On Blogging

There is a history of blogging, but I have been doing it, not making notes about doing it, so I won’t go there.[1] Suffice to say that blogging began earlier than we might think (1994; 1995) and has persisted longer than anyone would have expected (2025; see the blogroll in the sidebar at right)[2]. Further, blogging will persist because it has economic, literary, and social characteristics that resist enshittification[3]. And it’s not a bad business to be in, if business it be.

To establish my bona fides: I began blogging after the dot-com crash, circa 2003, when I was unemployed in Philadelphia, carrying my laptop from Center City hotspot to hotspot because the internet was off in my apartment. Philly — the sixth borough — was for some reason (low rent? slack?) the epicenter of the political blogosphere for what we then thought of as the left (liberal Democrats, back in the days of steam, before “liberals” were rebranded as “progressives, a real pivot people actually discussed). What I consider the golden age of political blogging ended with Obama’s victory in 2008, and at some point thereafter I was taken up by Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism, where I remained for thirteen years, posting more or less daily (the post being the essential deliverable of a blog, though there are others, especially community).

Blogging and blogs are unexpectedly complex. From an economic and institutional perspective, considering the blog as a small firm, the distinguishing features of a blog are:

(1) ☑ The barriers to entry are extremely low. As Gene Fowler almost said: “Blogging is easy. You only need to stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” The greatest expense, other than time, will be a URL and a server, and if you use a free blogging service, you don’t need a server, and you might not even need a URL.

(2) ☑ There is no “binding contract” between blogger and reader, very much unlike the platforms, all of which have terms of service.

(3) ☑ The blogger completely controls the blog. As Barry Ritholz writes: “The Big Picture is my personal fiefdom. I rule over all as benevolent dictator/philospher king.” From Blog Herald:

Through every hype cycle—social media, vlogging, podcasting, AI-generated content—blogging has remained the one format where you control the space, the tone, the terms.

(4) ☑ Bloggers often adopt pen names; their ability to do so stems from their complete control of the space. I remember back in 2003, people in Philly partaking in this honorable tradition by choosing Latinate names (like “Publius” from the Federalist Papers, a collective pseudonymfor Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay). A considerable amount of social and symbolic capital can accrete, over time, around a nom de guerre (like “Banksy”).

(5) ☑ Funding is voluntary. Advertising is possible, but in the main blogs are funded by gifts from readers; contrast substack.

From a literary perspective, considering the blog as a genre with formal characteristics:

(1) ☑ The front page lists the posts in reverse chronological order. You will have noticed this is the first feature the platforms take away, because they want to determine what you read with their cursed algorithms.

(2) ☑ A comments section, while not mandatory, is preferred. (It takes human moderators to make a comments section work, which can become a blocker as the blog scales up. Nevertheless, a comments section is essential to build and maintain a community, for insights or expertise the blogger may not have, for entertainment value, and for new sources and links.)

(4) ☑ There is an RSS feed. The RSS feed is essential to avoiding centralized chokepoints for the distribution of posts. (Podcasts are distributed with RSS as well, which is why you hear “wherever you get your podcasts” as a tagline when a podcast is advertised. Like Podcasts, blogs have not been taken over by platforms, and the continuing existence of RSS feeds is one reason for that[4]).

(4) ☑ There is a blogroll. Blogrolls have a vexed history. Although they might have been considered traffic builders, they also required maintenance by the blog owner, a time sink they resisted (or had qualms about), so much so that the dominant blogging platform, WordPress, removed the feature in 2013.

From a social perspective, there is (or was (or may be again)) mutuality between bloggers:

(5) ☑ There is a traffic counter. Back in the day, the first thing I checked was SiteMeter[5], which gave you a table showing the all important “referrals” — the sites that linked to you, which you wanted to know so you could return the favor, or even put them on your blogroll, creating a virtuous cycle of mutuality. “Clicks” were not the point:

[T] assumption that anyone creating a website or blog does so primarily to maximize readership [is false]. It completely ignores the fact that there are others who create because they genuinely love building something from the ground up. It ignores the fact that sometimes often times, the value lies in the action of creation, self-expression, and just owning a small corner of the internet that reflects who they are.

The author writes:

When you’re writing online, being unique doesn’t matter nearly as much as being found.

No, no, no. Please, do not listen to this. Unless your primary goal is to monetize your blog over self-expression, cover your ears (or eyes). Being found may get you attention, but being unique is what makes people STAY and REMEMBER you.

A small audience is not the same as no audience. Meaningful connections can still happen even if you only have 2 or 3 readers. You don’t need search engines to surface your posts. The most impactful writing will find its way to the right people organically, without needing to “rank”.

The author ends the post by saying:

You can have a unique website that no one visits.

Or you can have a “basic” blog that actually gets traffic.

I guarantee you that no matter what, there will be at least one person who will visit your website/blog. And that one person may tell another person, who will tell another person. Someone will always visit, no matter what.

Or so I tell myself. Unfortunately, SiteMeter no longer exists (nor its competitor, StatCounter. I’m trying to wrestle one into submission for this site (see the “Visitors” link at the bottom) but I’m not sure about it yet. But I don’t have any referrals yet anyhow!

(6) � Mutuality exists in the blogroll[6]. In the golden age, this was the ethic behind the blogroll:

An unwritten rule is followed when dealing with blogrolls. The rule prevalent in the blogosphere is that any blogger putting your link in his blogroll should be thanked, and in reciprocation, you should feature the blogger’s link in your blogroll.

Of course not all links need to be reciprocated. There are times when your link is published in a blogroll on a blog not related to your subject or even on a blog that is ambiguous. So the decision is truly yours to encourage a blogroll and it’s at your discretion.

In 2007 this changed:

I long ago decided that my blogroll should consist of blogs I read.

Which sounds fine in the abstract, until you realize that blogging follows a power curve, and if a few bloggers at the tippy top (call them the A-list) only read each other, that makes it much less easy for the B- and C-list blogs to accumulate social and symbolic capital, and so the Gini co-efficient of the blogosphere gets even higher, an odd outcome for the left[7].

After this Luis Tiant-like wind-up, the pitch: I believe that blogs (in particular blogs of the Golden Age), are resistant — very much unlike the platforms — to enshittification, which Cory Doctorow defines as follows:

“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

The classic example of enshittification is Google degrading its search so that users stayed on its site longer and saw more of its ads.) Of course, that only works because Google, as a platform, is a monopoly; of Hirschman famous triad, “exit, voice, and loyalty,” exit is the most difficult for users. Now contrast the blog:

Now imagine a blog — even an A-list blog — tried to enshittify itself the way the platforms are doing. It won’t work:

• Most blogs have very few business customers, so the customer v. business enshittification dynamic on the platforms is missing to begin with;

• Barriers to entry for bloggers are low, so it’s easy for competitors to the enshittifier to emerge;

• Posts in reverse chronological order are a strong barrier to the algorithmic manipulations that enshittifers typically perform;

• The presence of a comments section is a strong disincentive to enshittification, because commenters won ‘t put up with it, particularly commenters in a strong community.

• RSS means that there are no centralized distribution chokepoints for the enshittifiers to control;

• Readers can simply leave and/or stop giving gifts; Hirshman’s “exit” strategy is very much available to them;

Finally:

• Blogs have no requirement for virality, as on social media. Content does not propagate algorithmically, but by mutual aid among blog proprietors.

I believe, then, that blogs have the potential to last a long time, and I hope this blog can make its own small contribution to the vitality of the blogosphere.

I rarely agree with Jordan Peterson, but if you are an aspiring commenter, or even an aspiring blogger, consider this:

Writing changes everything pic.twitter.com/1yJ3tUDhg4

— Best of Philosophy (@BotPhilosophyQ) May 25, 2025

NOTES

[1] See, in no particular order, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

[2] See “Imminent Death of the Blogs Predicted, Except Not,” where I show how blogging was essential to the propagation of #MintTheCoin from 2010 - 2013, long after the Golden Age, and its breakthrough into the mainstream (a post picked up by blogger Brad DeLong, of all people). See here on blogging and AI slop. And see here on blogging and “the Lindy Effect” (“people still like to read”).

[3] Cory Doctorow, “My McLuhan lecture on enshittification” (2024).

[4] Somebody — I blame web designers — started eliminating RSS icons from sites, believing (wrongly) that icons from platform social media could replace them, or that they were simply old-fashioned. Because I need to maintain the blogroll, I need to find out whether any given blog has an RSS feed or not (some do not). As it turns out, even if a blog has no RSS icon, its RSS feed often can be discovered by appending “feed” to its URL. I’m guessing this is a WordPress feature.

[5] SiteMeter apparently did itself in with a botched upgrade, but I blame Google Analytics.

[6] Looking for the ballot boxes with checks, and the question mark character, I discovered that UTF-8 has characters for all the I Ching hexagrams. That’s pretty neat!

[7] “Blogroll Amnesty Day” was an enormous and continuing controversy; see here, here, here, and especially this study by Clay Shirky (“the smaller bloggers’ fears were perfectly correct”).