Why blogging is better than social media
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Torment Nexus called "The social web is dying. Is that a good thing? in which I looked at the decline of what we used to call social networking back in the day, or "micro-blogging" even further back (yes, I am dating myself, but just wait until I get going!). Evidence has been growing steadily that social media as we have known it in the past — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, even TikTok — is not growing at anything like the pace it did before, and in some cases is already shrinking. The Financial Times recently reported that a study it commissioned – an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries — found social media use peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline. Adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024, down by almost 10 per cent since 2022. The share of people who report using social platforms to stay in touch with their friends, express themselves or meet new people has fallen by more than a quarter since 2014. Instead, it has become television.
Why has this happened? Plenty of people have theories, and some of them may even be right. One of the obvious culprits is the corporatization of social media, in which giant tech corporations fueled solely by the profit motive took over, something that the decline and fall of Twitter more or less sums up, at least for me. When it launched in 2007, it was just a somewhat ridiculous toy designed by a handful of people who had no real idea what they were doing — which was part of the fun! Random people shared random thoughts, and it was a great tool for meeting new people from all walks of life. I not only got a job using it, but made some great friends. As it grew, the folks who ran it remained committed to their core beliefs, and among other things helped fuel popular uprisings known collectively as the Arab Spring (most of which failed, but that's a separate story). As social media grew and became more valuable, corporate raiders with no principles whatsoever took over, and the end result was what my friend Cory Doctorow has colorfully termed "enshittification."
There are other problems, however — ones that corporations and/or billionaires are not entirely responsible for. Could it be that the dream of social networking, where millions of people could share their innermost thoughts with millions of other people instantaneously, wasn't actually something worth striving for, and in fact wasn't beneficial in any way, either for those individuals or for society? In my previous post, I wrote: "It’s entirely possible that social media in the early 2000s worked in part because there were weren’t a lot of people using it, and the real problems started when everybody showed up. Not just because that brought people with widely diverging and in come cases horrible opinions and the urge to share them, but because those massive numbers of people attracted the Facebooks of the world, who then proceeded to enshittify everything."
As someone once said, it's entirely possible that human beings were never meant to hear from or share their thoughts with so many people at one time. In a recent piece in Noema magazine, James O'Sullivan wrote that social media promised connection but has delivered exhaustion:
At first glance, the feed looks familiar, a seamless carousel of “For You” updates gliding beneath your thumb. But déjà‑vu sets in as 10 posts from 10 different accounts carry the same stock portrait and the same breathless promise — “click here for free pics” or “here is the one productivity hack you need in 2025.” Swipe again and three near‑identical replies appear, each from a pout‑filtered avatar directing you to “free pics.” Between them sits an ad for a cash‑back crypto card. Scroll further and recycled TikTok clips with “original audio” bleed into Reels on Facebook and Instagram; AI‑stitched football highlights showcase players’ limbs bending like marionettes. Refresh once more, and the woman who enjoys your snaps of sushi rolls has seemingly spawned five clones.
Whatever remains of genuine human content, O'Sullivan continued, "is sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks. These are the last days of social media as we know it. Social media was built on the romance of authenticity. Early platforms sold themselves as conduits for genuine connection: stuff you wanted to see, like your friend’s wedding and your cousin’s dog. But the attention economy and the generative AI-fueled late attention economy, have broken whatever social contract underpinned that illusion."
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Anything worth saving?
This post is sort of a sequel to the one on the death of social media. If it truly is in decline, is there anything worth saving? Much of the conversation among like-minded people or friends or those who share an interest seems to have moved to private WhatsApp groups and private Discord channels and private Facebook pages. All of which is fine, of course. But is there any way to maintain at least a little bit of the social aspects of social media, minus (most of) the toxicity? I think there is, and it's called blogging. I told you I was just getting started with the ancient tech references! But seriously, I think writing about something that interests you and publishing that on a website you control (to some definition of the term control) still has a lot of value, and that's really all that blogging is. Maybe I'm just nostalgic for an earlier time, like a lot of old people. But despite its flaws, it worked, and much better than what replaced it.
I found myself nodding along furiously while reading something Joan Westenberg wrote, entitled "The case for blogging in the ruins." We have more information than any civilization in history, she said, but aside from Wikipedia we've organized the sum total of our collective knowledge into formats "optimized for making people angry at strangers in pursuit of private profitability." The attention-driven economy and algorithm-powered feeds, Westenberg writes, have taken whatever was once beneficial or good about social media and turned it into something terrible, fuelling people's worst impulses. The fix, Westenberg argues — or at least part of it — is "going backwards to a technology we've largely abandoned: the blog, humble // archaic as it may seem."
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. It could be rigorously researched or entirely speculative. The blogosphere of the mid-2000s had its problems: It was insular and often smug, prone to flame wars between people who agreed on 95% of everything but found the remaining 5% absolutely unforgivable. But it also produced actual intellectual communities. Remember those? People wrote long responses to each other's posts, those responses generated further responses, and you could follow the thread of an argument across multiple sites and weeks of discussion. The format rewarded careful thinking because careful thinking was legible in a way that it simply isn't on platforms designed for rapid-fire engagement.
Social media removed the friction of publishing, Westenberg says, and in doing so it made it even more difficult to separate the signal from the noise. "When you write a blog post, you're creating a standalone document with a permanent URL. It exists at a specific address on the web, and that address doesn't change based on who's looking at it, when they're looking at it, or what algorithm has decided they should see next." Posts on Twitter, meanwhile, scroll past endlessly and are controlled by factors you aren't even aware of. We've restructured the presentation of ideas around the needs of advertising platforms, Westenberg writes, and we're living with the consequences. "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."
By contrast, Westenberg argues that blogs are the direct descendant of Montaigne's essays, a word that came from a French term meaning "to try." She argues that it's a form that allows for intellectual exploration without demanding premature certainty. "You can write a post working through an idea, acknowledge in the post itself that you're not sure where you'll end up, and invite readers to think alongside you. You can return to the topic weeks later with updated thoughts. The format accommodates the actual texture of thinking, which is messy and recursive and full of wrong turns." I think Westenberg gets it exactly right, especially when she says that she can't help thinking about how many interesting writers have stopped writing anything substantial because they've moved to Twitter or Substack Notes. "It's like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones."
Bring back the weird blogs!
Like many people who used to blog, even when I was using social media non-stop I kept posting to my website at mathewingram.com/work — which I run using WordPress on a small server that sits in my middle child's living room (because their internet is a lot faster than mine). I've been publishing there more or less non-stop since the turn of the millennium. I publish this newsletter and others using Ghost (an open-source platform), as well as on Substack, but I also publish them on my personal site. They are donation-based only. As one author who gave up social media for a blog described it: "it's kind of a Medici-style patron of the arts situation. Everything is free for everyone, supported by those who have the means and desire to do so." My blogging hero has always been Jason Kottke, who has been blogging more or less continuously since 1998 and has always done so purely based on donations from those who enjoy his work (and some ads).
I still follow a wide range of different blogs via RSS (and in some cases via Substack as well if they publish there), and it is an eclectic mix to be sure. Some are more like full-scale publishing operations, like Techdirt and Boing Boing (which Doctorow co-founded) and Marginal Revolution and Platformer, and then there are the one-man shows like Kottke and Waxy and Astral Codex Ten and of course Dave Winer, the father of RSS. In Canada there's lawyer and copyright expert Michael Geist. There are ones that are hard to categorize, like Futility Closet or Mind Garden. There's Robin Sloan and Scope of Work and Flaming Hydra and Live Laugh Blog. And I'm always looking for more, so if you know of any or feel like sharing your XML file of sources, please let me know!
Westenberg has a list at the end of her post of places to start if you are interested in blogging, which I have borrowed to post here, along with her descriptions:
Write.as is minimalist, privacy-focused, no-frills. You can start anonymously and upgrade to a custom domain later. The editor gets out of your way. Good for people who want to write without fiddling with settings.
Bear Blog is extremely lightweight, fast-loading, no tracking. Free tier is generous. The aesthetic is deliberately simple, which enforces a focus on writing over design tinkering. Privacy-first.
Ghost (powering this blog) is more fully-featured, with built-in membership and newsletter tools. You can self-host (free) or use their managed hosting (paid). Good if you want to eventually build a paid subscriber base but want to own your infrastructure. Open source.
Micro.blog was built explicitly as an alternative to social media, with cross-posting, a community timeline, and support for short and long posts. Has an indie web ethos baked in. Good if you want the social layer without the algorithmic manipulation. Manton (founder) is one of my favourite folks to follow // read lately. Good insights.
I can vouch for both Ghost, which I mentioned above, and for Micro.blog which I have experimented with and quite liked. If you are interested in getting your hands a little dirtier with plugins and whatnot, WordPress is the grandfather of all blogging systems and it is extremely versatile. There are lots of cheap hosting services that support WordPress, and there is a vast network of plugin authors and open-source experts to help. Is blogging more work than posting a half a dozen words to Twitter or a photo or video clip to Instagram? Yes. But not by much. I've taken to posting more short thoughts or memes to my blog and then cross-publishing them to BlueSky and Threads and Mastodon automatically with WordPress's Jetpack software, and it takes no more time than tweeting. Plus, I don't have to worry about Elon Musk or his lackeys deleting it some day.
In sum, I am in favour of what a Noema piece described as "re-wilding the internet." Our online spaces are not ecosystems, that article argued – they are more like plantations; "highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within." Bring back the weird personal blogs! The future of the internet depends on it!
Got any thoughts or comments? Feel free to either leave them here, or post them on Substack or on my website, or you can also reach me on Twitter, Threads, BlueSky or Mastodon. And thanks for being a reader.
