-ish years ago. People would write and publish on paper or fax. Then came email and websites. Eventually the blog came up because the self publishing process at the time was cumbersome and people didn’t want to be writing html.
Because people don't go surfing on the web anymore, they stay in the same facebook-twitter-instagram-netflix-amazon-reddit loop forever.
That's not death. That's non-virality.
For extroverts and fame-seekers, I guess that feels like death. But it's not.
False, while you try to make this a moral point, the reality is where the audiences go the content goes.
Sorry that’s just life.
Source: worked on this research at Google for decades. We accelerated the issue unfortunately.
Google made the web searchable not browsable.
Social and media networks inside their walled gardens took over browsability.
I'd never heard of this blog before, but it looks like a really interesting, eclectic one, and the Web may be a bit darker, for its absence.
That said...
> anymore than there was a single heir to the Roman empire
I'm not exactly sure I'd classify this blog at the same level of influence as the Original Italian Mafioso.
He’s talking about blogs in general
What I see most from people who appear very attached to the Web of 15-20 years ago is a constant iteration of values, branding (cozy, small, open), discussions over protocols and platforms, and not much writing or self expression.
People don’t seem interested in “blogging” as much as they seem interested in building communities, or rather, full-fledged sovereign states.
Adam Curtis’s All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace and Rivbonfarms The Gervis Priciple were foundations of my professional career growth.
This might seem a little odd, but I’m trying to “find my tribe” of interesting thinkers to bounce around ideas with and your comments on this thread suggest you’d have some great/thoughtful/interesting takes.
If you’re open it would be great to connect (email in my HN bio).
I'm reading more blogs than ever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform, which will be set up like a social media site with curated content, otherwise you'll have to spend a lot of time finding them.
Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get.
And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end. In the past you could type into Google "new mothers discussion board" and immediately find organic, non-corporate socialization geared towards Americans. That ease of use is sort of erroneously gone, and probably not returning.
Might I ask...which blogs are you reading?
I consider Venkatesh to be amongst the brightest and insightful thinkers of our times (The Gervais Principle being a particularly brilliant eye opener that I share with everyone who could be interested and ready to benefit from it).
I hadn’t quite appreciated how long he’s been blogging for, nor that we was nearing 50 (the latter point gives me some inspiration in my mid-30s that there’s still time to contribute).
In terms of the article, and this doesn’t injure his main point, but I feel he has been overgenerous about how long the blogosphere has lasted (though there are of course still exceptions eg for me recently Ludic’s blog https://ludic.mataroa.blog/, some old gems like Rands in Repose ticking away, and more focused series like Patrick McKenzie’s Bits about Money).
To my mind it was well and truly done (in the way that it once existed) before Covid, with the absence of a resurgence during a period with so many locked down and online proving its end.
By that point there had already been the rise of walled gardens, the fall of Google Search, the rise of social media and influencers (and since the subsequent fall post-Covid), clickbait, smartphones as the primary browsing device, constantly online culture, attention exhaustion, (low quality) content saturation, etc. If the blog had survived all this LLMs adding fuel to the attention harvesting noise would almost certainly have sealed the deal.
On the whole “online” feels like it’s falling apart.
The leading apps and sites are buggy and broken with little innovation in years despite obvious low-lying fruit yet still dominantly crowding out (or buying out and shutting down) challengers, websites are a mess of instinctual clicking past popups like your relative’s malware-infected WinXP desktop you had to fix up at Christmas, almost everyone seems to be an influencer cynically pumping out low quality noise that the algorithms seem almost determined to elevate over unloved crafted quality content (and we still don’t seem to be reaping benefits of AI to sort through this), US politics contextlessly infects nearly every platform and channel globally (thankfully usually not here except when relevant), the subscription sites have bait and switched after hooking us all in and continue to turn the screws, the “gig economy” and “disruptors” have done the same continuing to damage broader society with their externalities while skirting the purpose of established laws and norms and now raising prices to higher than what they displaced, our democracy is challenged by the inability to know truth accelerated by the overwhelm of targeted noise (and old media has just as much guilt in monetising then selling out the fourth estate while governments are now racing towards totalitarianism in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle), attention span and ability to think as humans is being fundamentally reshaped in ways that most consider damaging, digital has accelerated (or at least coincided with) the society-consuming and society-destroying elements of capitalism over the last 50 years as it “cleverly” works out how to turn anything and everything (quality, brand value, trust, institutions, connections, spare time, relationships, attention etc.) into $ and destroy them in the process, and it all seems to have turned into walking through a crowded alleyway of people shouting and fighting and exploiting and vying for your attention and and and and.
The fall of Rome analogy feels figuratively rather apt, because it certainly has a sense of that, and maybe this cozyweb is a nice hideaway answer from all this (I haven’t quite found my online cozy place yet).
For those who haven’t seen it and find any of this resonates (especially as a Millenial), Bo Burnham’s Inside brilliantly talks to this all, and he’s the first I’ve come across to really do so.
Is anyone else talking about this in a way that’s helpful, or at least helpfully relays the problem that’s emerged upon us?
It's so strange when people say that such-and-such-internet-thing is dead. For the most part, I see no truth in that. There's SOME truth in SOME of it. Private mail servers are getting harder to use, because other servers don't trust them.
But blogs will work. The technology is as good as ever, and people can go read stuff on blogs. Maybe masses of people are choosing to do that less. That's not what being dead is. That's being less popular.
I mostly post on LinkedIn instead of my blog, because I like the shorter writing form.