Blogs Are More Important Than Ever Now
The year is 2024. Social media is melting down and locking down their content behind increasingly expensive APIs. Websites are increasing ads to a ridiculous degree because they aren't as profitable as they used to be. The first 5 articles on top of Google are garbage created using AI specifically tuned to maximize search engine optimization. 90% of comments on that one review you read are astroturfing accounts trying to sell you something. Youtube still cannot stop the "pu$$y In BIO!!" spam comments.
The bad news everyone figured out is that the internet is getting more chaotic and buckling under the stress of spam and bot accounts running around everywhere. The worse news is that nobody knows what to do about it.
That's why I think blogging has become so important. You get to read thoughts, reviews, tutorials and more without any strings attached. It's not tied down to social media or used as bait to drive engagement, it's usually just someone passionate about something writing about it! I encourage everyone to not just casually read blogs, but also create a personal blog for themselves too.
Social media conditioned everyone to create for engagement, and that ended up causing the internet to feel very "noisy". Too much low-effort content and beating around the bush for attention, or clickbait articles that were only written to meet a quota.
Going through some blogs I enjoy, it's a totally different experience than what most people are used to online. The posts feel genuine, something sorely lacking everywhere else.
As a start, check out Bearblog's trending page, though in the future you may want to casually browse random blogs elsewhere and add the interesting ones in your browser bookmarks or Atom/RSS feed. There's a lot of good content out there.
I rarely write blog posts now since I'm busy and a bit lazy, but when I do it feels very liberating that I can talk about anything and not worry about how many likes I get or how many snarky comments I have to sort through. Even if you make social media content for fun, you'd be surprised how different your writing could be when you're not looking for approval or following a bandwagon.
To everyone who reads blogs (that's you right now, probably), congratulations for escaping internet hell. To everyone who owns blogs or cool personal websites, thanks for keeping the internet cool. To everyone who doesn't own a blog yet, make one! You may enjoy it a lot more than you'd think.