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What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

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Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#41

Post by [deleted] »

spyspy wrote: post #36
julianpye wrote: post #4

The emergence of blogging allowed individual voices outside of control of the larger media to reach their own audiences. Because of this 10 years ago noone wanted to have AOL as their walled garden. Everyone wanted to search and discover themselves. Google brought an algorithm that allowed voices to emerge, but it also spawned the SEO industry to manipulate that distribution channel and make it more difficult. Today…

Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. That's a new idea. I hate how much this idea get's promoted here. That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. Of courses there are good quality ones commenters will be frothing to post about, but expecting an ecosystem of junk to remain consistently successful is purely utopian.

[deleted]

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#42

Post by craigching »

gmunu wrote: post #29
jackmaney wrote: post #20

I hadn't even heard of Andrew Sullivan until I bumped into his defense of Brendan Eich. Honestly, good riddance. I hope that Sullivan and Eich both fade into obscurity.

Does it matter that Andrew Sullivan was one of the early and very vocal champions of gay marriage? Or that he is quite openly gay and married himself? If you haven't heard of him, you might not have known that and it may change the way you view his defense of Brendan Eich. In addition to being a champion of gay marriage, Sullivan is a proponent of liberalism in the old sense of the word. I think his defense of gay ma…

It's fine to pick and choose the things you stand for, but the man has to be taken as a whole (IMHO). I want to like Andrew Sullivan for some of the things he stands for, but he was also a vocal proponent of the Iraq war and many other issues that I stand against. Someone who says this about the Iraq war:

> the allied campaign was a model of restraint and liberation, the most precise invasion in world history

makes me think they've really lost touch with reality. I'm not here to say that Saddam Hussein was some angel, but to put our role in those words leaves me wanting better critical thinking.

Andrew Sullivan is a man and he has his good and bad. So let's not "one issue" the man and suppose that he's good simply because he's for gay marriage (a position that he stands to gain from I might add).

I'd rather see better, true "liberals", elevated over Andrew Sullivan. Glenn Greenwald comes mind ...

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#43

Post by kingmanaz »

graeme wrote: post #40
spyspy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. That's a new idea. I hate how much this idea get's promoted here. That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. Of courses there are good quality ones commenters will be frothing to post about, but expecting an ecosystem of junk to remain consistently successful is purely utopian.

>That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. But good stuff came out of that crud. Now people do their writing on Facebook and Reddit. Those have much lower or no placement in Google. I find google results impoverished compared to 6-10 years ago. You used to get commentary from people, and it wasn't half bad. Now most searches return commercial resu…

Agreed. The web seemed far more sincere in the days of Deja News. Today's search results carry all the candidness of a car lot teeming with felony-convicted-used-minivan-salesmen.

Somewhere, somehow, a switch was flipped and "discourse?" became "discounts!".

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#44

Post by pyre »

spyspy wrote: post #36
julianpye wrote: post #4

The emergence of blogging allowed individual voices outside of control of the larger media to reach their own audiences. Because of this 10 years ago noone wanted to have AOL as their walled garden. Everyone wanted to search and discover themselves. Google brought an algorithm that allowed voices to emerge, but it also spawned the SEO industry to manipulate that distribution channel and make it more difficult. Today…

Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. That's a new idea. I hate how much this idea get's promoted here. That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. Of courses there are good quality ones commenters will be frothing to post about, but expecting an ecosystem of junk to remain consistently successful is purely utopian.

> Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more.

For you to make this claim, you are also claiming that the parent post is blaming "all of society's problems" of yester-year (pre-Facebook) on AOL. That's a rather obtuse reading, bordering on deliberate.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#45

Post by sukilot »

karmacondon wrote: post #24
pnathan wrote: post #16

I had never heard of him prior to 2 weeks ago. He is exceptionally thoughtful. His reason for quitting blogging seemed reasonable, especially given the timeframes involved. I don't think it says anything about blogging in general that one intelligent person is moving to a new position. On the other hand, I don't know that I'd call the blogosphere vibrant or even very interesting: Crappy mobile browers/keyboards, link…

The original blogosphere concept may be fading, but I don't think that bloggers or readers are suffering because of it. In a sense individual bloggers are like AP reporters and aggregators are the new newspapers. Dozens of AP stories are filed every day and local newspapers pick and choose which ones to include in each edition. The major difference between the traditional newspaper model and link aggregators is that…

But most aren't reading the blogs,they ate skipping that and chattering in the aggregator comments section.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#46

Post by jfarmer »

remarkEon wrote: post #39
jfarmer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually read his blog? Readers email him all the time. He typically posts 2-3 of those emails every day and responds to them publicly. Often, he'll go back and forth with multiple readers in this way. Here's a post from _today_ that contains emails from 9 people: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2015/01/31/busted-with-an-egg... He has a regular "Dissent of the Day" post where he goes out of his way to post cr…

Moreover, the fact that a reader had to email him served as sort of as a pre-screen, wherein someone had to take those extra 2 or 3 steps to put something together instead of just dropping whatever thoughtless or halfbaked idea came to the forefront of their mind in the comment box and hitting enter because you're logged in with facebook. I don't think having comments allowed on a blog are indicative of quality disco…

Yeah. Andrew probably write something once every few months about why he prefers to interact with readers this way vs. comment threads. He's even polled his audience in the past and the _audience_ overwhelmingly favors interacting in this way, often echoing your exact sentiment.

Ironically, the parent serves as an example for the kind of thoughtless, knee-jerk commentary that comment threads can (and do) breed.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#47

Post by sukilot »

misiti3780 wrote: post #32
visakanv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't make a career from the blog itself- you get headhunted because of the attention and the awareness gets you, and you get hired or solicited for all sorts of interesting, lucrative projects.

im not sure i agree - i think a lot of blogs (in the past anyways) were created with the intension of selling them - i also think there is a handful of bloggers out there that make a salary off blog traffic + book sales (www.nakedcapitalism.com / www.zerohedge.com / http://www.ritholtz.com/blog / etc.)

There are many hits, but the median hourly "wage" for blogging is below any job the blogger could do (but might not be able to obtain, for reasons of economic friction)

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#48

Post by ashark »

graeme wrote: post #40
spyspy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. That's a new idea. I hate how much this idea get's promoted here. That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. Of courses there are good quality ones commenters will be frothing to post about, but expecting an ecosystem of junk to remain consistently successful is purely utopian.

>That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. But good stuff came out of that crud. Now people do their writing on Facebook and Reddit. Those have much lower or no placement in Google. I find google results impoverished compared to 6-10 years ago. You used to get commentary from people, and it wasn't half bad. Now most searches return commercial resu…

It seems to me that somewhere around 2007-2009 the spammers won, and Google's search quality plummeted. It hasn't recovered. If anything it's kept gradually getting worse. A handful of top sites show up for damn near every search, followed by page after page of spam sites and clickbait. Remember when the second page would sometimes have some nice and relevant links on it?

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#49

Post by graeme »

ashark wrote: post #48
graeme wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a lot of crud. But good stuff came out of that crud. Now people do their writing on Facebook and Reddit. Those have much lower or no placement in Google. I find google results impoverished compared to 6-10 years ago. You used to get commentary from people, and it wasn't half bad. Now most searches return commercial resu…

It seems to me that somewhere around 2007-2009 the spammers won, and Google's search quality plummeted. It hasn't recovered. If anything it's kept gradually getting worse. A handful of top sites show up for damn near every search, followed by page after page of spam sites and clickbait. Remember when the second page would sometimes have some nice and relevant links on it?

I think that's only half the equation though. I follow a few niches where non-spammers produce content regularly, and you get good results. My own niche is one. The barrier to entry to create reasonable content is high, so spammers have stayed out. The second and third and even fourth pages routinely produce good results.

But in niches where there's no reason for experts or ordinary people to create text on standalone sites, the results are junk. I remember this being different.

Now to find good stuff I have to search Hacker News, Reddit, etc.

Re: What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging

#50

Post by graeme »

craigching wrote: post #42
gmunu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter that Andrew Sullivan was one of the early and very vocal champions of gay marriage? Or that he is quite openly gay and married himself? If you haven't heard of him, you might not have known that and it may change the way you view his defense of Brendan Eich. In addition to being a champion of gay marriage, Sullivan is a proponent of liberalism in the old sense of the word. I think his defense of gay ma…

It's fine to pick and choose the things you stand for, but the man has to be taken as a whole (IMHO). I want to like Andrew Sullivan for some of the things he stands for, but he was also a vocal proponent of the Iraq war and many other issues that I stand against. Someone who says this about the Iraq war: > the allied campaign was a model of restraint and liberation, the most precise invasion in world history makes m…

What year did Sullivan say that? I recall thinking, circa 2004-6, "gosh, Andrew Sullivan is wrong about Iraq. How does he not see how wrong he is?"

But the thing was, he changed. Gradually, he came to notice that the modern Republican party was doing lots of bad things.

Certainly, this puts him nowhere near writers like Daniel Davies and James Fallows, who clearly saw the war was going to be a disaster, before it happened.

But at least Sullivan was able to change his mind. Though maybe he didn't fully recant Iraq. I can't recall the details now. I just recall my impression of the time that, whatever he was, he wasn't a zealot. He genuinely seemed to be thinking through and considering his opinions.

But yeah, far more a fan of Greenwald. Or Ioz, if anyone remembers him.

Anyway, the point of my reply is that I don't think the Sullivan of today would agree with that quote, and I suspect he wrote that not long after the invasion. That doesn't make it a smart thing to have been written, but simply quoting that gives an inaccurate view of Sullivan. Unless I'm wrong on the details of when he said it and what he changed his mind about.

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