The Rise and Fall of Blogging: From BBS to WordPress and Beyond

[01:00:00.08]
Ned: You know the Internet Archive is down?

[01:00:02.27]
Chris: Yes. Being proudly hacked by jerkofs from Russia, allegedly.

[01:00:10.14]
Ned: Listen, it is very hard to do a historical episode about things that happened in the past on the Internet without the Internet Archive. So many links I hit this week took me to 404.

[01:00:24.18]
Chris: And not 404 Media.

[01:00:26.21]
Ned: Or Bora Bora, in case you weren't listening closely.

[01:00:32.11]
Chris: Bermuda, Bahama.

[01:00:45.25]
Ned: Hello, alleged human, and welcome to the Chaos Lever podcast. My name is Ned, and I'm definitely not a robot or a beach boy, but I repeat myself. I'm a real human person who believes that the Internet Archive should be up and You should respond to my queries when I want to see 12-year-old websites that I designed when I was in my 30s. With me is Chris, who's also here. I feel like you have something to say about that.

[01:01:14.15]
Chris: I was going to say, be careful what you wish for?

[01:01:18.08]
Ned: I thought you were going to say that I'm doing my math wrong and I would still be in my 40s, but you're wrong. I haven't crossed that threshold just yet.

[01:01:28.07]
Chris: Which one? The one where you're Don't know how to do math?

[01:01:32.11]
Ned: Oh, no. I crossed that threshold long time ago.

[01:01:33.02]
Chris: I was going to say, I have some bad news for you.

[01:01:35.29]
Ned: The ship has sailed 11 billion years ago or yesterday.

[01:01:42.04]
Chris: Or both. Why? Time is a flat circle.

[01:01:46.12]
Ned: So true. I really was disappointed, and we'll get into the topic shortly. But I was disappointed because I know for a fact that some of the websites I used to host, I mean, I've long since given up the domain, and the only way you can see them is through the wayback machine, because I don't even have a copy of the HTML from it anywhere that I can find. Right.

[01:02:11.05]
Chris: Yeah. It just no longer exists. I think I might have saved myself from having to go down a very similar rabbit hole because I thought I was clever at the time and use no robots files all over the place. So a lot of those, shall we call them efforts, were They've immediately skipped over by the caching services, and now they're gone for good.

[01:02:35.27]
Ned: I would say the 80/20 rule applies here, except maybe more extreme. 90% of the stuff that has been lost to time immemorial was not even remotely useful or interesting. At the time. At the time or now. That 10%, though, I missed that 10%. It's got to be less than that. It's got to be like a 99 to We won't be getting into decimals. I'm not sure.

[01:03:03.26]
Chris: Anyway, what are we talking about?

[01:03:05.17]
Ned: Wordpress.

[01:03:06.19]
Chris: Okay.

[01:03:08.18]
Ned: Okay, but we're not really because the whole kerfuffle over WordPress versus WP engine It continues. We covered this in Tech News the Week a few weeks ago. Tensions are mounting on both sides. Legal briefs are flying like the saddest Chippendales peep show in history. It was at this point, as I looked at I surveyed the landscape and I thought I could, number one, dig into the issues with open-source software, its current financial viability, and the history of Foss, or talk about the history of blogging and blogging software, of which WordPress is an important component, and I chose the latter. Maybe because it's more light-hearted and way less depressing.

[01:03:52.18]
Chris: Yeah, especially considering the WordPress guy just changed the way you log on to the website, and you have to a firm that you don't use or financially support WP engine before it will let you log in. That dude needs a vacation.

[01:04:09.23]
Ned: To maybe Bora Bora.

[01:04:12.07]
Chris: For example, A 404 example.

[01:04:17.19]
Ned: You walked right into that. I don't want to talk about it. It also gives me a chance to relive the glory days of my tumbler account in 2012, which was truly magical couple of times, Chris.

[01:04:32.08]
Chris: Tumbler is a thing that still exists, right?

[01:04:35.00]
Ned: It does still exist. So that was when we actually didn't need the wayback machine because my Tumbler account never got shut down, and all of my posts from 2012 and 2013 are there. And I'm going to read them to you for the next three hours. I had some opinions.

[01:04:54.23]
Chris: Doesn't sound like you.

[01:04:56.06]
Ned: They were not great opinions, but I had them. And so do all humans, really, when we think about it. We've been finding ways of expressing ourselves since the dawn of time. There are cave paintings, Incan kweipu. Kipu? Kipu? We'll workshop it. Chinese calligraphy. I said, If there's a medium, then we will find our way to leave a mark. The digital era and the worldwide web is no different. Long before we had blogs, we had discussion boards. And before that, we had email on local servers. And if you want to dig into that whole mess, check out our episode a couple of weeks ago with Dylan Bady. It was great fun. Tm copyright emoji, emoji, sad face. A happy face, really.

[01:05:45.17]
Chris: Lawyer face?

[01:05:47.05]
Ned: Is that possible?

[01:05:49.13]
Chris: Is someone getting sued?

[01:05:51.13]
Ned: Always. Usually us. Yeah. The Beach Boys are coming for us. One of the very first bulletin board services was started back in 1973 by a group of computer nerds in Berkeley, California. They had acquired an, at the time, already outdated SDS 940 mainframe, which was about the size of six refrigerators. So it was on the small side. They thought it would be cool to install a database application and let people use that database application to store and retrieve Keyword tagged messages. Functioning like a bulletin board. Now, how were people expected to actually interact with this bulletin board, given that it was this giant mainframe sitting in a room somewhere? Well, what the team figured out was they could put a teletype system and install it in a public location and then connect that teletype system back to the mainframe over a hundred Baud modem, roaring fast.

[01:07:00.07]
Chris: Now, was this actually over the phone lines or was this a dark line?

[01:07:07.08]
Ned: This was actually over a phone line, I believe. Now, I'm not sure how they set that up, whether it was on all the time, or they actually ran... I don't think they ran their own copper. I think they were using an actual phone line to connect it. But that particular detail is somewhat lost to history. They did decide to locate it right next to Leopold's Records in Berkeley, California. And it was able to transmit 100 symbols a second, 100 baud, which means that it could transmit maybe 10 words a minute. Like I said, roaring fast.

[01:07:43.22]
Chris: That's about as fast as you can type anyway, so I don't know what you're complaining about.

[01:07:47.08]
Ned: Watch it. So the bullet board system they invented, they called Community Memory. And believe it or not, it was a modest success, and it continued to live on using updated hardware and software well into the mid-1980s.

[01:08:07.16]
Chris: It's a good run.

[01:08:08.23]
Ned: Yeah, not bad. It started out with that one terminal next to Leopold's records, and then they started setting up other public terminals and making them coin-operated if you wanted to add messages to the database. You could read them for free, but if you wanted to add a message, you had to pay. And people did. Some of the folks who originated this community memory system went on to build newer and better bulletin board systems. Now, in order for BBSs to become more popular, people needed to be able to use them at their home. Going to a record store or going to a terminal down the block to post a notice or read the other posts. If you think it, it's really not that much better than the cork board at the grocery store, which is where I got my first television. True story. It was one of those old televisions that was in this wooden console. I think the TV itself was only 19 inches, but the actual structure it was in was three feet across. But I got it for $20. Yay.

[01:09:15.16]
Chris: It seems worth it.

[01:09:17.19]
Ned: Totally. So two innovations ushered in this new era of BBSs. First thing was microcomputers. They had to become a real thing. And the Apple II launched in 1977, followed by the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, and eventually the IBM PC. By the mid '80s, people had access to a microcomputer they could use at home. However, they still needed to be able to connect that computer to something. Modems existed and had existed for a while, but they tended to be specific to the computer model and require a person to actually pick up the line and put the cradle down manually. This was not a user user friendly process. Sometime in the mid '80s, modems began to arrive that sat outside of the home computer, and they used a standard serial port to connect to that home computer. So you didn't have to have the specific modem that was designed for your Commodore 64, let's say. And the modem could handle picking up the line and dialing the number because it was no longer tied to a specific vendor and they had put the circuitry inside to do all that, which means they could start producing these things en masse and lower the price.

[01:10:32.26]
Ned: So some people started buying modems. I think we got our first modem in, I want to say it was about 1986 or '87. Do you recall when you got your first modem, Chris?

[01:10:45.13]
Chris: I'm thinking, and I don't think it was quite that early. I think it was early '90s.

[01:10:52.16]
Ned: Okay. I have a distinct memory of dialing into Prodigy Net, and I feel like that was late '80s. That's my best guess. The Internet Archive doesn't even go back that far, so you'll probably never know. The first public VBS was created in Chicago in February of 1978 by Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss. When you think of an online platform now, you're probably thinking about something like Facebook or Twitter or God help you, TikTok. And that is a service that's hosted by whole farms of servers and can handle thousands or millions of simultaneous users. The first bulletin board systems were not at all like that. The BBS was hosted on a single system, like in somebody's house, and it was connected to a single telephone line. So if you wanted to access the BBS, you would dial its number using the modem on your computer and hope that line wasn't busy because somebody else was accessing the BBS. Then you would connect, retrieve the messages, and then disconnect so somebody else could access the system if you were being a good citizen. It was not a synchronous type of communication. It was like I would leave some messages, I'd read some messages, but I would disconnect after that.

[01:12:23.24]
Ned: While things did scale up a little bit with some deep pocketed posters having multiple modums and phone to handle more than one collar at a time, BBSs and most other services on the pre-Internet worked like this. You dialed directly to the service you wanted to access and hoped that something there would pick up. For instance, Prodegy Net. They were a very early, not even ISP, because they didn't give you access to the Internet. They just gave you access to their service, and they had a modem bank that would accept concept calls that were incoming.

[01:13:01.18]
Chris: Well, Prodigy's Walled Garden was a little different than a BBS.

[01:13:05.13]
Ned: Yeah, I'm not saying they were the same. It's just that it was similar conceptually to how you would connect.

[01:13:11.21]
Chris: The other thing, the things that were interesting about the BBS is being able to share messages with people you've never heard of before is one thing, but this was also text-based.

[01:13:25.21]
Ned: True, yeah.

[01:13:27.16]
Chris: We're still talking about the era of 2400, 14, 4K modems. Even 56K modems was not going to be sufficient to do active video like we know about with websites like YouTube these days.

[01:13:44.02]
Ned: Oh, yeah. That's a great point. It was all text-based, and there were no hyperlinks either. That was not a thing. It was just the text. You wouldn't really trade files, you wouldn't really trade music or something like that. That did eventually get added to bulletin boards, the ability to upload download and trade files. I'm sure that was used for all kinds of illicit activity, porn. But the rollout of the internet in the mid '90s spelled the end for bulletin board services as they were. Instead of dialing into an individual service, people would dial into an ISP, an Internet Service Provider, and from there, they would get a TCP/IP connection to whatever sites and services they wanted on on the larger worldwide web. There's also Usenet, which is a whole other story that we don't have time to get into. Honestly, history is very messy. During the '70s and '80s, a lot of people had similar ideas percolating in their mind. They looked at, We have these computers, and we have these phone lines, and what if I wrote a system that lets people communicate and share information? People did it in a myriad of different ways.

[01:14:59.28]
Ned: While I'm focusing on BBSes, there was also Usenet and a plethora of other things out there. If I didn't mention your favorite thing, I'm sorry, but shut up.

[01:15:13.10]
Chris: I mean, everybody Everybody's favorite thing is Usenet, so I think you've got it covered.

[01:15:18.25]
Ned: Okay. What took the place of bulletin board services? It was online forums. You and I, Chris, could spend two hours walking through ProdigyNet, CompuServe, AOL, and all the various and sundry ways that people chose to publish articles and respond to others. But I do want to get to the humble blog, which is at the heart of this conversation, so we'll fast forward a little bit.

[01:15:46.13]
Chris: Okay.

[01:15:47.06]
Ned: Okay. Thanks to an excellent article on the Notre Dame of Maryland University, which I think is like the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

[01:15:56.27]
Chris: Or the California University of Pennsylvania.

[01:15:59.20]
Ned: Equal Absolutely insane. I learned that the very first blog was created in 1994 by Justin Hall on links. Net. But he didn't actually call it a blog. He called it his personal homepage. To put this into context, the World Wide Web, as termed by Tim Berners Lee. Tim's. Wow, that's wrong. Tim Berners Lee. Why is that hard to say? It was released to the unsuspecting public in 1993. One year later, Justin Hall created a homepage about himself and stuffy light. It included bootlegs of Jane's Addiction concerts, then caught stealing indeed. And a picture of Cary Grant Taking Acid. I don't know if that was real, but it was on there. We were so edgy in 1993, weren't we? Adorable. Justin's homepage was lovingly crafted by hand using Mac, HTTP, and HTML, and hosted on his power book from Swarthmore College. So yes, dear listener, you can blame Philly for yet another terrible thing.

[01:17:09.04]
Chris: We have a list.

[01:17:13.06]
Ned: It is extensive, and we're proud of it. As more and better tools emerge to write and host HTML, more netizens join the World Wide Web to talk about themselves as well. Claudio Pinjanez, working for IBM, started documenting his life and his times on a website called Open Diary. Or I'm sorry, he called it Open Diary. Now, I want to pause and take a moment and think about how wildly strange the concept of a blog or this open diary really is. Chris, you and I take it for granted that everything we put on the internet is fair game. People are going to see it publicly. It's normal to share pictures of your with total strangers or tell your Insta followers what you had for dinner 15 minutes ago. That has become the new normal. We've willingly relinquished our privacy in exchange for something thing?

[01:18:16.00]
Chris: Likes, dude.

[01:18:17.29]
Ned: Yes, validation.

[01:18:19.13]
Chris: Sheesh.

[01:18:21.12]
Ned: Claudio's open diary was a step in that direction, a step that hundreds and then thousands of people would follow in. But it really is wild that we went from being relatively private and unknown citizens to just shouting our business to everybody over the internet constantly within the span of 20 years, 25 years.

[01:18:48.08]
Chris: It's now become a self surveillance system that we agreed for ourselves seems fine. I mean, not to go all kids these days, but I mean, kids these days, am I right?

[01:19:08.07]
Ned: I have kids these days. And what's actually funny is my kids, at least, have little to no interest in participating in this larger public Internet. They have their little friend group, and that's as far as they want to go with things.

[01:19:25.13]
Chris: So maybe they- Societyly, that's an interesting question because the change changes over time have been so freaking fast that generational changes, things that would have taken 150 years before, are done with in 15 now.

[01:19:41.02]
Ned: Yes. And I don't know if we can continue to accelerate that rate of change?

[01:19:48.17]
Chris: No. If we continue to accelerate, we will become liquid. I do think it's interesting. Like you're saying, the actual kids these days, They have their private groups isolated on Discord. They don't just go blast things out on Twitter anymore. That's just the Kardashian's. That's it. It's literally just the Kardashian's.

[01:20:11.16]
Ned: Just them and no one else. Don't look that up. Let me tell you a story of somebody who lived through some changes and was responsible for some of them. Jorn Barger grew up a computer nerd in the mid '60s. He went to multiple universities for comp or whatever the closest equivalent was, never actually graduated, then joined a hippie commune in Tennessee, and then left that to work as a programmer in the '80s, and then left that to join Northwestern University to be an AI researcher literature. He was also a prolific poster on Usenet. Now, Jorn was a cantankerous human who didn't do well with criticism, discussion, etc. So he didn't He didn't last on Usenet forever. People got a little sick of him. And that led him to start his own website called Robot Wisdom, which was a callback to his AI research. And he did that rather than continue to debate topics like Kate Bush Fandem on Usenet, which I would really like to read those Usenet posts. What was his position on Kate Bush?

[01:21:22.17]
Chris: Based on the previous paragraph, I'm going to go with problematic.

[01:21:26.05]
Ned: Indeed. Robot Wisdom had a novel idea when it came to web pages. Each entry on the site was listed in reverse chronological order on the main page, meaning that newest posts appeared at the top of the list. Jorn called the entries a logging of the web, and then shortened that to just Weblog, which he said about, If you think of a better name than Weblog, just start using it and see if it catches on. That was in 1997, four years after Justin Hall's homepage. Since humans are lazy, we took web blog and shortened it to just blog, and then named the totality of blogs the blog Theosphere, a term which was jokingly coined by Brad L. Graham in 1999. But unfortunately, news agencies that are largely immune to irony or humor began using the term seriously and in general circulation in the early 'auts'. I think it's died off again at this point. The earliest blogs were handcrafted using HTML in a code editor or just honestly like Notepad or VIM. That works well for freaks and geeks like you, Chris. But if you want the great unwashed masses to use a thing, it has to be simpler.

[01:22:57.12]
Ned: We had the rise of various blogging platforms tools to simplify the creation of pages or just simply host those pages for end users. Some of the platforms might be familiar to, and others have drifted into internet obscurity. 1999, Around that time, saw the launch of OpenDiary, SlashDot, Livejournal, petas. Com, and Blogger, which was eventually picked up by Google. And then, I don't know if it still exists. Does Blogger still It still exists?

[01:23:32.18]
Chris: I think it was absorbed into the Google and got renamed a bunch of times, and now we don't know. I believe that it still does.

[01:23:41.24]
Ned: It does. I just checked. Blogger still exists, and this It was funny. I was accessing something on Google recently, and the redirection for authentication took me through a blogger auth page. I didn't have to interact with it. It just redirected to that because somehow Now they're using the authentication on blogger to pass through a token. It was super weird. Anyhow, these tools and platforms also added features that many would consider essential to the modern web experience: permalinks, blog rolls, and trackbacks. If you don't know what any of those things are, they were important to blogs, I guess. Blog rolls in particular were a way for you to list out other blogs that you liked to read and that somebody who's interested in yours may want to subscribe to. Trackbacks were a way for you to see if people are linking to your blog so you'd understand and build up this web of interrelated blogs in the blogosphere. Many blogs also included the ability for readers to leave comments and start discussions. This was a mistake.

[01:24:58.02]
Chris: Sorry. It's all downhill from there. The word comments just encouraged people.

[01:25:04.20]
Ned: If you have something to say, start your own fucking web page. In the early 'ots', the prevalence of blogs exploded for two important reasons. Or two important trends. The first was political blogs. This is the era of Instapundit, Little Green Footballs, The Drudge Report, Daily Coats, and WONKET. If you've never heard of any of God, I envy you. As someone who mostly worked a boring help desk job in the early 2000s, I absolutely fell down the rabbit hole of the conservative blogosphere, and I don't think I was the only one. Just based off of traffic. Blogs like Inst... You have to...

[01:25:52.13]
Chris: I was just going to say one of the things that made those things very popular, especially early, was People didn't use to say, Well, I read it on the internet, so it has to be true. They didn't say that as a joke back then.

[01:26:09.22]
Ned: Yes, our media literacy was especially low when it came to the internet. Also, blogs like Instapundit would publish multiple times a day. Very short posts, usually just a link to something they found and some opinions on it. But as someone who didn't have a whole lot to do, when I wasn't reattaching the keyboard for Cathy for the 16th time, I would sit there reading article after article, each of which reinforced each other and made an internal, if not circular, logic. Luckily, at some point, I got promoted and life got super busy for me, and I pulled myself out of what could have been a dark, dark place. But the point I'm trying to make here is that blogs of this era had an eerily addictive quality in the same that doomscrolling does in the modern era. On what should be the other side of the spectrum, you have what were termed mommy blogs. If you never heard of those, very simply, You had these mothers trapped at home with screaming infants and crushing personal isolation, and they turned to the internet to find a community. There's a really good book It's called Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz, and it walks through the rise and fall of the mommy blogger era, so I'm not going to go into too much detail.

[01:27:39.14]
Ned: But basically, mommy blogs started with women sharing their experiences of motherhood and child-rearing in frank and unflinching manner. Things that would make some people very uncomfortable, like postpartum depression. They were saying things that would never be printed in the sanitized publication of that era. It turns out there was quite an audience for these type of blogs, and they also gained the attention of advertisers looking to promote their wares. That also led to the eventual destruction of the internet, along with the mommy blogs. But monetization of blogs is probably a six-hour discussion that we're not going to get into, unless you want to.

[01:28:26.19]
Chris: Moving on. There.

[01:28:29.27]
Ned: Let's move on to something that I'm angry about. As the prevalence of blogs exploded, people were looking for ways to track and subscribe to the blogs that they like to read. You could visit each site, keep them in a bookmarks folder or something, but what if you could see a list of posts from every site that you wanted to track? Really Simple Syndication is a web feed that packages up a list of items from a website using XML, and it's updated every time a new item is added to the site. Blogging platforms started using RSS to publish a feed for their articles, and RSS readers were created to consume those RSS feeds, the most famous of which was Google Reader. God damn it, Chris, we're going to have to talk about Google Reader, and I'll try to not to fucking swear too much.

[01:29:22.11]
Chris: So far, you're on to a great start.

[01:29:25.18]
Ned: Google Reader was launched in 2005 on Google Labs, right when blogs had truly started embracing the RSS feed. It was a really great piece of software that ran right in the Chrome browser. You subscribe to websites, and it gave you a chronological view of items from all of the sites. You could also create different views, filters, tags. It would mark things as read after you read the article. Even better, Reader would strip out most of the egregious advertising that started to appear on these sites. It would just I'll give you the article. That's probably why Google killed it in 2013. They cited declining use. I cite bullshit. Google ads only work if you visit the site. And if you're using Reader, you're not visiting the site or using Google Search. Google Reader was not just a product that made no money. It was a product that actively reduced Google's revenue, and that shit could not stand. So they axed it, and people were angry.

[01:30:37.06]
Chris: And fast forward to now, and we really should have known better.

[01:30:41.14]
Ned: Should we have? We don't learn. Learning is overrated. Since that time, solutions like feedly have risen to take its place. And I think pretty much anyone who uses RSS now uses feedly. I'm sure there's something else out there, but I don't know what it At this point, feedly is honestly just as good as Reader was, though you need to pay for the paid version if you want it to be truly just as good. But I think many of us never entirely forgave Google for killing Reader, and it's emblematic of a larger cultural problem about Google that we do not have time to explore today. Maybe we should have the killed by Google guy on, have him talk about it.

[01:31:29.26]
Chris: To say, Welcome to the show, and go.

[01:31:33.28]
Ned: We'll just sit back and listen.

[01:31:37.04]
Chris: And nod.

[01:31:38.07]
Ned: I remember that. What was their social media platform for a Google Plus?Google Was it Waze? Was it Buz or something? Wasn't it Waze? It was Wave. Do you remember? Yeah, Waze. Google Waze. Like 15 years before its time. Along with blogging platforms came the rise of Content Management Systems, CMSes, and dynamic websites. When you're a computer science nerd handcrafting the entirety of your site with HTML in a Web 1.0 world, you don't need anything fancy. Once you have 10,000 articles on your website with images, links, and comments, you might want something a bit more robust. In the era of Web 2.0, we started to see dynamically generated web pages that relied It relied on CMS, CSS, templates, and MySQL. The components of a page were rendered on demand based on the user's device, the current theme for the website, and the latest contents of the database. Wordpress and movable type were two early customer-facing implementations of this. Wordpress, in particular, took off. I think we covered this a couple of weeks ago in the tech news article that they host something like 40% or 50% of all websites are WordPress, which is frankly ridiculous. Wordpress is open source.

[01:33:14.08]
Ned: It's based on PHP, which is why a PHP is still a very popular programming language, it's pretty much just WordPress. It used MySQL as its database back-end. The software made use of templates for the layout of a page, and critically, it supported the idea of a plugin. Wordpress plugins let you add functionality to your website without doing any programming. Want to add a shopping cart feature? Plug in for that. Want to integrate Amazon or Google Ads? There's a plugin for that. If you need to optimize your pages for SEO or even send emails. Plugin and plugin, it's all covered. Even better, plugins can cost money, so that enticed developers to try and make really good plugins that users would fork over real money to install in their WordPress instance. I actually hosted my own WordPress site back in 2006, Humblebrag, called What the Hex. It was a web comic about geometric shapes that have very stupid adventures. The domain and the site are long since gone. I tried to find them on the wayback machine, but that's broken right now. If you want to see one of the comics, I I don't know, I guess I could share it on Chaos Lever's blog.

[01:34:35.03]
Chris: Sure. Which is not WordPress.

[01:34:36.18]
Ned: Not at all. It might be underneath, but I don't know.

[01:34:39.12]
Chris: Yeah, that's a good point. Who the hell knows?

[01:34:40.11]
Ned: I also had a second site that was about blogging and poetry, which has also since been flushed down the internet memory hole, and I'm not going to even pretend to share that. 2006 me, you know what you did. Speaking of 2006, a little platform called Twitter was launched in March of 2006 by Jack Dorsey and pals. It was initially billed as a micro blogging platform, and you could send updates by texting 40404 from your phone. The character limit of Twitter was driven by the 128 character limit of SMS messages. As Twitter and Facebook rose in popularity, the era of the blog wained. Maintaining a blog, even if you don't host the software, is no small amount of work. If your only goal is to share your activities and thoughts with other people, why not just use a platform that has an easy UI, a network of your friends, and zero maintenance from you? The purpose that the Humble blog served had been replaced for many by the advent of social media and all the baggage that comes with it. Social media companies, for their part, didn't exactly lament the loss of the blog, and in fact, it was to their great advantage that blogs decreased in popularity since their goal is to increase engagement by keeping you inside of a walled garden.

[01:36:08.13]
Ned: The longer you're on Facebook or Instagram or Shitter, the more ads they can show to you. The major downside is that they also own all of your shit now, or at least close enough. I mean, you can ask for an export of all your tweets or Facebook posts, but let's be serious. They effectively own all of the content you have ever created on their site, and they've already mined it for AI and ad targeting. We are 37 minutes in, Chris. I haven't even talked about Hugo, static sites, a return to blogging and owning your intellectual property, or about Matt Molenweg and his insane shenanigans over at WordPress. I think a part two might be in order.

[01:36:56.22]
Chris: The biggest difference was the What's the word I'm looking for? We started out, all the stuff was in one place that we all went to. Then what's the blogs that came out, and especially with software that allows you to create them in a very easy fashion like WordPress did. You became individuals and were able to put up your own site. Now, whether that was actually hosted by WordPress or whether you had it hosted on your home computer, either way. And what we ended up with was a million little websites. Now, with the massive sites like Facebook and Twitter and anything even remotely similar to that, we're right back to where we started, where everybody goes to one place. You lose a huge amount of individuality. There's a whole theory about this that I'll let you talk about next time called the theory of the Small Web. But it really gets to the heart of that. It's like being on Facebook is a performative thing, whereas being somebody that created a blog or wrote something like this in the '90s or 2000s. It was just different.

[01:38:08.17]
Ned: It did have a different feel. You weren't trying to game the algorithm. You were just writing interesting things, hopefully interesting things, and maybe people would engage with it. Maybe they wouldn't. And that was honestly okay. Right. Well, hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you it all the way to the end. So congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. Now you can go fire up a virtual private server, install WordPress, and write about how I am wrong about everything. You've earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page. Just search Chaos Lever, or go to our website, chaoslever. Com, where you'll find show notes, blog posts, General Tom Fruary, and maybe even a web comic from the early 2000s. We'll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Ta-ta for now.

[01:39:11.25]
Chris: You know, BBS still exists, right?

[01:39:14.12]
Ned: No. Lies, lies and slander.

[01:39:17.25]
Chris: You can tell that to them now, still in 2024. They're still really hard to use.