> This created tragicomic situations, such as people posting anonymous reports of toxic companies in the comments of the blog and one that threatened to sue me if I didn’t take down the spreadsheet.
In the old times, I briefly worked in some industry and was co-admin in a blog about working-related issues in that field. It was a rather small, obscure blog, that did not have any real traction outside a certain political niche, until a post where we shared one of our readers' experience working in a certain company. That post totally blew up and it received insane amount of views and comments by people talking about their experience working there and elsewhere. The comment thread below was going on years after the blog was practically abandoned. I still enter from time to time to approve comments.
I miss the blog era, because a blog post like that is not ephemeral like social media or other similar modern platforms like reddit or this very site. This creates a more protracted, sustained and imo healthy engagement profile. It still needs to be discoverable, but it was no problem back then once of community of blogs was formed linking to each other. Social media, on the other hand, are a black hole, as it is much harder to find and even more engage with posts that are more than a few days at most old. And while everything is always hosted somewhere and nobody ensures that stuff like with geocities will never happen, platforms like wordpress blogs allow at least one to backup and scrap a site more easily, and the control of the hosting providers on the content is much less than that of the social media platforms.