Fremantle
· blogging ·
What Made Blogging Different? by Elizabeth Spiers, 16 October 2025 (via Ben Werdmuller):
So if you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it.
I guess the issue is that these days if you write on your own site, no one will see it at all (while you'll still get a massive hosting bill because the stupid AI scrapers will hammer your site regardless). I don't particularly mind my words never being seen, I only keep a blog because I like to make notes for my own future reference, but it does lack the feedback systems that make social media enticing.
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