When FTB went down for several days, we all had a bit of an existentialist moment. What if FTB goes down for good? Well, it hasn’t happened yet, but even without any catastrophic incident, it’s fairly obvious that blogging is on the decline. If it’s not a sudden death, we’re just going to slowly fade away instead. It’s fine.

By “we”, I mean independent hobbyist bloggers. Independent means we’re not bound to any particular platform. Hobbyist means we don’t do it for money (although some may make money incidentally). Blogger means we chronically write, generally nonfiction in the medium length range between tweets and novellas.

I have to attach the adjectives, because I think that there’s still plenty of interest in blogging. It’s just the specific niche of independent hobbyist bloggers who are on the decline. We’re squeezed on two sides, first on the “independent” side and second on the “hobbyist” side.

Platform-dependent blogging

What I’ve seen over the past decade, is that young folks still blog, but they do it on platforms like Tumblr, Pillowfort, or Cohost. Of course, independent bloggers also use platforms, like WordPress, Substack, or Blogspot–but I would argue that there’s a qualitative difference. From the perspective of an independent blogger, the platform does not really matter. Is WordPress doing something you don’t like? It’s not ideal, but you can, in principle, move to a different platform. We do not require that readers are on the same platform. We freely associate with other blogs on different platforms.

With a platform like Tumblr, there’s a huge difference in mindset. People are far more bound to the platform. Is Tumblr doing something you don’t like? Well now there’s a huge community-wide crisis about whether to leave and where to go next. People are dependent on the platform as their means of self-promotion. Their readers all have to be on the same platform. Their fellow creators are all on the same platform.

And since readers and bloggers alike have to be on the same platform, there’s often no hard distinction between them. Everyone is a content creator because if you even want to read the content, the tools for creation are also thrust upon you, and sometimes people think it’s weird if you don’t say anything. This encourages a lot more dabbling into blogging, mixed in with other social media activity.

Now, I’m not saying that’s bad, but I am saying, it’s different. The rise of micro-blogging is entirely consistent with (and a contributor to) the decline in independent blogging.

The way this works, if you want to start an independent blog, you definitely still can. It’s not much more technically complicated than starting a Tumblr. What’s much more challenging, is finding readers. Most readers are attached to specific platforms, and are only willing to follow content on those platforms. They have virtually no methods to come across independent blogs.

And when people do find independent blogs, they tend to use high-friction methods to follow them, such as bookmarks. I appreciate when readers like my writing so much that they’re willing to bookmark my blog, but practically speaking you’re not going to do that for a lot of blogs at once. (This friction, by the way, is totally resolved by RSS feeds!)

Monetized blogging

Another way that blogging is still alive and well, is through monetization.  A lot of it is terrible.

For example, when I google “how to start a blog”, the first three non-sponsored results are about how to start a blog… and make money. The top article, from Wix, displays an image showing articles titled “5 Summer Fitness Tips” and “Healthy Eating 101”. It has tips like this one:

Here are three simple steps for choosing the perfect blog niche—one that not only is in line with your passions, but one that you can also monetize and grow:

1. Narrow down your interests
2. Research your audience
3. Check if it’s profitable

I’m not sure to what extent bloggers can actually make money this way, vs it just being a scam to persuade people to spend money on webhosting.  Maybe a blog can make a profit by advertising a pre-existing business, but are you really going to make money just by indulging in your heart’s deepest passion: writing health listicles??? But that’s pretty much how a lot of blogging platforms market themselves these days. Newer platforms like Medium and Substack are built around novel monetization schemes, and even WordPress has the words “Grow your business” at the top of its website.

Not all of it’s cynical SEO though. Because I also think scripted video essays have inherited the blogging tradition. Yeah, I know the format is different, and some people prefer essays over videos or vice versa. But I really think the more significant difference between video essays and blogging is not the format, but rather that people make video essays to make money. Big creators do it as a full time job, and employ teams to assist them; small creators spend a lot of time dreaming of getting big.

So, I can sniff at people who write like one essay and publish it on Medium because it looks “professional”. At the same time, I look at video essayists and think I could never reach such heights. They actually do research! They have test audiences, and paid editors. On a pure quality level, I can’t compete with that–at best I can differentiate by covering other niches.

The thing about hobbyist blogging, is that the standards for success are completely different. I get almost a hundred views a day. I’d guesstimate that the total time people spend reading it is comparable to the time I spend writing it. So as far as I’m concerned, this blog is wildly successful, and I don’t even care how it compares to other blogs.

But if my goal were to make money, I’d need hundreds or thousands times more readers (totally making up numbers here) to make a pittance. On some level, this whole monetization thing feels unsustainable. In our society, there is a certain amount of desire to create and share, and there is a certain desire to consume and be shared to. Does the desire to consume exceed the desire to create? Does it exceed it by a factor of a million? Because I feel that’s what it would take for the typical creator career to take off. People who make a living doing this stuff have to be extraordinarily fortunate, and go well beyond a natural passion to create. In other words, they need to do the uncomfortable and chase what’s popular.

So, monetization has certain distorting effects. The absence of monetization also has distorting effects! I’ve long observed a preponderance of grad students in hobbyist blogging. Probably because grad students have a lot of education, but their time isn’t very valuable.

So I think of independent hobbyist blogging as the middle child. We’re neither here to make money, nor because social media platforms have egged us on to generate content for them. We’re just here because we want to be (and because we have too much time on our hands). Maybe I’m romanticizing it a bit, but I’m sorry to see our little niche shrinking.

But you know, it’s fine. I like my social media, I like my youtubes. It’s not for nothing that they’re more popular these days. It’s fine.