On Blogging

There is a history of blogging, but I have been doing it, not making notes about doing it, so I won’t go there.1 Suffice to say that blogging began earlier than we might think (1994; 1995) and has persisted longer than anyone would have expected (2026; see the blogroll in the sidebar at right).2 Further, blogging will persist because it has economic, literary, and social characteristics that resist enshittification.3 So blogging is not a bad business to be in, if business it be.

Blogging and blogs are unexpectedly complex, as the following twelve points will show. From an economic and institutional perspective, considering the blog as a small firm, the distinguishing features of a blog are:

(1) ☑ The barriers to entry are extremely low. As Gene Fowler did not say: “Blogging is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” I rarely agree with Jordan Peterson, if you are an aspiring commenter, or even an aspiring blogger, consider this:

Learn to write. I’m dead serious. Like I’m dead serious about that because writing is formalized thinking. And so the way you write is first of all you need a problem because why write if you don’t have a problem. So this is good advice if you’re just writing an essay by the way for your classes is like pick a bloody problem that you want to write about because otherwise it’s false right from the start. It’s up to you to engage with the material until you find something that grips you, that you desire to investigate. Okay, so you need a problem. The next thing you need to do is, well, you need to have something to say about the problem. Well, so reading, reading is really good for that.

Read as much as you can. Your hands on that addresses the problem. So now you know a bunch of things, or at least provisionally know them. You at least have access to them. Well now you start sorting through it. It’s like, OK, well, maybe I need to summarize what I’ve learned. And then I need to iron out the contradictions between what I’ve learned. And I need to elegantly formulate that.

[Y]ou’re sharpening your tools and you’re putting yourself straight because you’re learning to think, you learn to do that by writing. And so I would say, pick some hard problems and learn to write very, very carefully.

The greatest expense, other than your level of effort, will be a URL for the site and a server, and if you use a free blogging service, you don’t need a server, and you might not even need a URL.

(2) ☑ There is no “binding contract” between blogger and reader, very much unlike the platforms, all of which have terms of service.

(3) ☑ The blogger completely controls the blog. As Barry Ritholz writes: “The Big Picture is my personal fiefdom. I rule over all as benevolent dictator/philospher king.” From Blog Herald:

Through every hype cycle—social media, vlogging, podcasting, AI-generated content—blogging has remained the one format where you control the space, the tone, the terms.

(4) ☑ Bloggers often adopt pen names; their ability to do so stems from their complete control of the space. I remember back in 2003, people in Philly extended this honorable tradition by choosing Latinate names, like “Publius” from the Federalist Papers, a collective pseudonym for Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. A considerable amount of social and symbolic capital can accrue, over time, around a nom de guerre (like “Banksy”).

(5) ☑ Funding is voluntary. Advertising is possible, but in the main blogs are funded by gifts from readers; contrast Substack.4

From a literary perspective, considering the blog as a genre with formal characteristics:

(6) ☑ The front page lists the posts in reverse chronological order. You will have noticed this has been the first feature social media platforms take away, because they want their cursed algorithms to determine what you read and in what order.

(7) ☑ A comments section, while not mandatory, is preferred. It takes human moderators to make a comments section work, which can become a blocker as the blog scales up. Nevertheless, a comments section is essential to build and maintain a community, for insights or expertise the blogger may not have, for entertainment value, and for new sources and links.

(8) ☑ There is an RSS feed. The RSS feed is essential to avoiding centralized chokepoints for the distribution of posts. (Podcasts are distributed with RSS as well, which is why you still hear “wherever you get your podcasts” as a tagline when a podcast is publicized.) Like Podcasts, blogs have not been taken over by platforms, and their RSS-based functionality is, I assert, one reason for that.5

(9) ☑ There is a blogroll. Blogrolls have a vexed history. Although they might have been considered traffic builders, they also required maintenance by the blog owner, a time sink they resisted (or had qualms about), so much so that the dominant blogging platform, WordPress, removed the feature in 2013. But see #11 below.

(10) ☑ There is a traffic counter. Back in the day, the first thing I checked when I sat down to blog was SiteMeter,6 which gave you a table showing the all important “referrals” — the sites that linked to you, which you wanted to know so you could return the favor, or even put them on your blogroll, creating a virtuous cycle of mutuality. “Clicks” were not the point:

[T]he assumption that anyone creating a website or blog does so primarily to maximize readership [is false]. It completely ignores the fact that there are others who create because they genuinely love building something from the ground up. It ignores the fact that sometimes often times, the value lies in the action of creation, self-expression, and just owning a small corner of the internet that reflects who they are.

The author writes:

When you’re writing online, being unique doesn’t matter nearly as much as being found.

No, no, no. Please, do not listen to this. Unless your primary goal is to monetize your blog over self-expression, cover your ears (or eyes). Being found may get you attention, but being unique is what makes people STAY and REMEMBER you.

A small audience is not the same as no audience. Meaningful connections can still happen even if you only have 2 or 3 readers. You don’t need search engines to surface your posts. The most impactful writing will find its way to the right people organically, without needing to “rank”.

The author ends the post by saying:

You can have a unique website that no one visits.

Or you can have a “basic” blog that actually gets traffic.

I guarantee you that no matter what, there will be at least one person who will visit your website/blog. And that one person may tell another person, who will tell another person. Someone will always visit, no matter what.

Or so I tell myself. Unfortunately, SiteMeter and its competitor, StatCounter, were both murdered by Google. I’m trying to wrestle a modern equivalente into submission for this site (see the “Statistics” link at the bottom of the page) but I’m not sure about it yet. But I don’t have any referrals yet anyhow!

From a social perspective:

(11) ☑ Mutuality exists.7 In the Golden Age, this was the ethic behind the blogroll:

An unwritten rule is followed when dealing with blogrolls. The rule prevalent in the blogosphere is that any blogger putting your link in his blogroll should be thanked, and in reciprocation, you should feature the blogger’s link in your blogroll.

Of course not all links need to be reciprocated. There are times when your link is published in a blogroll on a blog not related to your subject or even on a blog that is ambiguous. So the decision is truly yours to encourage a blogroll and it’s at your discretion.

In 2007 this changed:

I long ago decided that my blogroll should consist of blogs I read.

Which sounds fine in the abstract, until you realize that blogging follows a power curve, and if a few bloggers at the tippy top (call them the A-list) only read each other, that makes it much less easy for the B- and C-list blogs to accumulate social and symbolic capital, and so the Gini co-efficient of the blogosphere goes ever higher, an odd outcome, at least for the left.8

(12) After this Luis Tiant-like wind-up, the pitch: blogs are resistant to enshittification, which Cory Doctorow, originator of the term, defines the enshittification cycle as follows:

“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

The classic example of enshittification is Google degrading search so that users stayed on its site longer persisting in failing to find stuff, and saw more of its ads.) Of course, that only works because Google, as a platform, is a monopoly; of Hirschman famous triad, “exit, voice, and loyalty,” exit is the most difficult for users.

Now imagine a blog — even an A-list blog — trying to enshittify itself the way the platforms are doing. It won’t work:

• Most blogs have very few business customers, so the customer v. business enshittification dynamic on the platforms is missing to begin with;
• Barriers to entry for bloggers are low, so it’s easy for competitors to the enshittifier to emerge;
• Posts in reverse chronological order are a strong barrier to the algorithmic manipulations that enshittifers typically profit from;
• The presence of a comments section is a strong disincentive to enshittification, because commenters won’t put up with it, particularly commenters in a strong community.
• RSS means that there are no centralized distribution chokepoints for the enshittifiers to control;
• Readers can simply leave and/or stop giving gifts; Hirshman’s “exit” strategy is very much available to them;

And finally:

• Blogs have no requirement for virality, as on social media. Content does not propagate algorithmically, but organically, by mutual aid among blog proprietors.

I believe, then, that blogs have the potential to last a long time, and I hope this blog can make its own small contribution to the continued vitality of the blogosphere.

NOTES

1 See, in no particular order, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

2 See “Imminent Death of the Blogs Predicted, Except Not,” where I show how blogging was essential to the propagation of #MintTheCoin from 2010 - 2013, long after the Golden Age, and its breakthrough into the mainstream (a post picked up by blogger Brad DeLong, of all people). See here on blogging and AI slop. And see here on blogging and “the Lindy Effect” (“people still like to read”).

3 Cory Doctorow, “My McLuhan lecture on enshittification” (2024).

4 For example, Substack promotes “free posts” from its writers in emails. But the posts are only “free” if you agree to pollute your device(s) by downloading their app. That’s not free. And that’s before you get to the constant pressure to subscribe, which I understand, but which some Substack authors handle with much more grace than others. The “teaser” for a story of truly national importance, for example, should at least give the gist. Bloggers, by contrast, do not have to decide where in their posts to “turn on the meter.”

5 Somebody — I blame web designers — started eliminating RSS icons from sites, believing (wrongly) that icons for social media platforms and/or newsletters could replace them, or that they were simply old-fashioned. Because I need to maintain a blogroll, I need to find out whether any given blog has an RSS feed or not (some do not). As it turns out, even if a blog has no RSS icon, its RSS feed often can be discovered by appending “feed” or “rss” to its URL. I’m guessing this is a WordPress feature.

6 SiteMeter apparently did itself harm with a botched upgrade, but I still blame Google Analytics.

7 Looking for the ballot boxes with checks, and the question mark character, I discovered that UTF-8 has characters for all the I Ching hexagrams. That’s pretty neat!

8 “Blogroll Amnesty Day” was an enormous and long-lived controversy; see here, here, here, and especially this study by Clay Shirky (“the smaller bloggers’ fears were perfectly correct”).