I started writing a blog before the word “blog” had entered common parlance.
Yes, I’m that old.
In the late 1990s the only way you could publish words to the internet was via a self hosted website, or via one of the earliest social platforms such as Geocities – which experienced “enshittification” decades before Cory Doctorow coined the term.
If you’ve never heard of “enshittification”, it essentially describes the cycle most internet platforms have gone through – first attracting users, then abusing them for business purposes, then finally abusing the platform to such an extent that it no longer serves it’s original purpose, and is strip-mined for scrap.
So… back in the mists of time a number of different publishing platforms arrived – the likes of Blogger and LiveJournal – enabling anybody and everybody to start publishing their thoughts about the latest episode of X-Files or Battlestar Galactica for all to read.
Eventually WordPress arrived and crushed most of the previous platforms under its considerably shiny boots. Of course WordPress was a parlour trick of sorts – beneath the veneer of its shiny boots laid a foundation as old as the web itself – which it still creeks and groans atop today.
Who cares if the service works though, right? All you want to do is post your words, and allow others to read them – and that’s exactly what WordPress, Moveable Type, Vox, Posterous, Yahoo 360, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr, and others promised.
There has always been a problem with the social internet though – the same problem that afflicts high-streets all over the world. As soon as a coffee shop turns up, you know that all of the genuine “mom and pop” stores days are numbered – the chains will arrive within months, and either run at a loss as a “statement” location, or survive for a few months as a hobby project for somebody with too much money and not enough common sense.
I’m getting side-tracked.
The promise of the social internet saw an explosion of interest in blogging. For a time – in the mid to late 2000s – the noise from a million keyboards was cacophonous. People opened their lives to the internet – recording their days, thoughts and dreams.
And then the coffee shops arrived.
Slowly but surely, blogs became monetised. Rather than adhering to Norah Ephron’s maxim that a blog didn’t need to be about anything much at all, or only relevant for as long as it was being written, commercial interests arrived, and instantly enshittified everything they touched. Suddenly everything had to have a niche – an angle – a focus. Traffic equals eyeballs equals mouse-clicks equals money. More followers. More subscribers. More, more, more. The entire online audience became a fishing expedition for many – drag-lining every barrel until the bottom fell out.
It’s happening right now at LinkedIn, and I suspect it’s starting to happen to Substack too.
I’m a bit sad about it, if I’m honest.
The attraction of social platforms for me is that if you cast a wide enough net, you’ll discover at least a few beautiful souls (and yes – that is a mangled quote from The OA). There comes a point however where every time you so much as touch the water with your net, it instantly fills with floating plastic – wrapped in advertisements, mansplained get rich quick schemes, and breathless tales of “how I convinced 50,000 people to subscribe to my advertorial nonsense”.
I’m pretty sure the bloggers I remember are still out there – sharing their almost daily thoughts about things that don’t really matter – but there’s just so much damn noise now that the chances of finding them are impossibly small. Impossibly small, but not non-existent.
And that’s what keeps me going.
If I’m still writing a personal journal, and publishing it to the internet, then perhaps somebody else is too. I might not have discovered them yet, but I might.
I might discover them tomorrow.
