The Rise and Fall of Internet Blogging

This piece was supposed to be about the rise and fall of internet blogging and long form content publishing over the past several decades, a kind of retrospective of how things used to be in the early online publishing space, and a look at how they've changed. But more than anything, it was supposed to be a kind of homage to what internet blogging used to be.  The early days of internet blogging existed in a really special time and place, built out by a devoted counterculture of passionate computer nerds, and subsequently adopted and shaped by the explosive growth of an evolving internet publishing model.

The internet itself is different now than what it used to be. My own earliest experience with the web was in the late 90's, smack dab in the middle of dial up connections, palm pilots, and the unseen, looming collapse of the dot com bubble.  At that time, I think that we, as the collective users of the internet, were still figuring out what exactly the web was at that point.  By the end of 90's, in what I guess is now called "Web 1.0", we had a kind of initial web model figured out, which was more or less a digital analogue of the traditional publishing model: a small population of users were writing and publishing content, which was then directly consumed by the rest of the users.  This model itself wasn't so revolutionary, but one particular implication of facilitating it over the nascent internet literally changed everything: cost of entry.  

In the traditional pre-internet publishing model, publishing itself was the bottleneck in the content creation pipeline.  Books, movies, magazines, newspapers, and the other consumable content floating around in the entertainment and cultural ether, were, for a lot of reasons, incredibly expensive to produce and publish.  Expensive generally meant assuming more risk, which meant increasing incentives to minimize risk in other areas, which ultimately led to a highly rigorous curation process.  Publishing houses would receive thousands of manuscripts annually, and publish only the handful that they felt were the most likely to justify the expensive publishing process.  But when the early internet came to embrace the same publishing model, it did so without the same cost of entry and associated constraints on publishing as a bottleneck: anybody and everybody with a personal website or blog could publish content to the internet and compete on the same playing field as any other big publisher.  And so suddenly, seemingly overnight, publishing and content creation became a democracy.

More than anything else, I think this single idea of web publishing as a sort of newly democratized process best describes the landscape at the time.  Voices and minorities that would have never been considered in the traditional publishing model were able to share and create and connect with audiences in ways that were simply impossible a few years prior.  In some ways it made the world feel a bit smaller, because suddenly there was a swath of content outside of the echo chamber of mainstream voices that was truly relatable to whatever it was that you as an individual cared about.  The web was quirky and fun and smart and interesting in all the many ways that its users were quirky and fun and smart and interesting, and the blogs and personal websites that filled it were overflowing with passion and weirdness and the little bits of ourselves that made us unique and likable and, most importantly, human. 

Of course, there were growing pains too.  Both creators and consumers had to figure out how to interface from behind screens, and more pointedly, it was a process of figuring out how to adapt to a world in which anonymity is a kind of default state.  In my own optimism, I tend to think that the combination of internet anonymity and sudden inclusivity of web publishing was, in fact, one of the very things that allowed minority voices and diverse content to exist on the web in the first place.  There were, of course, those that abused this anonymity as well, but largely the nature of this unidirectional publishing model made this less dangerous than what we would eventually see in the next iteration of internet interaction, in which the consumption model shifted towards multimodal interaction and away from direct content.

All in all though, I think bloggers reveled in the new landscape, and were genuinely excited about, and proud of, whatever small corner of the internet they could call their own.  There was also a growing collection of services designed to give people the tools to create these spaces, like the now-defunct Geo Cities and Angelfire and Tripod.  These were the places that formed the backbone of the early blogging era, empowering writers and creators and individuals with the digital real estate necessary for self-expression.  

But perhaps the most interesting part of it all was watching, in more or less realtime, the way in which people as a group were building and inventing web culture where none had existed before.  I think something similar, but infinitely less sexy, happened at the height of the COVID pandemic as well, when company cultures shifted and entire industries moved to video meetings and online conference calls.  The Zoom Era.  And in the midst of this mass adoption of digital collaboration was the slightly awkward fact that we had no real existing precedent or cultural normal for this kind of thing, besides what we thought we knew about how physical meetings used to be run.  Is it rude to have cameras off in a meeting?  Is it okay to record?  What do we do if the host drops out?  Do we really have to wear pants?  Watching and experiencing this was similarly fascinating because the collective we, somehow, in a weird kind of ad hoc networking sort of way, settled towards a common equilibrium of Zoom-based online etiquette and set of digital cultural expectations.  And so in a similar way, it was not only incredibly exciting to watch an entirely new culture coalesce, carried along the phone lines by the bloops and blips of a dialup connection, but also to participate and contribute to it.

To better understand what was happening at the time it also helps to take a look at what came directly after it, specifically in how the content generation and consumption model of the web evolved.  If Web 1.0 was a model that democratized publishing, then what came next was a totally new model that simultaneously democratized publishing and consumption by using interaction as a proxy for both.  Up until this point, for various reasons both technical and experiential, content tended to flow unidirectionally from producers to consumers.  Then, beginning in the 90's and gaining traction in the early aughts, changes largely in server and networking hardware and software allowed for the creation of websites that brought varying degrees of inter-user interaction to the forefront of digital experiences.  These kinds of digital interactions were many and varied, from enabling threaded conversations in the comment sections of blogs, to user-submitted stories and other content on news sites and web forums, and early prototypes of what would eventually become modern social media platforms; ultimately the nature of behavior on the web shifted from consumeristic to participatory.  

The magnitude of this shift was not only huge from a technical level, but also from a behavioral one, and really foreshadowed the underpinnings of the modern web and internet model of today.  People were coming to websites not only to consume content, but also to participate in and interact with each other, in turn generating more content, which in turned enabled more user interactions, etc, in a cyclic action that blurred the line between publishing and consumption, and opened up the internet to a wider audience than ever before.  

So how did this new model affect internet blogs specifically?  Social media critics and yesteryear internet nostalgics will tell you that this new model eroded the public's attention span and that a new generation hooked on consumable, snackable short-form content lead to the eventual death of blogs and long form content.  But the reality is that things were more complex than that.  For one, blogs were still doing great.  The biggest change of the internet during the age of social media was the population of the internet itself, which went from a niche technically hobby to the everyman's daily routine, and the result of this increase in popularity was a corresponding increase in blogging and writing and content-creation at large.  And despite the fact that the average piece of internet-published content did seem to decrease in length, it probably had less to do with the fact that attentions spans were too short to understand it, and more to do with the fact that the internet was now just a bigger place, now home to content of all types and modes of consumption.

And so while the social internet age has a host of other problems that we are still coming to terms with in the modern era, the real effects of this new internet model and the changes brought with it really weren't killed by social media or the participatory model on which it was based.  The real reasons for the fall of internet blogging are far less exciting.  Namely, two large forces at play were slowly but significantly changing how and why we consumed and published content.  

Firstly, the larger internet population accelerated something that was already becoming apparent in the transitioning Web 1.0 model, which was that the sheer amount of content on the internet was forcing changes in how users interacted with curation as a process.  When the internet was a smaller place, it was feasible to manually collect and curate lists of websites, and these web directories served as a sort of starting point for surfing the web.  Yahoo started as one such website directory in the mid 90's, where real life human editors scoured the web, categorizing websites into neat labels and organizing the world wide web into a searchable, digital library. But as the size of the internet increased, these directories struggled to keep up with the corresponding increase in content, becoming less and less representative of the total stuff out there on the web. 

The solution to the quickly-expanding internet was a reframing of the content discovery process altogether. We shifted away from actively browsing directories and lists in order to discover new websites and content, and instead started searching for specific keywords across the entire web. Google would come in at the end of the 90's and elevate the accuracy and performance of internet-wide search algorithms at large, but it was ultimately the growth of the internet itself that allowed search to flourish as a method of content discovery in the first place.

Secondly, and perhaps much more predictably, were the driving forces of capitalism and a growing sense of the global economic potential of marketing to the millions of users on the internet.  If the growth and subsequent collapse of the dot com bubble wasn't a clear enough manifestation of the hopes and dreams of the public market for the online era, then I'm not sure what is. Page views, paid clicks, and conversion rates became the natural currency of the online marketplace, all driven forward by the looming dark clouds of an economy built on advertisements and algorithmic search engine optimization. Blogs and content in general were suddenly no longer evaluated by what cool and interesting viewpoints their authors expressed, but instead judged by their worth as an economic vehicle, by how many page views and how much ad revenue each was worth in the cold machine of the new economy.  This is, admittedly, a fairly pessimistic opinion of the matter, and perhaps the more objective one is that the businesses soon realized the massive marketing opportunity inherent in content publishing and began publishing their own, highly optimized marketing content under the guise of personal interest blogs.  Eventually, these edged out the personal blogs and niche hobby websites in the competitive marketplace of search engine page rankings, and the rest is history.

Which more or less brings us today. This is less of a shaking fists at the sky kind of piece and more of a chronicle of the journey that we've been on, a love letter to the early days of blogging, and a retrospective on how things have changed to move us to where we are today. There are still other things to talk about, like how search decentralized a part of the internet that used to be filled with centralized directories, causing a large portion of content to move and adapt to the inherent centrality of social media and other publishing platforms, or how the shift in the internet model has effected and slowly edged out the traditional forms of journalism that rely largely on the unidirectional publishing model of old, or even about the role that the coming wave of low cost, generative AI tooling will play in the content ecosystem, but these are all discussions for another time.

But if the question is "where have all the good blogs gone?", the real answer is simple. The good blogs, the ones that don't care about SEO or discoverability or content marketing or monetization, the one's written with the passion and expertise and vulnerability to voice their contributions and engage in critical dialogue with the parts of the internet that still care, they haven't really gone anywhere. There's still individual contributors on places like Medium and Brunch that are writing with the same personality and zeal of the early years (though admittedly, there's a lot of garbage there, too) and little gems of technical microblogs that surface on HackerNews and the like.  Cory Doctorow is still blogging, and Hackaday still has an ongoing archive of all the weird electronics  projects that people have built in garage workshops the world over.  There's that one site that has pictures and history of every special edition coke bottle ever made, and Randall Monroe still updates his silly stick figure comics every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  The truth is, the good blogs are right where we left them, floating in the now-obscure parts of the internet, unreachable by search engines or proper backlinks, now just a bit harder to hear over the megaphone of social media and echo chamber of ranked google pages.