Re-Blog
March 25, 2018 3:05 PM   Subscribe

Remember personal blogs? So does Dan Cohen: "There has been a recent movement to “re-decentralize” the web, returning our activities to sites like this one... However, I’m also a pragmatist, and I feel the re-decentralizers have underestimated what they are up against, which is partially about technology but mostly about human nature." He reflects on inertia, ambient humanity, and the challenges to a resurgence in personal blogging in this post, Back to the Blog. Via kottke.org.
posted by MonkeyToes (90 comments total) 56 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's not hard for me to remember it because I posted to it today! For math professors, the blog is still very much alive. Because, so far, nobody has figured out a good way to talk about math on social media.
posted by escabeche at 3:14 PM on March 25, 2018 [13 favorites]


I mean, I've only been posting on mine more or less daily for twenty years, so.
posted by jscalzi at 3:22 PM on March 25, 2018 [49 favorites]


My blogging arc has been similar to the author's. Increasing responsibilities, PLUS: when I applied for my current job and was under consideration, I was told one thing holding me back was my controversial blog posts. I put most of my blog behind a friends-only firewall then. Yes, it was a LiveJournal, and on top of cutting back on controversial posts for the sake of public glare, the sale to the Russians caused me to transfer to Dreamwidth. So now I have hardly any of my old LJ readers, AND write everything behind a firewall, so it's an echo-chamber where I work out my thoughts--basically a private journal. I'm an academic too, and I've even got tenure, but I'm somehow second-guessing my posts a lot more than when I was a for-hire academic.

Lately I've started making a few political posts to Medium. It seems a good format--not as de-centralized as a personal domain, but it seems to have something of the old time blogging flavor.
posted by Schmucko at 3:28 PM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


The time has come to stop sharing everything with everyone. It sounds great but has done us little good.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:48 PM on March 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


So, I've been digging mastodon so far in my going on 2 days as a user.

If I guess correctly, all it will take for the so-called fediverse of which it is a part to break out of its current largely twitter-like role and un-re-centralize the whole facebooky part of the web is some more UI polish, some kind of well-integrated discussion groups type thing that is more generalized than instance local, a better user on-boarding experience, an easy and widely-adopted way for it to serve as the comment section for blogs, an easier way to use it as you would once have used an rss reader, a completely painless method of migrating between instances if the one you're on offends you or goes down, the ability to deal with scalability issues (perhaps involving instance funding and moderation) that will come with having a billion users, a critical mass of people in one or two key countries, and then, after all that, another big marketing push like the one currently being provided by Mark Zuckerberg news headlines. Easy, right? It's practically inevitable.

Of course if everyone does go back to having their own blog, that'd be great too.
posted by sfenders at 3:51 PM on March 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I read blogs. They're still useful in my profession. I've got a blog I rarely post to - I agree with "Tweet to connect, blog to reflect," but I have a long list of blog topics for reflecting on that I can't get to because of other priorities. It's unpaid labor, which makes me think about this recent post. I think it's safe to say that blogging's a bit of a luxury unless you get paid for it or it actually gets you work (as opposed to in-theory getting you work because it enhances your profile...I find paid work enhances my profile too).
posted by Miko at 4:08 PM on March 25, 2018 [13 favorites]


A couple of days ago, I asked my Facebook friends if they'd read/comment/participate if i started up my personal blog again, and enough of them said "no" that I probably won't do it. A not-insignificant number of people made it clear that to them Facebook IS the Internet, and have no interest in anything outside of it. That surprised me a little for a moment, but most of my friend network consists of people over 50, and as a group they are not all that interested in the travails of social media and the Internet. For now, I value the contact with my friends and family more than the satisfaction of being out from under Zuckerberg's thumb.
posted by briank at 4:13 PM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


This is exactly what I need to read right now. I’ve been slowly migrating unique content I’ve posted to Facebook over the last few years over to a Wordpress site. My goal is to eventually only post new content to WP and link out from there.
posted by johnxlibris at 4:29 PM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Lately I've started making a few political posts to Medium. It seems a good format--not as de-centralized as a personal domain, but it seems to have something of the old time blogging flavor.

The problem with Medium is that it goes right up your ass with trackers and scripts and all kinds of busybody crap that I want no part of. As a reader, I find that very offputting.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:44 PM on March 25, 2018 [21 favorites]


These days the thing I post on Facebook most often is "Hey, here's a link to my latest blog post." It's actually the biggest reason I don't nope out entirely, because that's how my friends know I have something for them to read.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:46 PM on March 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


I recently found the archives of mine in an old hard drive I dug up and I'm glad they're not online anymore. I was a million times more insufferable at 21 than I am now (as one could imagine).
posted by elsietheeel at 4:46 PM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


I still (just about) have a blog, which I started in the 1990s, though my posting frequency has gone right down over the years. At the start, I posted several times a day; now, I recently made my first post in three months or so. There are various factors behind this decline.

When the blog started, a lot of posts were a link with two or so sentences of commentary. Twitter (and now Mastodon) took the market for those, leaving blogs for longer items: a paragraph to an essay, either recounting something personal or commenting on several things in the news. Though then Google Reader died and the popular usage of RSS declined, and so did the readership of blogs; this I've noticed in my comments. Most recent blog posts don't get any comments, and the scant few comments that come in usually do so on a few old entries that somehow show up in searches.

People just stick to Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/whatever, and generally don't seem to go to blogs. And given that a blog entry to modern standards, being longer than a tweet, takes longer to compose, the economics are damning: the amount of payoff (in terms of evidence of people actually reading my writing) per hour of effort has dropped precipitously. So, most of the time, I have better things to do than spend an hour or two honing my prose about some thoughts I had. Writing blog posts at length feels a bit like being a crazy guy ranting on a street corner, to overwhelming indifference. Yes, I could go on Twitter and Facebook with a post saying “hey guys, look at this thing I wrote about (Brexit/Morrissey/arcade emulation/the London rental market/&c.) on my blog here”, but then I'd be just another self-marketer, shouting into the crowd over the voices of other self-marketers, adding to the noise pollution to drum up business, which is not much better, and arguably worse in some ways.

I still post occasionally to my blog: it's partly a keep-alive function, to indicate that it is not dead. Though the only obligatory post that I make is my end-of-year record roundup, which I post on the 31st of December every year. That is essentially the only reason I keep my blog alive.
posted by acb at 4:49 PM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


Good for Dan.

I've been blogging for a while, and have been rebuilding my discipline to take content there, rather than to FB or Twitter. Sometimes it yields some fine results in a short time.
posted by doctornemo at 4:55 PM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Incidentally, just because a blog has its own domain name doesn't mean it isn't hosted on a giant centralized blogging platform such as wordpress.com like Dan Cohen's is.

I don't have any reason to believe that Wordpress is in any way abusing its position as the largest blog host, but if such providers were to somehow take over from Facebook to the point where my aunt who just wants to post the occasional picture of her cats uses one, then after a few rounds of industry "consolidation" they'd most likely become just as bad.
posted by sfenders at 5:08 PM on March 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


I've had blogs from around 2001 to 2012 or so (from something very basic in PHP to modblog to WordPress), when I finally ditched it for Tumblr (and I've mostly quit it on the past couple years except to repost the same April 25th joke every year, and, yes, a record roundup).

A big motive was that Tumblr was more connected and hashtags allowed posts to get more audience than imbound Google searches. Plus, after losing my mind with how tiresome editing posts was on WordPress, just typing something quick or drag and drop a photo looked like magic.
I do miss a lot about the time spent working on it. But to spend time doing stuff nobody cares about, I already have my music. It would be great if RSS would become a thing again as people move away from social media and can't crosspost as easily.
posted by lmfsilva at 5:09 PM on March 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


The time has come to stop sharing everything with everyone. It sounds great but has done us little good.

A few days ago, I answered a question on the Green with links to a blog, a single-topic, niche-interest throwback (child-oriented non-fiction books and ephemera related to space travel), and was delighted to see that such a thing still existed. That may be one form of compromise--writing about things you love, but that aren't personal.
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:39 PM on March 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


Last December, I wrote a blog post detailing how I helped my wife overcome a technical issue with her insulin pump and the website she has to use to get data off the pump for her doctor. The post is #1 on Google if you query the problem, had thousands of page views, and I've gotten dozens of emails from diabetics thanking me for the step by step instructions on how to overcome the issue.

It was a good reminder of the importance of the open web, and good motivation to keep blogging. I posted twice last week and I'm at 14 YTD. Once a week is my goal, so yay me?

Also, a couple of months back Nelson made an OPML file of the Mefi bloggers .
posted by COD at 5:53 PM on March 25, 2018 [26 favorites]


The modern internet has increasingly left me feeling orphaned.

I was a prolific Livejournaler from the spring of 2001 after a couple decades of old school dial-up BBS life, and I got up to some of the usual frenetic social embarrassments of LJ, but mostly, I used that platform like the serialists used newspapers, writing long-form narratives with an increasing audience that gave me support and useful criticism. In time, the audience I had for my sprawling epics of autobiography became my audience for live one-man shows, in which I told tales on stage with music and sound, and I've got book-length manuscripts that I assembled from those ongoing episodes.

When Facebook came along, it seemed so nice, so friendly and spare, even, compared to the verbose sturm und drang of LJ, and my narratives and audience slipped away so subtly I scarcely noticed it until they'd gone. Metafilter is a place where a lot of that concentration went for me, but it's responsive writing, rather than the kind of free-form narratives that became my natural writing voice. On Facebook, I'm a witty guy at a party, quipping here and sharing an anecdote there, and I treasure the extended network of connection...but I want more, and don't know where to go.

I've been experimenting with syndicating tweets to Facebook, in a broadcast sort of mode, and I write and syndicate bits and pieces of longer narratives to Medium and Tumblr, and even try the same on my old-school website, but I don't know—it all feels like the there that was momentarily there just...isn't anymore.

People tell me how much they enjoy my presence on Facebook, but I can't help but wonder if the lines that my digital doppelganger is uttering via FB would best be lines in a book that I'd be writing if I wasn't online...but it's all just a complex system of feedback loops and readers who won't click links or step outside that sandbox, and so—

sigh.
posted by sonascope at 6:50 PM on March 25, 2018 [26 favorites]


Once a year or eighteen months or so I go through my posts from here and from FB and repost them on my blog, with the initial dates of creation, sometimes with a linkover, sometimes not.

Once a year or more often I have a specific task I am puzzling over (such as a flaky SSD install or a miswired solar-powered LED security light replacement battery) and I tend to keep a working journal of the problem including links to resources. That is usually a scratch doc full of part numbers, the story of hitting my thumb with a metaphorical hammer, etc. I keep it open in BBEdit until the project ends, at which point I clean it up and post it to the blog so that I can find it from my devices easily via Google and so that it may be of service to others in the future. That is, as long as Google doesn't drown it in the results by promoting commercially-oriented similar results or, FUCK ME, YouTube content.
posted by mwhybark at 7:04 PM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I dunno, I just saw engagement on my blog (started in 1995) drop to the only traffic being people that got there accidently. I mean, not all of a sudden, but I'd guess that the death of google reader was probably what really killed it. Also Facebook. Facebook is such a walled garden, and lots of people seem to spend 90% of their "internet" time on a facebook property, and I'm not on Facebook, so...

At some stage, I realized that I was just sort of talking to myself, like a crazy cat lady, and so I stopped. Not talking to myself like a crazy cat lady, I mean, obviously I still do that, I just don't publish it for anyone else anymore.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 7:07 PM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


Innovations in decentralized computing services - "block chain" - and search-and-index machine intelligence lead to one conclusion.

Gopher Coin. Only instead of money, it establishes AAA (Authentic, Authorized and Accountable) security, meaning your blog is only you, as anonymous as you like, but only you. In a searchable sea of data readily indexed, as decentralized databases and map-reduce are a thing. You got a blog. You index it in NuGopher, and your friends index it in their personal NuGopher indexes with a single click, which gives it weight. It's further given weight by interacting with it, responses and re-amplification. It uses accounting tricks and tips to identify bad actors (Benford's Law, yo) and de-index itself from their gopherspace if they try to re-amplify in bad faith. Your personal Gopherspace is free of these bad actors, as you link to each other and algorithms are developed to separate the wheat from the chaff and bad actors are de-indexed aggressively.

There is no central server. It's all peer-to-peer. There's no need for a central server, apart from serving video or audio, and even then, the cost of bandwidth has been decreasing lately... I mean, even in backwards America, the wireless providers have been introducing and aggressively promoting unlimited data.

This is ONE vision of a way forward. There will be others, coming and soon.

I have been thinking hard about the Hacker Ethic, recently. And how the Radical Right co-opted a far-left ethos for their own ends. At the end of the day, tho, yes. Distrust authority (including whatever block chain you're on) and promote decentralization. (Google Delenda Est.)

Don't deal in absolutes. Don't succumb to logical fallacies. Roll with the changes, and keep quick on your feet. Establishments crumble. Ideals don't.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:13 PM on March 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


Also, I have an essay I wrote around 2002 or so kicking around one of my backups titled "DNS is Considered Harmful."

Because it is. It's an easily gamed centralized service, then and now.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:17 PM on March 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I feel like the same hollowing-out of blogging has replayed itself time and again on successive platforms: social media in the early part of this decade, and more recently streaming and video platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Video platforms still have a tiny bit of the allure that blogging did, but they're losing it fast, just like Twitter did, just like blogging did: the idea that anyone can start a channel and have other people watch them just because. In a way this has never really been true, not of your Twitch channel or your YouTube videos or your Twitter stream or your blog, but in the early days of all those mediums it felt true because the communities were small enough and the standards still in flux.

Ultimately I think what many people want out of these platforms is a way to have a conversation with like-minded people, and by and large the ability of any platform or medium to facilitate this declines over time. Too many people want the same thing, and the audience isn't big enough to support it all. Big players rapidly take up all the oxygen, leaving millions of blogs or accounts or channels that will never get more than a pittance in traffic. All the people who used to be enthusiastic participants slowly dial back their involvement and become more passive until they can't be bothered because the medium no longer gives them what they wanted, if really it ever did. And eventually, they all move on to the next thing. Anyone who's left is there for a different reason: to consume content as entertainment. And that's totally fine! But it necessarily changes the medium, and it's generally permanent.

I can't see how we get back to the idea of blogs as miniature republics of letters that regular people use to communicate with one another. Blogs can still work for the people who are able to maintain large, dedicated followings, or have transplanted those followings from some other venue ("hi I'm famous movie star X and I've decided to start a blog about vegan puppies ENJOY"). Increasingly, that doesn't include you or me or most of the other people on the internet. You were lucky if people gave a shit about your blog in 2008; there's no way anyone will give a shit about your blog now. Not your family, not your friends, and in many cases not even you.
posted by chrominance at 7:37 PM on March 25, 2018 [9 favorites]


> A couple of days ago, I asked my Facebook friends if they'd read/comment/participate if i started up my personal blog again, and enough of them said "no" that I probably won't do it.

If someone is only willing to interact with you on Facebook, that person is not your friend.
posted by sourcequench at 7:58 PM on March 25, 2018 [11 favorites]


Remember personal blogs

they're back in pog form!
posted by entropicamericana at 8:17 PM on March 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


Other people have mentioned RSS above, and I wonder just how much Google's decision to kill their RSS Reader has contributed to the centralization of content distribution. And I wonder if it was a strategic decision or an accidental byproduct.

It isn't just the Reader either; I frequently use the auto RSS feed detector feature on Firefox, but Google seems to have decided not to implement a similar feature on Chrome.
posted by Umami Dearest at 8:51 PM on March 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


If someone is only willing to interact with you on Facebook, that person is not your friend.

Yeah, because they literally won't talk to you otherwise and you lose friends.

I still have blogs, but I've lost pretty much everyone who read them. I had to discontinue one due to Shitty Drama and have only passed the replacement link onto a few others since then, most of whom don't read or admit that they are intermittent (one just noticed "hey, you haven't updated since November..."). Most of them are only found via Google searches coming up. I had a mailing list that shut down with no warning, I don't have the names of the folks on it and they're long gone. I do one blog project a year that has still somehow lasted despite declining writership, but that's the only time anyone reads it.

And...that is probably for the best. I keep the blogs because it motivates me to get something done as opposed to private journaling, which I don't do too much of. It's also easier for me to find old entries/old links if I want to via looking online instead of privately. I enjoy doing it for me and I never cared about readership anyway. But mostly it's because if anyone notices you these days they are likely to get offended, get shitty, and then dox you, stalk you, ruin your life. So it's better that I not be seen any more anyway.

" there's no way anyone will give a shit about your blog now. Not your family, not your friends, and in many cases not even you."

Yup, that is true.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:56 PM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


If someone is only willing to interact with you on Facebook, that person is not your friend.

That's a slightly extreme reaction to someone giving you a realistic "no" to "will you read my blog?". There are plenty of people I'll happily interact with on Facebook whose blogs I won't bother to go out and read, and they're still very much my friends because the primary way we interact is in person, in IRL meatspace.
posted by Dysk at 9:55 PM on March 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


I’ve been blogging for almost twenty years, back when it was possible to fit every British blogger in a single pub’s upstairs room. When I started, I’d check my stats regularly, but after a few years I got bored of that and it was really just about the enjoyment of writing, and letting my friends know what was on my mind.

There’s definitely an element of “dude shouting on a corner” to it, but some of my posts have accumulated hundreds of comments from people who came from Google, and some have no comments and only a few views. It’s all fine. I like doing it and after a long sojourn on Twitter and Medium, I’m glad to be back blogging on my own site rather than another interchangeable avatar on a platform I have zero control over.
posted by adrianhon at 11:32 PM on March 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


This thread is inspiring me to start a zine.
posted by smelendez at 12:48 AM on March 26, 2018 [9 favorites]


I blog mainly about pithy, political and more arcane aspects of my work - the sort of stuff I'm not (yet) happy having on my company page, 30 followers or so, mainly coming in from my wife's much larger specialist colour blog, altho' I do have it in my work email sig. I really just do it as it's improving my writing confidence. And if potential clients see it and don't like what they see, well it's again for both parties I say!
posted by unearthed at 12:53 AM on March 26, 2018


This is, sadly, timely for me. I've done nothing but blogging for 12 years now, but the blog that I depend on for the majority of my income is going out of business next week. All the money is now going to Amazon and Zuckerberg. The thought of going back to punching a clock at my age is terrifying.
posted by Miss Cellania at 2:12 AM on March 26, 2018 [6 favorites]


I’ve been blogging for almost twenty years, back when it was possible to fit every British blogger in a single pub’s upstairs room.

I remember going to a few blogger meetups (or “blogmeets” as they were called) in London in the 00s, a few years apart, and noticing how they changed. The first one was amateurish in the best sense of the word: half a dozen or so mildly eccentric people with interests they felt inspired to write about. Fast forward a few years later, and the makeup had changed: the participants looked like real-estate agents and the talk was about “driving engagement” and using a blog as a personal marketing platform, with a goal to getting book deals or whatever.
posted by acb at 2:37 AM on March 26, 2018 [9 favorites]


There's been a lot of ragging on the "cult of the amateur" on mefi lately. Well, the shift acb describes neatly captures where the preference for amateurism comes from.
posted by Dysk at 2:55 AM on March 26, 2018 [6 favorites]


> A couple of days ago, I asked my Facebook friends if they'd read/comment/participate if i started up my personal blog again, and enough of them said "no" that I probably won't do it.

If someone is only willing to interact with you on Facebook, that person is not your friend.


No, they are my family.

Seriously, back when I used to have a Facebook account, I interacted with my parents in some way most days, often multiple times a day. I interacted with my cousins a couple of times a month. I deleted my Facebook account four or five years ago (before it was cool :) ) and since then, I talk to my parents once every couple of weeks by phone. I don't really have a sense of what their life is like on a daily basis anymore. I haven't spoken with my cousins at all since I deleted Facebook. (I never had their phone numbers or email addresses in the first place.)

I still like the idea of blogs a lot, but I got out of the habit of posting to mine and probably won't start doing it again. But there's something polite about the idea that you put things out there and other people can choose to engage with it or not, and like it or not, that's what social media like Facebook does too, which is very different from a phone call or email, where the person in question is directly targeted and has to respond to be polite.
posted by lollusc at 4:32 AM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Just in case - back in December someone did a MeTa calling for Mefite bloggers to pitch themselves. So if anyone's looking for new reading, there you go.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:41 AM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Since the beginning of the year, I have been blogging regularly. It is a HUGE, unpaid time-suck, I agree, and despite my best efforts (which are mediocre at best; I'm not much of a self promoter), mostly it is read by my father, and occasionally by my sister. Even Mr. Freedom doesn't read it. And, really, it's about my niche research interest, so I'm not really expecting many people to read it, although I would prefer that more people in my discipline did.

However, the 5-10% of my readership that gets there via Google Searches is why I keep posting this research to a blog and not just writing it down in a Word document on my own computer. You see, I profile immigrant students from the early 1900s, and people who are researching their ancestry stumble across my blog all the time. I've received messages from descendants who are thrilled to learn new information about their great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, and every time I receive those messages it makes my entire week.

So, I'll probably never stop blogging.
posted by chainsofreedom at 5:13 AM on March 26, 2018 [13 favorites]


I do still find blogging useful (primarily as a way to begin thinking through problems in my own research), but like a lot of other people, I found that my readership imploded with the collapse of RSS. And I started when I was an assistant professor with few outside commitments; I'm now at the phase of my career when I'm asked to do things on a fairly regular basis (write something, referee manuscripts, review a book...), alongside the usual service expectations for senior faculty in my own department, and there just isn't that much time during the school year to also blog.
posted by thomas j wise at 5:28 AM on March 26, 2018


I very much miss fandom LiveJournal from a decade ago. It was a lively fun space in a way that never really made it across to other platforms. I got a Dreamwidth in one of the LJ exoduses, but had already stopped posting to my own LJ a while before, and when I check in on Dreamwidth now it's a sparse crowd posting very occasional updates about how much they miss it too and how it's a shame none of us update any more. (I know LiveJournal fandom is not Serious Blogging Business in many eyes, but God was it nice having an internet space for lengthy discussions about internalised misogyny and sci-fi worldbuilding where men were like 10% of the population.)

Also miss parenting blogging from around the same period, back before it became all about Brands and Influencers. There were some wonderful writers back then. And academic blogging, back when Dan Cohen was telling us all to do it! I hope the pseudonymous grad students who ran the Philosophy Job Market blog (tagline: "It'd be funny if it were happening to someone else") are doing okay out there, hopefully in decent fulfilling jobs that actually pay enough to live off.
posted by Catseye at 5:33 AM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


I'm shutting down my personal WordPress blog after two decades of blogging. My traffic, which was never high to begin with, had dwindled to almost nothing. Even I wasn't checking it that often and the cost of hosting and time I spent keeping it secure just wasn't worth it anymore. I get more traffic from a single Facebook post than a whole bunch of blog posts. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.
posted by tommasz at 5:45 AM on March 26, 2018


The correct answer to blogging and social networks is probably Indieweb tech; it syndicates your writing onto the social networks, then automatically pulls the comments back onto your blog. Best of both worlds.
posted by jaduncan at 5:48 AM on March 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


"Ambient humanity" is a really great term that gets right to the crux of it, I think. It's why a lot of Facebook people failed at making the leap to Twitter. People really want feedback on what they're posting, or else they become rapidly convinced that they're shouting into a hole. Twitter was never able to meaningfully solve that problem. So there's that old William Gibson thing about Facebook being the mall and Twitter being the street. There's more interesting stuff happening on the street, but the people on the street give far less of a shit about you and your thoughts than your friends at the mall do.

Which, to extend the metaphor, pretty much means that personal blogging these days is like standing in the middle of a meadow and shouting at cows most of the time. Especially if your blog isn't posting links to Twitter or FB. I finally gave up auto-posting to Twitter a few months back because Nazis, and engagement on my site went way down. Not that I'm writing that often, but when I do, it gets far less notice. People with noteworthy names get more incentive to keep it up, because they've got an audience following them around the web. But your cousin who couldn't figure out why anyone wants to tweet when "nothing happens" afterward sure isn't going to give you 500 words on a topic of interest. Because there's no ambient humanity there. Just the cows.

I think it's fantastic that a lot of you have been keeping it up, and I think you should continue to, but your personal story is the exception, not the rule. The open web is dying. AOL 2.0 has been in full swing for a while now. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that fundamental infrastructure of the web needs to change in order to fix that. People want these connections, and if it's not baked into the way the web works, Facebook will continue to be Facebook.
posted by middleclasstool at 6:21 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've tried blogging off and on over the years, but have never been successful at it. IMHO, a blog only attracts readers if it falls into one of two categories, neither of which I have ever fit into:

- Confessional blogs that reveal enough personal details and are well-written enough to be entertaining.
- Expertise blogs that provide interesting details about one specific topic.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 6:49 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've just gone back to blogging after a verrrrrrrry long break.

The feelings re: readership are well-founded. My particular feeling is that blogs don't necessarily require regular readership.

I'm not going back because I want an audience. I'm going back because I am on a particular personal / professional journey (going back to school / re-skilling into coding as a mid-30s adult) and blogs make a really, really great place to chronicle events in rich text. They can also be super useful tools for developing a portfolio of various types. So that's why I'm doing it. If people read it and find some value, great. If not, that's okay!

YMMV
posted by lazaruslong at 6:54 AM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


I have a 15 year old blog. It's the longest lasting journal I've ever kept, and while it's of no value to anyone but myself and a small handful of readers, someday historians are going to consider it a quaint treasure. It's also handy for, "what year did I go to Morimoto again? Ah, that's right." I crosspost to Facebook to reach those who gave up once Google Reader sunset.

I follow so many blogs I can't keep up. It just takes some more effort to find them now. That OPML file above is a goldmine. But I'm glad Mister Professor is instructing us all to go back to blogging.
posted by kimberussell at 7:14 AM on March 26, 2018


I want to blog again, but I don't know what I should blog about. I was ostensibly riding the tech beat for the last couple years before the election and the stress, and the sheer visceral anger over nearly everything that comes out of Silicon Valley these days finally got to me and I quit for my mental health.

So... yeah. I need something to blog about, I guess.
posted by SansPoint at 7:18 AM on March 26, 2018


Yes, I have no idea if anyone other than myself has ever read my blog. I purposely don't check its analytics, don't have comments enabled, don't cross post to social media and don't associate it with my real name. But I really enjoy jotting down a thought or two every day and there is something liberating about knowing no one will care, including me. I suppose a diary would serve the same purpose but public writing, even when it will probably never be read, is far more interesting to me.
posted by tavegyl at 7:20 AM on March 26, 2018


People really want feedback on what they're posting, or else they become rapidly convinced that they're shouting into a hole.

Great example here is "likes". It gives just enough feedback to know that there is someone at least glancing and not hating that pithy thought.


...blogger meetups (or “blogmeets” as they were called) in London in the 00s, a few years apart, and noticing how they changed. The first one was amateurish in the best sense of the word...

Where did all the quirky great amateurs go? Occasionally suspect there is a secret non-published site where all the notcool kids hang and post and chat.
posted by sammyo at 7:25 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


People really want feedback on what they're posting, or else they become rapidly convinced that they're shouting into a hole.

...Y'know, I realized - this is something that bugs me about my own blog. maybe like two people ever comment on it.

But I realized - how often do I comment on the blogs I read?....

I'm thinking I should start doing that more often, build up some karma.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:30 AM on March 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I was just thinking that. I think various types of social media have trained me to glance, appreciate, and move on, and I need to keep making an effort to comment and engage and "be there", regardless of the format people are using to share.
posted by Secretariat at 7:43 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


I went back to stand-alone blogging after I ended up targeted by a group of BARFs (bi-antogonistic "radical feminists") on tumblr and realized that I had no control over what happened in the notes attached to my posts. Since then, I went to a static site generator with no comments or reward system, and have largely been journaling and link aggregating for myself and a handful of other people. Most importantly it's pseudonymous, so I don't get accused for throwing my queer approaches to my hobbies and activism into the faces of my family and high school peers.

I do it because I like to do it, and anyone who wants to engage with me can look me up on mastodon or something. I wasn't getting frequent comments on WP or Dreamwidth anyway, and a static site builder eliminates much of the security surface.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 7:57 AM on March 26, 2018


You know, the mention of the "blogmeets" has me thinking about one of the other things that helped kill blogging, along with Facebook, et. al., and that's "Pro Blogging." The whole ecosystem that developed around how to juice your page views, make bank on Google Ads and Sponsored Content and generally produce a whole shitton of low-value, high keyword content that'll make you bank with minimal work, or so forth. Facebook helped kill that off, but the Get Rich Quick attitude still persists in whatever is the medium (though not Medium.com) du jour online. In particular, I think we're really hitting peak "Pro Podcasting," but I'm hoping the medium survives that bubble a bit better than blogging did.
posted by SansPoint at 8:01 AM on March 26, 2018 [9 favorites]


I blog, just to amuse myself. Most of my facebook posts are just links to whatever I have blogged about recently and even then I get very few hits.

The problem with blogging is that everyone wants their posts to be pushed in front of of their friends eyes the minute they hit post. That is what the Facebooks and Twitters of the world give you - an audience and instant feedback. There is value in that, but at the cost of giving those sites everything you produce.
posted by AndrewStephens at 8:23 AM on March 26, 2018


METAFILTER: like standing in the middle of a meadow and shouting at cows most of the time
posted by philip-random at 9:04 AM on March 26, 2018


The open web is dying. AOL 2.0 has been in full swing for a while now. I'm becoming increasingly convinced

or it's a phase that, circa 2016-18 (ie: right now, right here), has achieved its highwater mark of peak absurdity, given recent calamities big and small. Marshal McLuhan spoke of World War Three as being a guerrilla information war with no clear distinction between military and civilian targets. I'd argue that we're in it and have been for quite some time and, like the previous world wars, the tide tends to shift, with nobody really knowing how it will all play out, only that it's a drama (and a comedy, a farce, a tragedy, a mystery, an adventure etc) that will undoubtedly change the course of history before its done.

Which makes personal blogging what exactly? I personally have no clear idea, but I have no inclination to stop. If nothing else, it serves to anchor a commitment to get a few words down on a topic I care about, if not every day, then most days. Speaking of which, that second Violent Femmes album doesn't get near enough respect.
posted by philip-random at 9:24 AM on March 26, 2018 [6 favorites]


I know LiveJournal fandom is not Serious Blogging Business in many eyes
Eh, I think at least part of this conversation has to be the Not Serious blogs. To play on the alternate meanings of the word, blog businesses are a rather different animal and probably not the target of this nostalgia.

Dreamwidth is a matter of finding the people -- it's just not got the critical mass of participants that LJ had in its heyday, so on top of all the rest of the social media black hole stuff, it's hard to find folks.

Anyway, for me, it isn't necessarily that new social media have supplanted blogging. I don't use Twitter or Facebook, for example. It's more that I'm mind-tired all the time; I've lost the blissful assurance that what I have to say is important enough to put in a space of my own; I've seen how awful people can be to one another and I can't Bare My Soul To The World like a teenager anymore.
posted by inconstant at 10:10 AM on March 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


I've got a blog. I don't post in it very often, but when I've got a long-form thing I want to post publicly, that's where it goes, with a link to it on facebook.

I really want to see a sort of self-hosted alternative to Facebook. I don't mean like Diaspora or Mastodon, where there can be multiple instances and you pick your instance and you can host your own instance if you really want. I mean where hosting your own instance is common, like with Wordpress(.org). I also don't mean like Diaspora or Mastodon because Diaspora seems to be a dead end, and Mastodon is more like a Twitter alternative (which is worthwhile, but different). Group discussions and events are useful things that Facebook offers, even though I'm not a big fan of how it does group discussions.

I get the impression the technology to do this is pretty doable. I just haven't found it.
posted by adamrice at 10:25 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


I keep thinking about how much of what is missing from the internet now is not just the blogs themselves but the blog behaviors. Anil covered some of it.

For example, linking to outside sources! How many times have you gone into a "do you know if...?" thread on Facebook only to find 50+ comments of speculation and not a link to be found? I feel like I could spend half a day silencing threads by posting one good link to an unquestionably reliable source that anyone could have found and judged had they only googled.

Or that search for the unusual, rare, interesting, that the blogosphere had; so much of what I see is too many Facebook friends posting the same big news story as if it were some kind of scoop (or retweeting it on Twitter), while almost nobody is posting the little stuff from the tiny sources or the monomaniacal individuals. There's none of that finely tuned drive that bloggers had to find Very Rare Things and Facts, Real Ones, and Not Many of Them.

Or the link blog. The only two I know that have that old spirit are Waxy's and Y Combinator Hacker News. Arts and Letters is still out there, I guess. Where are the Memepools?
posted by Mo Nickels at 10:56 AM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Blogs and personal webpages aren't the answer. Blogs are fine for people that Must Generate Content Always, but that is not most people, nor should it be. The answer people are looking for is BBSes. Smaller communities where you can let your guard down and hang out, and not constantly be harassed by shitlords and nazis.

Also, can I just mention that in the last 20 years, *everything* has gotten diluted? Twitter and Facebook have diluted 'The Blog' down to less than a paragraph, but even books now read like barely-researched slap-dash blog posts; just padded out to 300 pages.

Slow down. Stay small. Let it rest for a while before you release it upon the world.
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 11:20 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


I think it was Austin Kleon who said that most tweets should be notebook entries. Write it down, let it simmer.
posted by middleclasstool at 11:34 AM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


Well, first, I must disagree that a blog == Must Generate Content Always. Off the top of my head, Genevieve Valentine only updates her blog with original content (i.e., not just a link saying "hey I did a thing elsewhere, go there and see it) perhaps once a month. Sam Kabo Ashwell update(s/d) fairly often during the IFComp judging period, but otherwise more along that kind of once-a-month. Foz Meadows might go anywhere from half a month to two months between posts. Etc.

And second -- the answer to what question, exactly? The article is addressing "why is it difficult for 're-decentralization' advocates to achieve their goal?", not "what are people really missing from their lives?".

I'll note also that some of the forums I've been on the past had blog threads, which were just... personal blogs, but hosted on the forum?
posted by inconstant at 11:44 AM on March 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


And like, blogs don't have to be super longform all the time. I like reading the longform things, but [scans own reading list] there are definitely still entries which are nothing more than "here's a fun meme" [in the sense of "questionnaire thing you pass round to all your friends] or "many thanks to so-and-so for helping me out" or "I got these really delicious cookies".
posted by inconstant at 11:48 AM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


Blog vs journal is a false dichtomy, imo. I can access a blog from anywhere, and it's really hard to insert images / video / links into my paper journal. Gotta use IRL cut and paste and that's no fun.
posted by lazaruslong at 1:09 PM on March 26, 2018


Blogs are the opposite of Must Generate Content Consistently. Tweets that don't go viral have a lifespan of about 30 minutes. Facebook, too, as you never know how the algorithm is working so you need to barf up crap constantly to make sure your followers are seeing something. On those platforms, it's publish 10+ a day or perish.

Blog posts don't go anywhere. If I got back to a blog that hasn't been updated in 3 months, the latest blog post is still there. In fact, I've been using Facebook much more like a blog system lately. I unfollowed everybody and now I go to my friends list when I have time and click on the "New Posts" tab to get a list of friends with updates I haven't seen. Then I click through to the walls of people I want to interact with at that time. I find it a much more sane way to use Facebook, and about 90% less time consuming than keeping up with the flow of information in your newsfeed.
posted by COD at 1:29 PM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


The time has come to stop sharing everything with everyone. It sounds great but has done us little good.

They say, making that statement out in public for anyone to see.

So anyway, when are we doing the mass exodus from Metafilter to our own private blogs? I mean, people complain about Facebook and Twitter, but MeFi is also a centralized substitute for personal blogs.

God was it nice having an internet space for lengthy discussions about internalised misogyny and sci-fi worldbuilding where men were like 10% of the population.)

I still consider the demise of LiveJournal's women-dominated SFF communities to basically be a suicide. Requires Hate says hi, by the way. It also became the model for interactions in the communities in Twitter and Tumblr, and something to be easy of in writing one's own blog.

I think the legacy of LiveJournal is reflected in the few remaining popular blogs. Scalzi and Stross for instance, have to go to a lot of effort to moderate their blogs, both to expell people who threaten to disrupt them, and to make sure they'll stay interesting. Come to the attention of the wrong people, and everything one word will be parsed by enemies for attackable quotes. Again, something really pioneered from LiveJournal.

Honestly, the way to go right now seems to be to do blogs under the auspices of an organization, like say Tor Books. That will give one cover, moderation, and a natural audience.
posted by happyroach at 1:49 PM on March 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


I really want to see a sort of self-hosted alternative to Facebook. I don't mean like Diaspora or Mastodon, where there can be multiple instances and you pick your instance and you can host your own instance if you really want. I mean where hosting your own instance is common, like with Wordpress(.org). I also don't mean like Diaspora or Mastodon because Diaspora seems to be a dead end, and Mastodon is more like a Twitter alternative (which is worthwhile, but different). Group discussions and events are useful things that Facebook offers, even though I'm not a big fan of how it does group discussions.

The missing piece of the puzzle for a self-hosted Facebook alternative (or Facebook/LiveJournal/Flickr/&c.) is a privacy/access-list mechanism, that allows posts (and events and other items) to be locked to a specific list of friends. This would have to work across federated instances, which means that it could not simply rely on the admin of each instance being honest and honouring permissions on all the traffic that flows through.

I imagine it would involve public-key cryptography; each user would have a public/private key pair, and when you friend someone, you get their public key with their ID. When you post a post/event/&c., this item would be symmetrically encrypted with a randomly generated key, and for each person allowed to read it, a copy of the decryption key, encrypted with their public key, would be made available. Some sorts of mitigations would have to be in place so that, even if a post's encryption key is encrypted with a large number of users' keys, this does not make it possible to brute-force it.

Has anybody done anything like this?
posted by acb at 1:55 PM on March 26, 2018


happyroach: I disagree with the notion that blogs require comments. One of my favorite blogs, Daring Fireball, never had comments, and I disabled comments on mine. The hassle of having to moderate my own website---deleting spam, especially, as I never had the audience size for sustained commenting---which I built and control, is not worth it.

There's ways for someone who wants to respond to my work to do so: email and/or social media, and I'd much rather have that than a box under my work full of other people's content that I'm responsible for.
posted by SansPoint at 2:05 PM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


The missing piece of the puzzle for a self-hosted Facebook alternative (or Facebook/LiveJournal/Flickr/&c.) is a privacy/access-list mechanism, that allows posts (and events and other items) to be locked to a specific list of friends.

It sounds a fair bit like email.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 2:05 PM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


The difference from email (and WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram, and Snapchat, and so on) is that it is not ephemeral. Each post has a URL it lives at, where it may be interacted with; people who have access to it can comment on it and interact with each other.
posted by acb at 2:11 PM on March 26, 2018


The missing piece of a self-hosted Facebook alternative is the difficulty of setting up and maintaining a self-hosted anything. I don't just mean technical difficulty. There's the time cost of setting up a site and the _financial_ cost as well. You can get web hosting cheap, and free CMS systems have gotten pretty easy to set up, but it's still not as cheap and easy as Facebook.
posted by SansPoint at 2:23 PM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


The difference from email (and WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram, and Snapchat, and so on) is that it is not ephemeral.

Has email been ephemeral since gmail's ever-expanding mailbox innovation?

Each post has a URL it lives at, where it may be interacted with; people who have access to it can comment on it and interact with each other.

Or you can just give them copies of the discussion in progress. But I suppose some of the group discussion spaces might qualify as an alternative.

I generally share the opinion that commenting is orthogonal to blogging. The happy medium between twiddling your thumbs between yearly spam attacks and providing a playground for a few hundred of your more obnoxious readers just doesn't exist for most online publishing.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 2:28 PM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


acb:
The missing piece of the puzzle for a self-hosted Facebook alternative (or Facebook/LiveJournal/Flickr/&c.) is a privacy/access-list mechanism, that allows posts (and events and other items) to be locked to a specific list of friends.
[snip]
Has anybody done anything like this?
I think so, sort of. Scuttlebutt is 100% decentralized and encrypted. It's so decentralized, in fact, that it's serverless—it runs on client hardware. It's not even clear to me that you could sync your own content between your desktop and smartphone (and in any case, you probably wouldn't want to).

We've also got Signal, which uses your phone number as your identifying token for contact discovery, but which allows a robust level of security on top of that, and allows for group conversations. So that basic mechanism is there, and seems to be reliable.
posted by adamrice at 2:51 PM on March 26, 2018


We've also got Signal, which uses your phone number as your identifying token for contact discovery, but which allows a robust level of security on top of that, and allows for group conversations. So that basic mechanism is there, and seems to be reliable.

That is a messaging app, not social media; it's ephemeral messages, with no hierarchy/threading, not posts. It's a poor substitute for discussion threads, events, photo albums and such.
posted by acb at 2:55 PM on March 26, 2018


I disagree with the notion that blogs require comments

Agreed - isn't that what "trackback" and/or "permalinks" where for? You would post enable those on your own blog entry - and if someone wanted to comment/reference it - they could do it on their own darn blog...

I think the real true death is the lack of RSS/Atom aggregation and decent blog reader/poster software these days - between the rise of "walled gardens" like Facebook/LinkedIn and then the rise of mobile app-lock-in, well... Content sharing and aggregating is a thing of the past - harder to "monetize" and track, so... not worth the effort...
posted by jkaczor at 3:05 PM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]


In fact, not having comments is a win-win situation. I'm liberated from the anxiety of needing to use a banhammer on any given evening. And my readers are liberated from the threat that any part of the toolchain has been cracked in the last week, exposing their bad passwords based on pet names to the universe at large.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 3:12 PM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


acb:
That is a messaging app, not social media; it's ephemeral messages, with no hierarchy/threading, not posts. It's a poor substitute for discussion threads, events, photo albums and such.
I'm aware of that. My point was in response to your earlier question, and is simply that the technology for encrypting content and restricting access to a list of people has been implemented effectively in an open-source project that's easy to use and has had pretty broad acceptance. Code is usually modular, and it might be possible for one project to borrow the useful parts from another.
posted by adamrice at 3:31 PM on March 26, 2018


The missing piece of the puzzle for a self-hosted Facebook alternative (or Facebook/LiveJournal/Flickr/&c.) is a privacy/access-list mechanism, that allows posts (and events and other items) to be locked to a specific list of friends.

So Dreamwidth, but with a calendar/event function?
posted by inconstant at 4:18 PM on March 26, 2018


I imagine it would involve public-key cryptography;

This is a way, I suppose, but the usual approach is federated identity. You have an identity at server x (which can be self-hosted or not, depending). Server y has a blog post, and knows that you are allowed to view it. Server y contacts server x to confirm your identity, and if it's confirmed, serves you the blog post. No need for cryptography on the post itself, you just don't get a copy in any form if you're not allowed.

The problem is agreeing on an identity standard.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:54 PM on March 26, 2018


So Dreamwidth, but with a calendar/event function?

And with a modern API (with REST endpoints and OAuth-style login/permissions rather than the 1990s CGI-era LiveJournal API), and image uploading/display, and a few other recent UX innovations. But most importantly, federated, in such a way that users on different instances can interact and selectively give each other access to private content.
posted by acb at 2:13 AM on March 27, 2018


The open web is dying.

You just wrote that on a blog. I know, not exactly the same, but still.
posted by Beholder at 3:09 AM on March 27, 2018


The open web is dying.

netcraft confirms it
posted by entropicamericana at 5:51 AM on March 27, 2018


I can't speak for the quality of the API, but LJ/DW are federated, there's just not many independent instances anymore. I believe it's fairly heavy, and something more modern like mastodon is easier to create your own instance of. Also, LJ has image uploading, but DW doesn't mostly for cost reasons I believe.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 9:54 AM on March 27, 2018


Yes, it's for cost reasons, although last I heard they had an image upload beta(?) and they're definitely interested in figuring out some way to make it work (financially).
posted by inconstant at 10:17 AM on March 27, 2018


Another issue that I think is eventually going to kill Dreamwidth is that it really stinks on mobile.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:07 AM on March 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


Another issue that I think is eventually going to kill Dreamwidth is that it really stinks on mobile.

This is what the API would help; the current LJ API is not particularly conducive to mobile clients.
posted by acb at 10:20 AM on March 28, 2018


I disagree with the notion that blogs require comments

Agreed - isn't that what "trackback" and/or "permalinks" where for?


In that case, there's no need for anything new. Just go to Dreamwidth or WordPress, turn comments off and write whatever.

Of course I then hear people on WordPress and Dreamwidth complaining that they write stuff and is like yelling into a well. "Does anybody actually read anything I'm writing?" So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by happyroach at 11:45 AM on March 28, 2018


I like comments on my work as well, which is why I cultivate a circle of friends whose judgement I trust.

But an open comment section is just giving an open mic to people who hate me, or don't hate me exactly but want me to do the work of LGBTQ 101 for them. We've known this for 30 years and still keep making the same mistake over and over again because comments produce drama, drama produce clicks, and clicks produce revenue.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 12:32 PM on March 28, 2018 [2 favorites]


happyroach: Someone who reads your work and wants to respond could send a tweet, or an email, or post a response on their blog. Why should the onus be on me to provide a space for them on my website to say what they want, when there's so many other ways those people can respond?
posted by SansPoint at 1:05 PM on March 28, 2018


Hosting a comment section is one of those design decisions that people need to consider carefully, not something that's mandated as a moral imperative of Web 2.0.

For one thing, favorable likes, upvotes, and comments come with their own form of bias that may not be the kind of quality you want to shoot for.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 1:15 PM on March 28, 2018


I still blog, semi-regularly. Mostly book and film related at www.susanhatedliterature.net/, but I have been trying to get back to doing the odd random topic as well. I also mainly visit blogs when I'm online. My feedly is usually my first stop online, followed by twitter and then fb for people I know in RL.

Blogging has certainly changed since I started, but I do it to keep track of what I was reading/thinking/doing more than for comments, although interactions are nice. It is interested to me to reread what I thought of film/book years ago versus now. Sometimes I still feel exactly the same, but just as often my opinion has changed.
posted by Fence at 10:07 AM on March 30, 2018


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