Hari's Corner
Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and thenI miss the heydays of blogging
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Internet and Blogging by
Hari
Posted on Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 21:24 IST (last updated: Tue, Mar 10, 2015 @ 21:40 IST)
I seriously miss the heydays of blogging. When you had thoughtful and intelligent people actually regularly blogging about issues and making well constructed pieces. It's now become rare to see anybody expressing articulate and independent opinions on any subject. With social media's status updates and wide sharing of memes and political posters, people simply repost thoughts or opinions that they agree with.
But I wish the people who used to actively blog and express their thoughts in more than 140 characters would return to serious blogging. I've posted about this before and I think in 2015 there are even fewer independent bloggers around. What do I think are the reasons for this? I don't know actually, but I think bloggers used to enjoy the feedback and the community that formed around them and when people moved in droves to social networking sites, individual blog networks suddenly went quiet. Suddenly your comments area was more inviting to spammers than to legitimate readers providing feedback. And so bloggers introduced anti-spam measures, some of which had a negative impact on reader-engagement. People who blog love an audience and when your audience dwindles the motivation to engage and connect with them decrease as well. I think what happened is a vicious cycle of dwindling readership and dwindling blog updates.
I also think bloggers are also to blame to some extent for the decline. Here is my list of what I felt really killed the community of blogging other than the social networking impact:
- Uncontrolled spam - comment spam forced bloggers to moderate comments and introduce tough anti-spam measures, some of which made it tedious to comment on blogs, but what was worse were blogs where spam was left unattended, giving the distinct impression that the blog owner didn't care.
- Third party commenting systems / login requirements - forcing users to log in to a third party commenting service or a blog seriously discouraged reader engagement.
- Lack of response - lack of response to readers' comments had a negative impact, especially on regular commenters. It's a two-way street and I think many bloggers started taking their readership for granted.
- Non-reciprocation - not reciprocating by leaving comments on readers' blogs is another reason why the network of blogging crumbled. I think, early on, bloggers had a larger audience of fellow bloggers than casual readers. I certainly believe that an informal, unspoken, unwritten agreement about reciprocation was what made social blogging so successful a decade back. Link exchanges used to be common too, but I think more than links, what bloggers appreciated was the reciprocal nature of fellow bloggers.
The decline of blogging could be the subject of an interesting study for social science students and researchers and it would be interesting to read the conclusions of such a study.
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4 comment(s)
I agree about the exodus to social networks. Blogs used to be THE social places to visit and no longer are. To get your blog noticed now, you have to rely on the search engines and the responses you get when you share them on the social networks (mostly Facebook).
Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on Thu, Mar 26, 2015 @ 08:20 IST #
I think search engines turn up more spammers than genuine commenters these days. You're right, the conversations have shifted to social networks.
Comment by Hari (blog owner) on Thu, Mar 26, 2015 @ 19:27 IST #
I definitely agree with how too many bloggers seem to take their audiences for granted. Indeed, that seems to be a problem with a lot of online 'celebrities' and individuals that get popular, they seem to lose any contact with their fanbase or people that got them there in the first place. It's even worse given how some (like I think Copyblogger) actually disabled comments altogether and only seem to take feedback via social networks.
And the non reciprocal stuff now? Oh, I know where that's coming from. It's been another unfortunate casualty of everyone's paranoia about 'SEO' and 'pagerank' and whatever else. Or this modern attitude in marketing that everyone should be all 'screw everyone else, it's only my personal success that matters'. It's especially depressing seeing how many big sites seem to immediately remove their blogrolls and stop commenting on other people's works the minute they become popular...
Either way, it's an article that's both very well timed and depressingly honest at the same time, so well done.
Comment by CM30 (visitor) on Sat, Jun 13, 2015 @ 02:03 IST #
Sorry for the comment moderation though. It is enabled on older posts (partly due to the spam problem I wrote about above)
Comment by Hari (blog owner) on Sat, Jun 13, 2015 @ 19:19 IST #