Blogs used to be different
jetgirl.art
Blogs used to be different
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: Blogs used to be different
#2Livejournal and then xanga…
Bled into MySpace which led to Facebook which was the beginning of the end.
Re: Blogs used to be different
#3E/N am I right?
My blog made me online friends that I still have today. We all had one and learned programming together.
Re: Blogs used to be different
#4> We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's (lol Foursquare wtf were we thinking) and the idea of sitting down at the end of the day and pouring everything that happened into a journal entry was completely normal.
I was there, and we weren't all like this. I can remember being offended when a friend checked me into a location with foursquare, broadcasting my location out to the world. I felt similarly offended when I was "tagged" in photographs (and still am to this day).
This idea that we were all collectively oblivious and only recently made our way out of the fog really bothers me. Why did the majority of my generation never care about their own privacy?
Re: Blogs used to be different
#5People want to be read and the algorithm is selected over time to promote this.
The only problem is that nobody selects the algorithms but the platforms.
Maybe in the ends, algorithms will still be selected for virality regardless no matter who choose, but I doubt it.
Re: Blogs used to be different
#6We've collectively learned that besides the OPSEC concerns most of the "diary" type posting is very boring to consume (most people are boring) and therefore it's pretty likely your posts aren't that great either.
To make them interesting you must put effort, which we see some people doing, but anyone who has done it knows how the amount of effort needed detracts from the actual meaningful part of experiences/life/relationships.
In a way blogs are the worst medium now for this: Hard for people to consume casually, hard to meaningfully control the audience, and constantly scraped/archived by 3rd-parties. Most who still want to do this more causal, diary-type posting are better served by a private Instagram and posting occasionally, but mostly focusing on low-effort Stories. The key part/fix is the ephemeral nature of the majority of posts/content.
And there you see exactly how/why most people end up doing exactly that.
Re: Blogs used to be different
#7> The only people reading your online journal were your other friends IRL 89% of the time.
Was it just me who had like 1 irl friend occasionally open their website and the rest was an online group of friends comprised of people you met on forums and game servers?
Re: Blogs used to be different
#8So true. Before the Internet swallowed the world and became a part of everyone’s life, it was possible to be much more open and less superficial. I still see this to some extent with personal sites on the Gemini:// protocol, but maybe it won’t last forever.
Re: Blogs used to be different
#9> We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's (lol Foursquare wtf were we thinking) and the idea of sitting down at the end of the day and pouring everything that happened into a journal entry was completely normal. I was there, and we weren't all like this. I can remember being offended when a friend checked me into a location with foursquare, broadcasting my location out to the world. I felt s…
20+ years isn't exactly "recently" in internet time.
And while early 2000s might be pushing it, in the 1990s, it was most certainly normal for people to put their home phone numbers in Usenet signatures. The internet was initially just this small subculture thing for nerds, generally not on the radar of anyone not wishing you well. Your employer wasn't there. Your parents weren't there. Your stalker wasn't there. Your insurer and your bank and your local PD weren't there.
And I hate to say this, but the privacy dystopia we now live in is largely of our own doing. We had a bunch of really naive ideas about how information wants to be free. It made for a couple of wonderful years, but then allowed bad actors to abuse every single bit of it. And the bad actors weren't exactly external: the companies were founded and staffed by techies who now lament the status quo.
Re: Blogs used to be different
#10> blogs weren't a place to promote yourself and your side hustle. Blogs were personal diaries. We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's
OPSEC has nothing to do with it. People used pseudonyms by default in the 1990s, and blocked Doubleclick (a.k.a. Google) in their ~/.hosts files. Blogs were non-commercial places where we worked out ideas and offered useful information.