My blog made me online friends that I still have today. We all had one and learned programming together.
I was there, and we weren't all like this. I can remember being offended when a friend checked me into a location with foursquare, broadcasting my location out to the world. I felt similarly offended when I was "tagged" in photographs (and still am to this day).
This idea that we were all collectively oblivious and only recently made our way out of the fog really bothers me. Why did the majority of my generation never care about their own privacy?
And while early 2000s might be pushing it, in the 1990s, it was most certainly normal for people to put their home phone numbers in Usenet signatures. The internet was initially just this small subculture thing for nerds, generally not on the radar of anyone not wishing you well. Your employer wasn't there. Your parents weren't there. Your stalker wasn't there. Your insurer and your bank and your local PD weren't there.
And I hate to say this, but the privacy dystopia we now live in is largely of our own doing. We had a bunch of really naive ideas about how information wants to be free. It made for a couple of wonderful years, but then allowed bad actors to abuse every single bit of it. And the bad actors weren't exactly external: the companies were founded and staffed by techies who now lament the status quo.
if you were tech-savvy enough to blog, you were tech-savvy enough to have some clue about that stuff.
also, people weren't like, "liveblogging." they didn't have personal internet devices in their pockets. typical personal noncommercial blogging was people talking about stuff they did days or weeks ago. and even early platforms like Livejournal had visibility filters on posts; people kept the personal stuff friends-only
that was just my personal experience. i guess the author had a different one
The only problem is that nobody selects the algorithms but the platforms.
Maybe in the ends, algorithms will still be selected for virality regardless no matter who choose, but I doubt it.
To make them interesting you must put effort, which we see some people doing, but anyone who has done it knows how the amount of effort needed detracts from the actual meaningful part of experiences/life/relationships.
In a way blogs are the worst medium now for this: Hard for people to consume casually, hard to meaningfully control the audience, and constantly scraped/archived by 3rd-parties. Most who still want to do this more causal, diary-type posting are better served by a private Instagram and posting occasionally, but mostly focusing on low-effort Stories. The key part/fix is the ephemeral nature of the majority of posts/content.
And there you see exactly how/why most people end up doing exactly that.
Nah. Unless your benchmark is "interesting to every person on the planet", in which case, sure. But then, I'd say that following celebrity and politician gossip is far less productive than following the life of my family, friends, and relatives.
Almost every person is interesting to several dozen other people. Exceptions happen, but are relatively rare.
You're correct on the other count: writing takes effort. Not writing to make things interesting, just... writing in general. If you want to summarize your day, it's gonna cost you 30 minutes of brain work. If you want to post to your Instagram reel, Snapchat, or whatever, just point your phone at your surroundings and hold the record button down for 10 seconds or so.
most of the "diary" type posting is very boring to consume
(most people are boring)
I really enjoyed the coziness and uncommercial-ness of it. People wrote so much more openly and thoughtfully.
I understand the OPSEC issues mentioned by the linked article, but the faux example he posted is kind of an unrealistic caricature. I don't remember people typically doing that kind of OPSEC-nightmare "live blogging" type stuff on noncommercial personal blogs.
Was it just me who had like 1 irl friend occasionally open their website and the rest was an online group of friends comprised of people you met on forums and game servers?
OPSEC has nothing to do with it. People used pseudonyms by default in the 1990s, and blocked Doubleclick (a.k.a. Google) in their ~/.hosts files. Blogs were non-commercial places where we worked out ideas and offered useful information.
1997 also was mostly in the books before the word "blog" ever appeared. The number of us writing on the "internet" numbered in the low thousands, not the millions.
My entire readership was online, not in-person, friends. If they knew I "wrote on the internet," my in-person associates didn't give a shit and probably didn't know how to use a browser yet.
Most of us pioneers are scattered to the winds, and a substantial number are dead now.
The upside is self-expression didn’t die, it just evolved into new forms such as vlogs, newsletters, short clips, etc...
My own blog probably fits the “new” style, but for me it’s more about practicing storytelling and sharing something that resonates.
Thanks for sharing.
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