Requiem for Early Blogging. “I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting.”
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Comments 1
I was an extremely active "early blogger," and I had a run with a rather large audience for a while, but I haven't blogged in years. I wasn't writing about anything particularly controversial, either, mostly just philosophy, personal growth, and frugality.
These days, instead, I write in my own analog private journal.
Why did I shift away from blogging?
One, the conversation largely shifted into "walled gardens" run by large corporations, which I didn't want to participate in. I wanted to retain ownership (as much as possible) of what I produced, and you have to give up so much ownership inside the garden walls.
Two, early blogging was a positive environment, with people supporting each other, but gradually it became more and more negative, with personal attacks and uncomfortable behavior. One of the last straws for me was someone sending me pictures of my house and telling me that they were watching me.
Three, if I wrote about a personal struggle, it often ended up being used against me in my non-blogging life, in both professional and personal contexts.
These factors caused me to put up more and more walls around what I shared and wrote, and gradually I began to feel more freedom of expression in a paper journal, so I simply switched to that.
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