Why blog
I've been a part of a long running, mostly joking, conversation about how point and click adventure games as a genre are dead and have been for decades. Of course that was never true. There may have been fewer big name P&C games 20 years ago, but people were still making them.
I feel that's the same with blogging. In my experience blogging was very popular but they were supplanted by social media. I thought fewer people made blogs because social media was a cleaner and simpler way to connect with people. I could write a 500 word Facebook post in 2005 and immediately share it with 300 people. If I had a blog, who was actually going to read that?
When I did some cursory research on the impact of social media on blogging I found that my suspicions weren't true. There seem to be over 600 million blogs out there, and around 500 new WordPress sites created every day. And 21% of people have read a blog post in the last 4 weeks. I have to take numbers like with a grain of salt, but if it's off by 50% those are still very impressive stats. It appears blogging didn't disappear. I did.
So why come back? Honestly, it seems to be the only way to exert some control over how I write. Blog are not beholden to algorithms the way social media posts are. They're less likely to get lost in the shuffle too. A good RSS reader with a handful of semi-regular blogs on it is a great way to spend a morning. It's certainly much better than scrolling through BlueSky or Facebook.
I have fond memories of the internet in the 1990s. Visiting a handful of sites, becoming somewhat familiar with strangers, reading thoughts that weren't just tossed out, and even forming some kind of friendships. Those things don't seem possible on social media now because that's not what social media is for. The old adage that states, "if you're not paying to use a website then you're the product" is true. I won't pretend that every platform is perfect (see WordPress, Substack, and others), but I missed having a place that was mine and I miss seeing people in places that belonged to them. So here we go.