the internet Archives - I'm Not Doctor Who

Time moves on, and things change. I didn't really notice the gradual disintegration of the "blogosphere" because it was just that — gradual. But with social media taking its place as many folks' primary means of self-expression online, it's hard to deny that, now, the age of the personal blog would, at first glance, appear to be over.

I look at my WordPress reader and it's a bit sad; folks that I used to enjoy reading the posts of on a near-daily basis haven't updated for a year or more, and since their blog was the primary means through which I kept up with them, I don't know what they're up to now, or even if they're okay.

Sure, there are a few still happily going about their business — particular shoutouts to Infernal Monkey's thoroughly NSFW but hilarious wanking blog, Kresnik258gaming's retro Sony games site and Ernst Krogtoft's excellent in-depth explorations of retro gaming for just a few sites I've been following for years that are still actively updating at least semi-regularly — but my Reader is no longer the active community hub that it once was.

I miss seeing folks like Irina of I Drink and Watch Anime, Leth of Lethargic Ramblings (which appears to no longer be online) and the whole #oneaday crew; various others that I once knew by name and considered friends, but who, in many cases, appear to have vanished into the ether. That's their choice, of course, and I don't blame them for wanting to just quietly retreat with the way the Internet is these days, but I still miss them.

Going along with that is the fact that people just don't seem to be reading blogs any more. This place used to get a few hundred views a day, which is obviously peanuts in the grand scheme of the Internet, but it always felt like a noteworthy number of people who were interested in the daily life of a relative nobody like me, particularly when I was never making a particular effort to SEO optimise this place or write about trending topics.

D'you wanna know how many page views I had yesterday? Five. This isn't really a complaint, because the only reason I'm writing here is more as a journalling exercise than anything else, and that's how it's always been — but those figures are a stark contrast from when I started daily posts first time around here, when #oneaday was a community effort.

And the more I think about this, the more I wonder why this has happened. Sure, social media is good for a quick dopamine hit if a post does numbers, but you are, by design, limited in what you can say — and the sites that are still the biggest in the world despite both having gone down the right-wing toilet are both algorithmically driven to an abusive degree, making it near-impossible to actually see something you might be interested in rather than something which is "suggested".

Blogs, meanwhile, are completely freeform. There's no algorithm at play. You follow a person's blog, you get that person's blog. When they update that blog, you get that post. When you want to respond to what they said, you can comment right on that post, assuming they've left comments turned on. Over time, you can really get to know the person who owns that blog, even if, in the case of larger sites, you never become "friends" with them as such.

But even then, there's a personal touch that social media simply doesn't match. I remember years back I wrote a post about how inspirational I found Allie Brosh's hilarious (and, at the time, enormously popular) Hyperbole and a Half blog, and the lady herself came and commented on my blog to say thank you.

That was amazing to me at the time, but nowadays, I suspect that sadly, relatively few people know who Allie Brosh is; her one lasting legacy on the Internet is the "[x] all the things!" meme, which began its life in an innocuous post from 2010 about how hard it was to be a functional adult with depression and ADHD, but which I suspect is not known by a lot of people using the funny cartoon of the gremlin with the broom to make some sort of "hilarious" point online.

One strange development I've witnessed recently is that blogs have sort of come back, except folks don't call them "blogs" any more. They call them "newsletters", based on the assumption that most folks will subscribe to them via email. And while there are some excellent examples of those — my favourite is Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At?, which is a sole voice of sanity in a tech world that seems to be going increasingly insane — I kind of don't like the name change. "Newsletter" implies something of some importance; something that you follow in order to keep up with important things. And as such, it feels kind of silly to sign up for a "newsletter" from some random person online that you don't know. Newsletters are things you get from the local church, or that one place you bought PC parts from that one time, or a software company you like. They're something that organisations send out, not people.

And I think it's important to make that distinction. Because if you're positioning your work as a "newsletter", you're automatically placing a certain amount of pressure on yourself to make everything you write "newsworthy". Your newsletter needs to be about something, and you need to stick to that subject, lest you lose those all important subscribers and Number No Longer Go Up.

A blog, meanwhile, is just a public diary. Sure, it can be more than that, and yes, of course you can specialise its topic — that's what I've done with my other site MoeGamer — but at its heart, it's a public diary: you write something, you date-stamp it, you post it out into the void. That thing you write doesn't have to be important, it doesn't have to be thought-provoking, it doesn't have to be funny, it doesn't have to be anything. But the one thing it will always be is personal. Anyone reading it is getting a glimpse into your mind, your personality, your soul.

Newsletters are not replacements for blogs. Social media is not a replacement for blogs. And fucking Discord absolutely is definitely not a replacement for blogs.

I miss your blogs. And you're missing out by not reading more blogs. So if you have a blog — or indeed if you are, for some inexplicable reason, inspired to start one after everything I've written above — please let me know. I'll happily add it to my subscriptions. Because heaven knows social media hasn't been fun for a long time, and while Bluesky is definitely an improvement over Twitter for the most part, it still lacks the magic that blogs once had.

So c'mon, let's hear it. Let's build up a kickass blogroll and party like it's 15 years ago.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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As the rot economy continues apace, more and more people are starting to recognise the modern Web for what it is: an unpleasant place, in which commercial interests and venture capitalists come first, and making an actually pleasant, enjoyable and educational place for the actual users is far, far down the list. As a result, "the old Internet" is often romanticised, perhaps to an overly nostalgic, rose-tinted degree, but I have to kind of concur; things did used to be much more enjoyable online before our daily routine was nothing but scrolling through the only two or three websites that actually exist to most people.

I think about this a lot when I'm writing on here or MoeGamer. I used to get fairly decent numbers on both blogs, even though I was just posting daily nonsense on this one. Now, I get maybe double figures daily on here, if that. MoeGamer still pulls in about a thousand views a day, which is nice, but a lot of those views are for things I wrote about several years ago at this point, and rarely for things I've written about recently.

Now, I don't do either this blog or MoeGamer for the views, but I feel the trajectory this site has taken in terms of numbers is symptomatic of the way the Web has changed over the years. People just don't do blogs any more, either as writers or readers. Part of this is down to the fact that RSS readers just aren't a part of people's daily online routine any more (though I'm aware they still exist) — and even those "magazine-style" apps that were never really a good replacement for Google Reader seem to have died a bit of a death. Not only that, but the usefulness of search engines has declined considerably, too.

Instead, it is, of course, all about social media. It's all about having a presence on the "important" social networks — though even that has seen something of an upset over the last few years, and particularly in the last few months. Twitter was already circling the drain in terms of usefulness for sharing stuff even before Elon took over and did… whatever the fuck he's doing there; Facebook has been such a horrible experience to use for so long now that I question the sanity of anyone who is still using it — to say nothing of the frankly quite disturbing policy changes they've had recently; and the less said about TikTok, the better.

So what, exactly, is someone looking to express themselves online to do today? If you want to get seen, you seemingly have little choice but to sign your soul over to one of these companies and plunge your data into the mire that is "The Algorithm". Telling people that they should start their own website is a noble and proper goal, and one I stand behind, but the fact is… a lot of folks just don't and won't leave social media — and many of the social media companies are doing their best to keep those folks on their platform as much as possible.

Look at Twitter (no, I'm not calling it "X") and how Elon is desperate for people to "post content" on it, completely failing to see that it is a platform woefully ill-equipped for anything other than that which it was originally designed for: microblogging. No-one in their right mind is going to set up a video-centric Twitter account instead of a YouTube channel, even if the site wasn't infested with the worst bigots the Internet has to offer. And no writer is ever going to use Twitter as their primary means of posting their work.

Everyone knows this. And yet it's so difficult to get people to notice you if you're not spending all day "building your personal brand" or some such bullshit. Artists struggle to get commissions without social media. Writers struggle to get publishers without social media. Video makers struggle to get views on their videos without social media. It all sucks, and it feels far too late to be able to do anything about it.

All you can do, really, is just be stubborn. Keep plugging away at your own personal passion projects, and do those projects for the passion, not for the potential of monetising them. I keep doing this blog because I like writing and it's good therapy for me — nothing more. It's always a thoroughly welcome sight when I see someone I recognise in the comments, but that's becoming an increasingly rare occurrence these days. Family and friends who used to read on a regular basis just… don't any more, and the worst thing is, I completely understand why. The modern Web simply isn't built to support personal sites any more, and that's a real shame. It feels like we're very much at risk of losing an important part of our collective culture — because what happens to everyone's "content" (ugh) when one of these social media companies eventually implodes?

Anyway, close your Meta accounts, get off Twitter and read more blogs. That's my advice for surviving online today.

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