The emergence of blogging allowed individual voices outside of control of the larger media to reach their own audiences.
Because of this 10 years ago noone wanted to have AOL as their walled garden. Everyone wanted to search and discover themselves. Google brought an algorithm that allowed voices to emerge, but it also spawned the SEO industry to manipulate that distribution channel and make it more difficult.
Today most people never leave Facebook and FB's new feed rules will make sure that you have to pay to be heard.
So maybe Facebook has become like AOL, has become like the print magnates even prior to that. Time for disruption again?
Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. That's a new idea. I hate how much this idea get's promoted here. That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. Of courses there are good quality ones commenters will be frothing to post about, but expecting an ecosystem of junk to remain consistently successful is purely utopian.
>That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud.
But good stuff came out of that crud. Now people do their writing on Facebook and Reddit. Those have much lower or no placement in Google.
I find google results impoverished compared to 6-10 years ago. You used to get commentary from people, and it wasn't half bad. Now most searches return commercial results.
I often give up and go search relevant subreddits for many types of queries.
99% of Reddit and Facebook are crap too. Anything produced by humanity in general will be. But good stuff gets produced too.
It seems to me that somewhere around 2007-2009 the spammers won, and Google's search quality plummeted. It hasn't recovered. If anything it's kept gradually getting worse. A handful of top sites show up for damn near every search, followed by page after page of spam sites and clickbait. Remember when the second page would sometimes have some nice and relevant links on it?
I think that's only half the equation though. I follow a few niches where non-spammers produce content regularly, and you get good results. My own niche is one. The barrier to entry to create reasonable content is high, so spammers have stayed out. The second and third and even fourth pages routinely produce good results.
But in niches where there's no reason for experts or ordinary people to create text on standalone sites, the results are junk. I remember this being different.
Now to find good stuff I have to search Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
Agreed. The web seemed far more sincere in the days of Deja News. Today's search results carry all the candidness of a car lot teeming with felony-convicted-used-minivan-salesmen.
Somewhere, somehow, a switch was flipped and "discourse?" became "discounts!".
People were excited to be part of something new an add to the overall discourse of humanity. Then it became a question of "How can I monetize content?" which require pumping out low-value content just to try to make a few bucks.
Yup! Here's the interesting, counter-intuitive thing: 99.9% of blogs can be shit, but there are literally millions of blogs.
So if you have 1,000,000 blogs, and 99.9% are shit, you still have 1,000 good blogs! If only 0.01% of blogs were good, you'd still have 100 great blogs- which is excellent for the public good.
The same long tail effects appear on things like Wikipedia, too. Wikipedia on average might have say 10-20% reliability, because 80-90% of the pages are crap. But that's because most of those pages are really obscure. The 10% that are most observed- say, pages about chemistry and physics- are updated very regularly, even quicker that science textbooks.
It seems that people are really bad at thinking about this clearly, probably because we imagine quality is a yes-or-no proposition.
> Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more.
For you to make this claim, you are also claiming that the parent post is blaming "all of society's problems" of yester-year (pre-Facebook) on AOL. That's a rather obtuse reading, bordering on deliberate.
> Expecting an ecosystem of junk to remaain consistently successful is purely utopian
I'm curious to hear your opinions on the quality of Wikipedia, and its success and/or failure! Is it doing well, or poorly? Do you prefer say, Encyclopedia Britannica? Genuinely curious.
Actually, I think that FB has been good for blogging. It helps get the crap off of blogging. People who can't actually maintain a blog write on FB and think of it as their blog.
Andrew Sullivan's exit really doesn't mean very much. Blogging is a lot of work and doesn't pay very well, so it's kind of a surprise he lasted this long. I know a whole lot of people who tried to write a blog, but it's such a grind they pretty much gave up after six months or so (on the outside). The time between posts gets longer and longer in some sort of asymptotic death spiral, and eventually they put up a short post that says, basically, "I quit".
The problem is to keep people interested in your stuff the content has to change multiple times per day. You can't just write a single post every couple days when you feel like you have something important to say - most of your potential readers will drift away.
The vast majority of people trying to make money gave up trying to produce that much content by themselves and joined some sort of group blog (or have "guest bloggers", like Kos). At that point it's less a blog and more of an online magazine. I'm thinking sites like Huffpo and Gawker. As a business/creative model, how are they different from the online presence of The Atlantic or National Review?
Most of the people who still produce all the content on their blog are really just news aggregators. Provide a link, write a joke or a sentence indicating why it's important, and your done with that post.
I'm not Sullivan's biggest fan, but... if Sullivan can't make it as a blogger, who can?
Sullivan has a wealthy, educated audience that should be catnip to advertisers -- particularly with his particularly distinct influence among gay and politically liberal niches. He's possibly the most well-known blogger today and his Dish audience piggybacks from his previous work with The Atlantic. And while it's not easy to run a website, the capital required is minimal compared to virtually any other form of publication.
If he can't make it, can anyone? Much less a publication with heavier administrative and staff costs like virtually every newspaper or magazine.
It's realistic to me that individual bloggers can't live on advertising. The well-known corrosive effects of ads are too big to deny. I'd particularly cite the need it creates to pump out tons of "views" to tons of "eyeballs" which is corrosive to any sort of quality that might let one stand apart from a crowd of others doing the same thing. (And please note how I phrased that, it's very important. I'm not saying they can't have quality in some snobbish sense, I mean it leaves them unable to cultivate any unusual quality that might let them dominate some micro-niche under such constraints.) But I've got at least one guy in my Patreon lineup that I'm essentially sponsoring to write his blog. In that particular case it's not political, but there's no particular reason why that couldn't work.
But I would say at least speaking for myself that for politics, I would expect to either see some very original, quality thinking, or some sort of substantial research being done if I'm going to be paying for it. Party-line punditry's supply already verges on the infinite. (Not a crack at Sullivan. I never read his blog, I have no opinion about the writing I've never read. Just an observation from the other political blogs I read.)
On the one hand, we're lamenting the death of our nostalgic remembrance of blogging's heyday.
On the other, we're conflating blogging with indie commercial media businesses.
Blogging isn't dead, but indie commercial media businesses may be in their death throes.
Why do we fret? Is it because the listicle is such a mindworm that it has made us forget what we liked about the indie voice? That we can't help ourselves?
There was this saying, "interesting news finds me", meaning that a properly tuned social network and media diet is a good filter for what you should ingest, better than trying to be omnivorous and a slave to fear of missing out (FOMO). Over time, it's become closer to "interesting people find me" as more of my intake comes from the people I follow (and the ones I mute).
But there are great opportunities for us to create better filters, for better routing mechanisms to our short attention spans.
I just don't know whether there will ever be a commercial motivation to create it, or whether there'll be enough of a market willing to give up their FOMO and outsource their self-discipline to consume it...
Do wealthy, educated people click on ads online? I'm not wealthy, but I'm educated, and I don't even see ads online, let alone click on them (Adblock). Most of the other educated people I know are the same way (the non-technical among them may not even realize there still are ads online).
"if Sullivan can't make it as a blogger, who can?"
How didn't he make it work? He made it work, but he wants to try something different. I don't think his decision says anything about blogging that it doesn't say about many other go-it-your-own-way ventures like writing physical books, recording music, gigging, crafting, etc.
I had never heard of him prior to 2 weeks ago. He is exceptionally thoughtful. His reason for quitting blogging seemed reasonable, especially given the timeframes involved. I don't think it says anything about blogging in general that one intelligent person is moving to a new position.
On the other hand, I don't know that I'd call the blogosphere vibrant or even very interesting: Crappy mobile browers/keyboards, link aggregators, Facebook, and Twitter basically shot the web as we knew it dead for the mainstream. My intuition is that this is a natural consequence response to decentralization when the tools to gather your information into one place are poor. You wind up with link aggregators, and then comments on them, and then the link aggregators become the content. Like what's going right now in this thread, instead of a blog link bouncing around between disparate interlinked blog posts.
The original blogosphere concept may be fading, but I don't think that bloggers or readers are suffering because of it. In a sense individual bloggers are like AP reporters and aggregators are the new newspapers. Dozens of AP stories are filed every day and local newspapers pick and choose which ones to include in each edition. The major difference between the traditional newspaper model and link aggregators is that we can easily see all stories filed by an individual blogger, whether they get picked up by our "hometown" paper or not[0]. Sharing a link to a blog post on facebook will never replace quality journalism of course, but I think we've come full circle back to this model because it works. Most people don't have the time or inclination to follow a multitude of different blogs or maintain their own. They just want news and opinion selected for them, by trained editors or a community, and the ability to comment on those stories.
An open exchange of long form ideas between a network of people who each run their own blog has an important place in internet culture, but it doesn't scale very well. It was a golden age, for a time, but the aggregation model as the potential to open those ideas up to a much broader range of people.
[0] I'm actually not sure if the AP allows people to easily "follow" all stories filed by specific reporters, but it doesn't seem like it.
I like Sully and read the Dish daily but I'm glad I won't have to watch the next 2-10 years of him trying to justify his Hillary Derangement Syndrome when her policy positions basically mirror Obama's, whom he reliably supports.
Given the style of blogging, I'm not surprised. High output, fast thinking...it seems more like one of many types of blogging, rather than blogging itself. And it seems like the type of thing that could easily imbalance your life, which may explain the need to make an exit. Hope he finds what he's looking for. Personally more blogging is in my future but several posts a day is probably out of the question.
It doesn't say anything about the future of blogging in my opinion. I think the future of blogging is bleak for people who want to make a career (aka a salary) doing it. There is so much noise and so much bullshit online, not to mention amplified/fake stories and zero fact checking (read Ryan Holiday's book Trust Me Im Lying). It doesn't mean people are going to stop reading them or blogging, but the traffic / ad space $ will probably continue to go down as more content continues to spews online.
You don't make a career from the blog itself- you get headhunted because of the attention and the awareness gets you, and you get hired or solicited for all sorts of interesting, lucrative projects.
im not sure i agree - i think a lot of blogs (in the past anyways) were created with the intension of selling them - i also think there is a handful of bloggers out there that make a salary off blog traffic + book sales (www.nakedcapitalism.com / www.zerohedge.com / http://www.ritholtz.com/blog / etc.)
Right, allow me to refine my statement– tonnes of bloggers start with the intention of selling them, but few bloggers actually make it to that sort of scale.
The same thing applies to webcomics, to musicians, etc. These are the exception, not the rule. There are thousands of blogs started every day! So if you're serious about making a living from your blog, it's worth having the "big blogger" dreams, but you'll probably end up doing other things to pay the bills along the way.
There are many hits, but the median hourly "wage" for blogging is below any job the blogger could do (but might not be able to obtain, for reasons of economic friction)
Blogging and RSS feeds are still out there. Ask not why it seems like everyone is moving to Twitter, ask why your perception and tastes have shifted to perceive that as the primary channel?
When I look at this through the Clay Shirky "publish-then-filter" mindset, what I see is that we have a problem with our filters--whether those filters are RSS aggregators, search engines, follower lists, inboxes, subscription services, it doesn't matter. Look to the work of people like Paul Ford (@ftrain) and little hacks like SavePublishing.com.
Solving this filtering problem and creating a focus of attention--that's a huge opportunity. Not Uber huge, or monetarily huge, but huge as a public service to free up the mental capacity of a lot of talented people whose filters are very likely tuned by default to the commercial aggregators.
Go to major sites like Wired, heck even any Medium blog. Where is the RSS feed???
Now go to their Twitter feed or Facebook feed. Oh there are their latest urls!
it's not a matter of perception. It's the truth. It's hard to find the latest content for a site/blog through RSS. But it's easy to find it in their twitter/FB
I guarentee that Glenn Greenwald would still be blogging if he hadn't gone Salon -> Guardian -> Intercept. And I don't see how what he did wouldn't still be still possible...
Does it matter that Andrew Sullivan was one of the early and very vocal champions of gay marriage? Or that he is quite openly gay and married himself? If you haven't heard of him, you might not have known that and it may change the way you view his defense of Brendan Eich. In addition to being a champion of gay marriage, Sullivan is a proponent of liberalism in the old sense of the word. I think his defense of gay marriage was always so compelling because he gave respect to people who disagreed with them while showing how wrong they were on the issue.
It's fine to pick and choose the things you stand for, but the man has to be taken as a whole (IMHO). I want to like Andrew Sullivan for some of the things he stands for, but he was also a vocal proponent of the Iraq war and many other issues that I stand against. Someone who says this about the Iraq war:
> the allied campaign was a model of restraint and liberation, the most precise invasion in world history
makes me think they've really lost touch with reality. I'm not here to say that Saddam Hussein was some angel, but to put our role in those words leaves me wanting better critical thinking.
Andrew Sullivan is a man and he has his good and bad. So let's not "one issue" the man and suppose that he's good simply because he's for gay marriage (a position that he stands to gain from I might add).
I'd rather see better, true "liberals", elevated over Andrew Sullivan. Glenn Greenwald comes mind ...
What year did Sullivan say that? I recall thinking, circa 2004-6, "gosh, Andrew Sullivan is wrong about Iraq. How does he not see how wrong he is?"
But the thing was, he changed. Gradually, he came to notice that the modern Republican party was doing lots of bad things.
Certainly, this puts him nowhere near writers like Daniel Davies and James Fallows, who clearly saw the war was going to be a disaster, before it happened.
But at least Sullivan was able to change his mind. Though maybe he didn't fully recant Iraq. I can't recall the details now. I just recall my impression of the time that, whatever he was, he wasn't a zealot. He genuinely seemed to be thinking through and considering his opinions.
But yeah, far more a fan of Greenwald. Or Ioz, if anyone remembers him.
Anyway, the point of my reply is that I don't think the Sullivan of today would agree with that quote, and I suspect he wrote that not long after the invasion. That doesn't make it a smart thing to have been written, but simply quoting that gives an inaccurate view of Sullivan. Unless I'm wrong on the details of when he said it and what he changed his mind about.
I ran across this the other night. Pointing you to it because it seems to offer a complementary counterpoint to your benefit of the doubt point of view.
That piece doesn't address Sullivan's change circa 2006-08. IIRC, he Began to oppose the Iraq war, and the republican party, where he had been a strong supporter previously.
I never shared Sullivan's views. I could be misremembering how much he shifted in that period, since I didn't follow him closely. But the article doesn't address those years, only earlier times. (which sound pretty bad, if the characterization is accurate)
Edit: here is a piece that comments on Ames and Sullivan. It's how I remember his later writing. No moral hero, but a man clearly aware that he made an enormous error on iraq.
Is Kottke.org not a blog? Daring Fireball? You're just injecting a nonsense definition to satisfy your own biases. High profile blog comments are typically nothing more than trash... flamewars, spam and, whenever politics is involved, astroturf. Sullivan has the FB page where readers are free to comment and features curated reader responses in the blog daily.
Comments are common, yet are hardly an essential part of blogging.
Regardless, a more than cursory glance at the Dish would show that curated reader engagement is one of the most important parts of the site. One can easily make the case that the quality of that content stands in sharp contrast to the thoughtless automated approach that many bloggers take.
I don't want to read someone having a conversation with their community, I want to read what they themselves think without the lurking context of the subset of their audience that demands to speak up and be heard right then and there.
I also frequently don't like the results of community feedback shaping a blog; a lot of times it just puts the writer on the defensive all the time, and can easily become toxic and contribute to burnout. If you can read even the best comments on the best blogs and not want to just give up on humanity forever, you're a better man than I (either that, or you were one of the people writing those comments and thought they were awesome).
There's already plenty of places on the Internet for people to discuss things written elsewhere on the Internet, like right here for example. Or Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or any number of other places where you have persistent communities of commenters. If it's just comments at the bottom of an article, you end up with a lot of drive-by comments that are even more dumb or pointlessly cruel or boring or strangely insistent about your potential to make $2500/day at home on your computer, just like I did! Because you totally can.
And I like writers on the defensive. When they write crap, and they take comments, the crap comes up awful quick.
Notice how a lot of sites don't take comments? Notice how many of them are very seriously moderated?
One could argue trolls, and that's a fair case. However, not actually being out there enough to take feedback on one's words tends to make nice, magic, bubbles, filled with unicorns and rainbows.
Sullivan occupies one of those bubbles.
And it's not just comments. It's dialogs, even among peers. Sullivan largely just broadcasted.
Either way, his departure means pretty much nothing.
Have you actually read his blog? Readers email him all the time. He typically posts 2-3 of those emails every day and responds to them publicly. Often, he'll go back and forth with multiple readers in this way.
Moreover, the fact that a reader had to email him served as sort of as a pre-screen, wherein someone had to take those extra 2 or 3 steps to put something together instead of just dropping whatever thoughtless or halfbaked idea came to the forefront of their mind in the comment box and hitting enter because you're logged in with facebook. I don't think having comments allowed on a blog are indicative of quality discourse at all.
Yeah. Andrew probably write something once every few months about why he prefers to interact with readers this way vs. comment threads. He's even polled his audience in the past and the _audience_ overwhelmingly favors interacting in this way, often echoing your exact sentiment.
Ironically, the parent serves as an example for the kind of thoughtless, knee-jerk commentary that comment threads can (and do) breed.
You make the assumption that a lack of on-site comments is a lack of feedback, which I think isn't substantiated.
I don't use an RSS reader or similar, so when I read a blog post, it's generally because it reaches me through some form of social media -- friends or coworkers sending links around via IM or email, Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, or so forth. All of these mechanisms come with a built-in avenue for comment. All of these mechanisms also ensure that, unless I know the author directly, someone other than the author thought the post merited reading. This works as a natural feedback cycle if the author cares about impact at all. (And if they don't, comments wouldn't help.)
And as the internet democratizes, perhaps the best feedback mechanism is for commenters to have their own blogs. Nothing requires giving the world a chance to speak at your own pulpit.
> I also frequently don't like the results of community feedback shaping a blog; a lot of times it just puts the writer on the defensive all the time, and can easily become toxic and contribute to burnout.
Or, the blogger panders to the worst of his commenters and it forms a cesspool of mutually reinforcing bigotry.
Not really blogging? Thank you so much for your enlightening wisdom. I imagine, then, that Scripting News and other such long-standing blogs need a new moniker. Care to offer one?
Comments aren't necessary for a blog. Most people who are trying to make money allow comments because the same people hit the blog over and over when they're bored at work. Pageviews = money.
But comments are a double-edged sword, too. You have to police them or the trolls and stormfront types will chase all the normal people away. So it takes time you could have spent writing.
