John Scalzi’s post on how blogs work today is thoughtful, but I still disagree with most of it.
Facebook and Twitter are innately inferior to blogs. The main reason is that both companies (especially Facebook) are tracking and advertising platforms where as the cliche goes you are the product. Both are very user-hostile in any sense I care about.
Blogs — especially when they were mostly self-run — operated under an entirely different ethos and were also much deeper and more ruminative and of course far less beholden to advertisers.
There has been one advantage to the rise of Facebook, though. Most of the very dumb people have disappeared into its maw and aren’t heard from as often since I never go there.
Though Facebook is still hugely harmful to the internet in general, that is a de facto benefit to me that I do actually enjoy.
But that’s about like saying that the shark ate that one annoying person first when you’re both shipwrecked and treading the same shifting sea. The shark’s still there and you’re still in the water.
I confess that I miss old blogging (2000 – 2005); Tumblr -that hellhole- is just not the same thing.
I know that nostalgia is bad, and that that time wasn’t all roses, but I’m sad it’s gone.
Corporate takeovers — which is basically what happened to the internet in that time– nearly always seem to make the world worse, even if it is easier.
I’m constantly surprised by how willing people are to sign up for surveillance and control platforms. It’s like the NSA doesn’t even have to do any work any more. People just spew data everywhere freely.