dannyman.toldme.com

Hello From the Ruins

I heard on that ultra-trendy news site, NPR, that Social Media is On The Way Out in 2026. What comes next? Well, I kinda like blogs. And I’m not the only one. Joan Westenberg wrote a kick-ass piece here: The Case for Blogging in the Ruins about the long view of how sharing knowledge works and how social media kinda pissed all over things … I’m going to just drop some excerpts …

Before social media ate the internet … blogs occupied a wonderful and formative niche in the information ecosystem. They were personal but public, permanent but updateable, long-form but informal. A blog post could be three paragraphs or thirty pages.

When I write a blog post, I’m writing for an imagined reader who has arrived at this specific URL because they’re interested in this specific topic; I can assume a baseline of engagement; I can make my case over several thousand words, trusting that anyone who’s made it to paragraph twelve probably intends to make it to paragraph twenty.

When I write for social media, I’m writing for someone who is one thumb-flick away from a video of either a hate crime or a dog riding a skateboard. … The format actively punishes nuance, which means that a thoughtful caveat reads as weakness and any acknowledgment of uncertainty looks like waffling.

She explains the origins of Essays: provisional attempts to try out ideas.

Social media flattens all of this into statements: Everything you post is implicitly a declaration. Even if you add caveats, the format strips them away. What travels is the hot take, the dunked-on screenshot, the increasingly-shitty meme, the version of your argument that fits in a shareable image with the source cropped out.

I keep thinking about how many interesting folks have essentially stopped writing anything substantial because they’ve moved their entire intellectual presence to Twitter or Substack Notes. … It’s like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones.

The capacity for hot zingers like the symphonies to ringtones analogy are maybe something we can thank our social media experiences for.

She’s got some advice on what makes a good blog and how to get started, and how to address “the Discovery Problem” with the observation that blog entries get indexed and surfaced over time, where social media disappears. I have to admit, though: since Social Media came about, this humble blog has received about zero comments over the past decade. Kind of a bummer. But the quiet exploration over here in my own space beats The Monetize Everything Hate Machine.

Anyway, it is nice to find another feed to add to https://theoldreader.com/.