#Microblog Monday 280: Old Internet
Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.
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We’ve talked about this before, but a recent Buzzfeed article drove it home. The current internet is not like the old internet; not just in temperament (remember when the internet was kind?) but in actual format. We moved from message boards and blogs to social media in ten short years.
“Sure, blogs still exist, but the promise of a scrappy new form of communication, open to anyone has been chewed up and spit out by social media. Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and even Medium have all made the idea of a personal, updated website seem less useful to someone who just wants to post stuff about their life.”
Sigh.
I know life moves on, and it should move on. I don’t expect the internet in 2020 to look exactly like the internet in 2010, but I miss the blogging community of ten years ago. There are still plenty of us writing regularly, so there is always stuff to read. But I miss the blogs that shut down in the last ten years; the writers moving to social media.
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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.
11 comments
Happy new year, Mel. Hope you are well. I could not agree more to what you said. Those days are long gone and while there are so many more media, the charm is missing. Everything is so perfect in this world.
I much prefer the old internet. I don’t think people were kind in the usenet days; in fact, I konw they weren’t, but at least they took more time to be mean. I like reading. I don’t like Instagram because I’m not a super visual person, I want a story, not a snapshot. I don’t like twitter because I like words. I don’t want to condense my thoughts, I want to explore them. Facebook is better because you can have pictures and words, as many as you like, but their curating mechanisms are dreadful and the process of self-curating (in the form of lists and whatnot) is dreadful. I really do prefer Livejournal’s method of creating lists, but livejournal is a dead platform, although I still use it for my personal journaling. And I have a wordpress blog for my more public journaling.
I miss it too. 🙁
I have no recollection of the old internet. I was 20 then and basically used it for social media starting with Myspace and then Facebook. I know nothing less lol.
Oh man. How I can relate to this. I’d love to address this on my own blog (future MM post!) I miss my blogging friends. I’m one of the few in my blogging circle still writing and I love reading the blogs of women I’ve now known for 6-8 years. I’m friends with so many on social media, but it’s not the same. Snippets on their lives are nothing compared to the posts I used to read on them. So…I miss. it.
Me too. I have done neither (blog or social media) but read/follow blogs. And it’s a lot easier to read a blog vs social media where you mostly have to have an account/log in to read stuff (I read (not folllow since I have no account) some twitter feeds that are public but that’s about it).
Also blogs (at least the ones I read—I know some aren’t) are way more real vs. “curated”.
I also miss message boards. Thank goodness they were still around when I was going thru infertility/IVF. Now there are things like Facebook groups but I’m not on there (yay me considering all the privacy breaches etc.)
I guess the people I have always enjoyed reading are mostly still writing. Not everyone – many of the bloggers of 2006-7 have gone by the wayside, of course. But those who are still blogging have become real friends, people I want to know/visit/talk to. I never liked reading too much of the stream of consciousness blogging or the listing of cycles/drugs/etc – that seems to have moved to instagram. But that was never my blogging experience anyway – as I used messageboards when we were comparing IVF drugs, or cycle planning sites, etc.
It’s definitely harder to reach new readers (in infertility/childless issues) – but I’m not their demographic now, anyway.
I definitely see more blogs going than new blogs coming in the space I occupy, but then again my focus has changed in the past 10 years, too. I think there’s something so very personal about a blog, and it’s harder to let the artifice of social media seep in. I was late to the social media game and I still don’t do a lot of the things (no Instagram, no SnapChat, I have the Twitter but don’t really know how to use it), so I can’t imagine shifting to JUST social media for posting. I like the time it takes to write a blog, and the time it takes to go through blogs I read and catch up and comment and interact with people in a way that feels more real than social media. This space that you author and curate is like a beautiful salon of blogs — it brings people together and there’s a level of friendship and respect that is increasingly missing in social media. It’s interesting how things change, but I certainly hope that blogs don’t go away. I mean, the kindle exists and people still read books and go to the library, so there’s hope, right?
Hppy New Year! At the end of last year, I came across your #MicroblogMondays idea and love it and now hoping to be active with it. I think like many things in life, blogging is a pendulum swinging. Right now, many blogs are a sea of monetizing themselves with little substance but I do believe there are many still seeking and trying to create substance, find authenticity. After all there are 8 comments before my own 🙂 and bookstores still exist.
Me, too. I miss the days when I couldn’t wait to get on my virtual front porch and visit other bloggers’ front porches. It felt very neighborhood-y, very connected. That has been lost and I don’t see it coming back.
(Coincidentally, I got an unsubscription notice today from an ALI reader. Made me sad for the old days.)
I miss it too. I like reading blog posts that are about real life and much of social media is focused on one message. Although, I have to admit, I myself, am not reading many blogposts myself. :/ Yet, I want to drive traffic to my blog and be seen? Yeah, let’s just call that a disconnect.