I’ve been disillusioned with social media for a while. But it’s only recently I’ve realised I miss something about the early days of social media: the genuine connections and conversations that used to happen online.
I wrote about leaving Twitter severeal years ago, in which I said:
I found a full-time job via Twitter. Clients have hired me after finding me on Twitter. I formed a mastermind group with people I met on Twitter. I started a small Slack community primarily with people I met from Twitter. And I’ve made many life-long friends from Twitter.
I still have nostalgia for the early days of Twitter. I felt I got as much out of it as I put in. This of course was before The Algorithm arrived. Twitter, pre-algorithm, was just a chronological list of updates from people I’d opted to follow. These days, what you see is decided by the platform, not by you. The social element is gone.
Algorithms have created an incentive to game the system, to create “content” that gets as many likes or shares as possible, for users to be performative. And with the rise of LLMs, what is posted is often insufferably generic. It should no longer be called social media: it’s anti-social media.
Manu Moreale recently wrote about online counterculture:
The way I see it, the true online counterculture is not to join Mastodon or Bluesky. That’s just a different spice of the rotten experience that’s social media. True online counterculture is rejecting social media altogether.
[...]
Counterculture is sharing things you’re passionate about not because you plan to make a living out of it but because you believe connecting with other human beings is important. Counterculture is forming online bonds with 20 people you get to know over time, rather than amassing hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.
Counterculture is writing a personal blog.
I’ve really come to appreciate RSS and personal blogging as social media replacements. RSS is now my social feed: just a list of really awesome stuff, written by cool and interesting people, waiting to be read. I treat it as a stream, not an inbox to clear. It is far more nourishing than scrolling social feeds.
Personal blogging is the antithesis of what these gamified platforms have become. Blog posts tend to be long-form, thoughtful, personal. There's no algorithm to please, no incentive to game the system or perform in a way that's not you, no draw towards outrage or controversy. It's a place you can be yourself.
It’s worth pausing here to draw a distinction between personal blogging and the kind of blog a business might have. If a company is blogging, it’s usually for a reason: to build a lead pipeline, to establish authority, to become a “thought leader”. These are all fine reasons for publishing, but that’s not personal blogging. Personal blogging isn’t concerned with metrics. It’s concerned with whatever that individual wishes to share, metrics be damned.
As Tom Critchlow so wonderfully put it:
Forget about “visibility” for your post. The unit of blogging isn’t pageviews, it’s conversations.
Which leads me to what I want my personal blog to be.
I’ve long grappled with what to blog about. With so much negativity filling the web, I've often felt the urge to share only positive things. But sometimes my mood is dour and that felt insincere. There’s a lot of shit things happening in the world, and sometimes it’s good to talk about them.
Thus I’ve come to the conclusion that I should stop trying to set boundaries for what my personal blog should be. It should be whatever I want it to be in the moment. It’s more fun, more genuine, more likely to create connection, if I share what’s on my mind.
I want to share more of my private notes. I use Obsidian to maintain a Zettelkasten-like system full of connected ideas. Recently, Dries Buytaert wrote about sharing notes from his own system, and his principle resonated with me: if a note can be public, it should be. If something is useful to me, there’s a good chance it might be useful to someone else too.
I also want to do more riffing. Taking a post someone else has written and responding to it via my own blog. It’s a form of slow thinking, a considered response that encourages conversation. Writing from a place of curiosity, not authority. I’d love to see more of that kind of dialogue happening through blogs, and I want to be part of it.
I’ve been encouraging more friends lately to write a personal blog. I know so many thoughtful people who keep their ideas to themselves, or share them in bite-sized pieces with The Algorithm. The alternative is personal blogging.
There's something freeing about having a space online that’s yours, a space that isn’t beholden to some company’s algorithm or business model. You can do whatever you want with it, and you should.
Personal blogging is more likely to generate interesting conversations with interesting people. That, to me, is the beauty of having your own little corner of the web.