Blog Posts on Blogging
Everyone had their own answer. Some comments blamed the app-ification of the web. "Everything is an app now!," one user replied. Others point to the death of Adobe Flash and how so many sites and games died along with it. Everyone agrees that websites have indeed vanished, and we all miss the days we were free to visit them. (...)
We used to know how to do this. Not long ago, we were good at separating the signal from noise. Granted, there’s a lot more noise these days, but most of it comes from and is encouraged by the silos we dwell in.
Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed. By most, I mean upwards of 90% who don’t make content on a platform as understood by the 90/9/1 rule. And that’s okay! Or, at least, it makes total sense to me. Who wouldn’t want a steady stream of dopamine shots?
This blog post about blogging myths posted on the 5th of July, 2023, by Julia Evans is really really great: https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/06/05/some-blogging-myths/
Also it’s hard to guess in advance what people will think is interesting, so I try to not worry too much about predicting that in advance. I really Darius Kazemi’s How I Won The Lottery talk on this topic about how putting things on the internet is like buying lots of lottery tickets, and the best way to “win” is to make a lot of stuff.
I also really agree with this part:
Someone who read this mentioned that they feel like writing has gotten harder as they get more experienced, and I feel the same way.
I think this is because the gap between me and who I’m writing for has gotten a bigger over time, and so it gets a little harder for me to relate to people who know less about the topic. I think on the balance having more experience makes my writing better (I have more perspective!), but it feels harder.
I don’t have any advice to give about this right now. I just want to acknowledge that it’s hard because someone who read a draft of this mentioned it.
And I'm thinking about offering a quick blog post responding to it.
My own scribbles: