Blogging is, if you look in the right places, undergoing a little underground rebirth. Not quite a phoenix like rise, given its prominence in the early 1990s as Blogger bestrode the online world, but it certainly is gaining some traction in the nicer, friendly, quieter corners of the web.
I will happily admit that I have some bias to this growth and hope it succeeds for, just as when I was deep in my blogging heyday – creating Scottish Blogs, being interviewed on BBC Radio Scotland, featuring in the Guardian, being mentioned in the O’Riley Blogging book (modest, ain’t I) – I can sense the friendships sparking online.
I’ve been revisiting some blogs I used to follow ardently back in that day but, alas, my blogroll of favourite sites is now largely full of dormant links.
Sidenote; Diamond Geezer is still going strong and still churning out an amazing amount of top quality content. I once had the good pleasure to meet him briefly in London, along with a few other stellar bloggers of the UK scene, many moons ago.
I’ve got my RSS feeds cranked up, thanks to NetNewsWire which is exactly the no-cruft reader I prefer, and I’m taking time to click through to the websites more often, remembering my own excitement and the stats telling me how many people had visited a post rose from single to double figures!
There is one thing that is lacking, one thing that largely powered the exploration and explosion of blogging when it all first started. Back before there was social media, when the only influencers we followed were doing so because they felt passionately about something (rather than being paid to pretend to be passionate about something), it was the heady days of the early web and it was a place of happy joy for the most part.
Find a link, visit the blog, read, leave a comment, move on. I will admit I probably spent about an hour or so each day doing this. But as we had yet to have Twitter thrust upon us, it was the online equivalent of having a conversation.
Comments drove the interactions, drove the discovery, drove connections and created partnerships, some of those for life. All that from a few words and a shared link.
Time was I could posit a question on my blog, ask for advice about, say, which bands to check out at a local festival, and I’d have multiple people pitching in with their suggestions. It was a way to give back, and I did the same on the sites of others.
But it was more than that, it was discussion, open, honest, in public. A thoughtful blog post would inspire equally thoughtful comments, with people taking the time to craft a response, something we appear to have lost in the quick-fire ‘reply and move on’ approach that social media prefers.
And a lot of the newer blogs that I’m seeing don’t even have comments available, sometimes because the platform doesn’t offer a native option (Blogger didn’t, but that gave rise to options like Haloscan which I got involved with too), sometimes because all the writer wants is a LIKE.
Which is fine, and for the those of us who exist in the low-traffic locations of the web, I get it. We publish more to share and publish, than to interact. We have other places for that, yet, in a similar way to this quiet rise in the number of blogs appearing, there is also a noticeable trend of those self same new (or rediscovering) bloggers vocally quitting social media.
I fall somewhere in between, of course, with a long term blog that was only briefly in the mid-traffic zones many years ago, which still has comments, and who is slowly moving away from social media as best he can.
Oddly, on that latter point, whilst I ditched X a couple of years ago and happily picked up Threads, I find that my recent ‘pause’ of Threads usage has seen me on BlueSky treating it very much like early Twitter. Reaching out, interacting, and finding connections. It is bringing discovery back, it’s even fun at times (with careful curation of who I’m following), and it reminds me of when the internet was a place I enjoyed visiting.
The world wasn’t necessarily a better place back then, it’s only been 10 -15 years, but the way social media has skewed things, driven attention to outrage for clicks (and money), the casual forgetting that we are the product, means it feels bad.
OK, it IS worse as America has an idiot dictator holding power but, isn’t he only there because of social media?
Would comments on blogs have stopped any of this? Perhaps? Would gentler connections across the world, connections not focused on skewing attentions for the sake of generating more money for the billionaires, have helped soften our world and not left a bunch of hateful, racist, fascists at the helm?
Would a comment move a secluded individual from the pathway to incel? Would a kind word alter the choice of a disillusioned kid with access to guns?
How many of the anonymous social media gremlins, so used to spouting their hatred and vile with abandon with no accountability, would pause if asked to leave their name and email? Yes these things can be faked, but dashing out words of spite on X is one button click from being published. Comments have a tiny bit more friction and, perhaps, the awareness that IPs are tracked too?
I admit, it’s a leap. But in an online world driven by algorithms, if every interaction was softened a little maybe it would keep the more extreme views of the world at bay, or at least reduce those making the noise. Of course that presumes that there is kindness remaining to be shared, and again I look at social media and the permission it has given so many to be so awful.
Maybe we are doomed, and the blogging heyday was just that, a short period of time of popularity which we won’t be able to revisit.
Or maybe, as with every stone dropped in the ocean, we can slowly change its course?
I realise this is a ridiculous notion, and I am not actually positing that blog comments can change the world. Plenty of bad things happened when blog comments were prevalent. But there is a definite correlation (not causation I know) between the decline of blogging as we all moved to social media. The decline of effort to ease, the decline of thought to mindlessness. I followed it too.
