I started blogging in 2002. In Internet terms, that’s somewhere after the dinosaurs, but close enough that dust from the Chicxulub impact was still making colorful sunsets. My very first blog-type site started a bit before that, a booklog using hand-updated HTML files that I would FTP up to the steelypips.org server (ask your grandparents, Zoomer…), but my more general blog Uncertain Principles launched in 2002 on Blogger, with a third-party add-on to handle comments. I moved to ScienceBlogs in 2006 which was using Movable Type, then switched to WordPress, and in 2015 I started at Forbes which was WordPress and is now using a custom platform, and now I’m doing this Substack thing.
My point is, I’ve lasted through whole geological ages of blogging history, which makes me in some sense the perfect audience for a couple of recent reminiscences by Tanner Greer at the Scholar’s Stage and Dan Nexon at the Duck of Minerva (which I gather is going through some kind of re-launch; I was never a reader of the site, so I can’t speak to that). As I probably tipped off with the “in some sense” a sentence ago, though, my actual reaction is “Not so fast…”
Greer’s piece is mostly building atop Nexon’s, and both are singing the praises of a more freewheeling era of “the blogosphere,” where tenured academics and scruffy graduate students interacted on equal terms, and social-media discourse was carried on at a higher level. People in those days were interested in vibrant dialogue and working through ideas, not tawdry politicking. Here’s a bit from Nexon:
These posts could be explanatory, didactic, or polemical in character. But undergirding the exercise was, in my view, a shared understanding that blogging was, at some level, ‘thinking aloud.’ Posts usually ended, whether explicitly or implicitly, with the question “What do you think?” When readers were supposed to take a specific post in a different spirit, it was up to the author to make that clear. Someone, perhaps PTJ, described this mode of blogging as resembling a conversation in the hotel bar at an academic conference – but one that was, at least in theory, open to anyone with internet access.
And Greer:
Points-for-my-side-ism did not fly in the old blogosphere. Who would have been impressed? Yes, one could lampoon national figures… but other bloggers, writers, commentators? What would have been the point? Performative attacks in blog comment threads would simply get you blocked by the blogger being attacked. Retreating to one’s own blog to snipe, in contrast, would mean being ignored. If you wanted to be part of the conversation you had to add something substantive (even if informal) to it.
This is lovely stuff, and some of what they talk about brings back good memories of, in Internet terms, finding Clovis points in the wooly-mammoth steaks we roasted outside the cave to accompany our vibrant online dialogue. To a large extent, though, I find this to be an over-romanticized picture of a very narrow slice of “the blogosphere” in any of the epochs I can recall.
I was never a huge political brawler, but my entry point for “the blogosphere” was through political bloggers like Josh “Talking Points Memo” Marshall, Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, and Andrew “Andrew Sullivan” Sullivan, none of whom were particularly averse to partisan point-scoring. Or necessarily adding anything substantive to the conversation— Reynolds in particular was infamous for block-quoting a paragraph or two with only a few words of comment (“Indeed.” was a particular favorite). This quickly expanded to a wider community, including folks like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein who have become pillars of the modern media ecosystem, but again, brief and snarky dismissals were always a staple of the form. This is also where dismissive mentions of “mainstream media” became common, usually in the course of proclaiming the superiority of blogging as a new mode of “citizen journalism” that would cover stories THEY didn’t want you to know about.
And, of course, this is the community that gave the world the concept of “fisking” a post a given blogger didn’t like. They would copy the full text of the post, and go through it paragraph-by-paragraph adding brief mocking rejoinders along the way. This was entertaining a couple of times, maybe, and mostly served as a reminder of how crazy talented the crew behind Mystery Science Theater 3000 were, because it’s really goddamn hard to be actually funny in the format where you’re just interjecting in the middle of someone else’s work. What it was not was a significant positive contribution to the republic of letters.
Sniping from other blogs was never as harmless as Greer suggests, either, particularly when high-traffic sites got involved. That sort of cross-blog fighting could bring in a whole horde of commenters from the other site, and while they could be individually blocked and deleted, it got exhausting pretty quickly. I never got in a scrap with Reynolds, but I butted heads on a few occasions with PZ Myers, and once had “Vox Day” pointed my way, and that was a huge hassle (by the time Day’s followers invaded, I was at least getting paid per pageview, so they actually made me some money).
Now, the obvious rejoinder to this is some form of “No, no, not that blogosphere; the politics-and-media part was always a cesspool. I meant the academic political science blogosphere.” Which, OK, sure, that was arguably better— I was never that deeply engaged with it, but I recall enjoying Crooked Timber back in the day. But then we’re talking about a very narrow, selective, and already somewhat professionalized slice of the larger universe of blogs and bloggers: A “blogosphere,” not The “blogosphere.” And even there I suspect that the passage of time and the workings of memory have smoothed down no small number of rough edges.
This is not to say that Greer and Nexon are entirely off base— there’s some sharp analysis in there, and also Greer’s older The World That Twitter Made (linked from the original piece above). In particular, I think Greer’s right to point to the difference between the separate spaces characteristic of individual blogs and the giant global free-for-all that is Twitter. Nexon is largely right about the effect that professionalization had on the online space, not just in whisking good and interesting voices off to paid and sometimes paywalled gigs, but in making blogging an aspirational activity. Once bloggers started getting paid, blogging became less of a hobby and more of a step toward a career, and that leads to a big change in approach. In particular, this resonated:
Nonetheless, just as email has shifted from a casual to a relatively formal mode of communication, writing ‘a blog’ now often means submitting a short-form piece to an editor for online publication. Blogging is to Twitter as Email is to Snapchat. I’ve sometimes heard Duck bloggers say that they didn’t post a piece here because it wasn’t “Duck worthy” and I’m not sure what that means… except that it’s not 2005 anymore, I guess.
I think the biggest issue separating Now from Then is just one of scale, though. That is, to whatever extent the 00’s were a Golden Age (or even just well-polished brass) it largely had to do with there not being all that many people involved. This will sound insane to people today, but for a while when I started in this business, there was a site called something like “weblogs.com” that just listed recently-updated blogs— Blogger and other platforms had an option to automatically ping it, or you could do it manually. This was basically just a list of links with the blog name, and I would scroll down it looking for quirky or interesting names to click on, just to see what they were. I found a few cool sites that way, though it stopped really being feasible even before I moved to ScienceBlogs in 2006.
There was also the “Blogging Ecosystem” list where one particular blogger (“NZ Bear”) went through and classified sites as various organisms— worms, mammals, etc.— based on some combination of traffic/links and whether he agreed with the site’s politics. That got a little more formalized with Technorati, which was a more automated traffic-based “ranking” of sites. Again, this was at least vaguely practical as a source of new reading material.
When there are few enough people operating in a space that listing them all is a sensible thing to consider doing, it’s much easier to maintain a relatively civil conversation. As the number of participants grows, though, it gets harder and harder to maintain. The fraction of participants who are unreasonable assholes can remain very small, but once you get to a mass scale, the absolute number becomes too much to manage.
(Greer makes a point along these lines by noting that low-follower Twitter accounts have a different experience of that site. I think there’s also some effect of topic on this, but ultimately, scale is the main thing.)
To some extent, what Substack is doing (and here’s yet another Greer link) is recreating some of the features of the old blogosphere, most obviously the separate spaces for each writer. It suffers a bit from the legacy of professionalization— writers who are getting paid here have an incentive to include lots of links to their own stuff, and less incentive to link broadly to others. But I think the main benefit is again, a matter of scale— the fact that everyone is starting over from zero subscribers (and the activation energy barrier of needing people to click a link to get here from some social-media site, let alone asking them to pay to read) cuts the size of the community of people who might be reading and commenting back down to a level that more closely resembles “the blogosphere” back when it was new and shiny.
I suspect we may run through this dynamics again if Substack continues to grow, with the toxicity that comes from scaling up too far re-emerging. In which case, all the cool kids will likely shift to another platform again. That’s a few years off, though— which is to say, in Internet time, around the next reversal of the Earth’s magnetic poles. We’ll see if I’m still doing this thing when that comes around.
Well, that was a trip down memory lane, in one of the seedier neighborhoods that runs through. If you’d like more of the sort of thing that makes my kids say “OK, Boomer…” in your email, here’s a big button to click:
If you know some decrepit ancestor or young whippersnapper who ought to read this, here’s a different one:
If you’d just like to make fun of me in my own space, the comments are open.
Flashbacks to the "framing" discourse at ScienceBlogs.