Forget Threads, Bring Back the Blogosphere
The blogosphere is Beer Lane to social media’s Gin Alley
This week it looked like Elon Musk was finally paying the piper for his terrible management of Twitter. Meta released Threads, an alternative to Twitter that unlike the others (Bluesky, Mastodon, etc) could bring on huge numbers of people immediately. 1
I knew something had changed when a local music festival announced that they would be posting their updates on Threads. There is an air of inevitability about the rise of Threads and fall of Twitter. People I follow on Twitter seem to be saying that they will either jump to Threads or just stop posting because they’d rather not have to start from scratch again.
I would like to propose a third alternative: a return to the blogosphere. Before the rise of Twitter, so much serious online discourse came through blogging. In the darkest years of the Bush era, during the Iraq invasion, it was pretty much the only place where you could get honest assessments of what was actually happening. Crucially, it was a public space not controlled by corporate interests and advertising, reminiscent of the internet’s early promise.
Inspired by what I saw, way back in 2004 I decided to wade into the blogosphere myself and haven’t stopped since.2 It took awhile for me to jump onto Twitter. It happened after a blog post of mine went viral on the site, and I realized that if I wanted more readers, I would need to play the Twitter game.
It quickly went from being a side interest to being the primary focus of my media consumption and an unhealthy one at that. As veterans of the site know, there is no shortage of outrage fuel and people who get angry with other people over the minutest things. Oftentimes this anger arose from the format itself, which necessarily forces people to be more blunt and less nuanced. Blogs do not have this problem. When reading them, I feel like I am getting a full picture of someone’s thoughts rather than a direct statement intended to drive “engagement.”
Twitter had these problems before the new fires started by Musk. Now that the site openly favors fascists and transphobia, it’s hard to morally justify sticking with it. Threads of course will have the same old problems of Twitter combined with Meta’s dysfunctional algorithms and prioritizing of advertising revenue. Corprorate-controlled websites are pretty rotten places to build a genuine public sphere, and will ultimately generate outcomes that favor corporate interests.
Instead, let’s bring back the blogosphere. If you once blogged and quit, get back into it. If you post long threads on Twitter or Threads, write a blog post instead. Most crucially, read blogs and boost their readership instead of getting sucked into the social media outrage machine. Blogs won’t get the same “engagement” as tweets, but depth matters more than breadth if understanding is our true goal. It is easy to get seduced by the high of getting a “viral” tweet out there but like all drugs chasing that initial high leads to terrible outcomes.
This might be my inner 90s alternative kid self speaking, but I also think it is imperative to not have public discourse on the web dominated by corporate-owned platforms. They exist primarily to make money and are fine distorting the truth and encouraging misinformation if it gets clicks (YouTube is the most egregious example of this.) In more extreme cases, like Twitter, the owners of the site can use it to push a right-wing agenda.3 Meta’s products are built to maintain engagement, the quality of that engagement be damned. As a result they harm our mental health, something Meta’s internal memos acknowledged about the impact Instagram had on teens.
Breaking free from both Twitter and Threads and returning to the blogosphere would also help undercut the noxious mentality that accompanies posting. Even the most ardent advocates for socialism online spend all their time trying to get likes and followers in the online marketplace. They are modern Calvinists setting out to prove via their storehouse of retweets that they are truly among the elect. This leads to all kinds of undercooked “hot takes” and stupid conflicts instead of insight.
In fact, there are multiple writers whose words and opinions I cherish that I have had to unfollow or mute on social media because their pursuit of engagement leads them to be so thoroughly nasty and insufferable. This came home to me yesterday when I was listening to a podcast and the guest was someone in this camp. I loved hearing the person on the podcast, the person he had been on social media was toxic.
So much time and mental energy has been wasted on talking about the “main character” on any particular day and in making or responding to those insufferable “well actually you didn’t consider every possible case” replies to what people say online. The demise of Twitter is giving us an opportunity. to reject the corporate internet, a bloated apparatus on the cusp of implosion. The internet once thrilled me with how it stood outside of corporate structures and the profit motive. We can have that back if we want to as long as we are willing to reject the temptations of engagement for the more valuable riches of insight. Long live the blogosphere!
I have just been able to join Bluesky and I really love it. Considering Zuck’s track record and how he basically destroyed Facebook as a tool for me to keep up with friends and family I am not anticipating joining Threads.
Sadly I had to nuke my first blog when a horrible former colleague started weaponizing it against me. My personal blog dates from 2012, and this Substack actually took the name of my first blog,
Full disclosure: some of the things I am hearing about Substack are causing me to question using it as a blogging platform, so blogging is not immune to these issues.