'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

But a bigger issue is at work here - censorship. Twitter is being pulled in two opposite directions. It's a platform in which authoritative content is hosted. For example, the president conducts foreign policy through Twitter. And Twitter is also a platform where bots try to influence elections, people post images of dubious taste, and plain old lies are told.

Twitter has been leaning ever-harder into the role of curating authoritative content. The idea of verified identities as a prerequisite to post has been floated, and will no doubt resurface.

All of this leads to a dead-end. Twitter won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police.

The same problem applies to Facebook, Medium, and all the others.

The reason to blog is simple. Because sooner or later a rational human exploring the bounds of human knowledge through writing will post something that will make one or more powerful people scared, angry, or offended. A blog makes retaliatory deplatforming much more difficult to pull off.

Disparaging entire mediums makes little sense. There is both enlightening and mind-numbing content on social networks, blogs, television, and books. Are people that read many books drooling page-turning zombies? Is scrolling through blogs inherently superior to Twitter scrolling?

Look, I don't like those popups too. And I, too, prefer media that doesn't do that. But at the same time, keeping in mind how hard it is to make any kind of money in that market, I don't have the guts to tell those people how to run their business.

There are plenty of people who blog and tweet, and who read blogs and read tweets. Back when I used twitter, I used it partly as a sorta glamorized rss feed for when certain people posted blogs.

There are and always have been people who do not read long-form blogs and people who do. I see no evidence that social media has changed that significantly.