That old school internet was different
Weblog notes from April 5, 2026 that were compiled and shared.
Right now, at this very moment, I’m feeling nostalgic about the original weblog movement sparked from Movable Type and the initial WordPress communities from yesteryear. We blogged and read blogs. It was so asynchronous and delightful. Back during high school, which in context was during the previous millennium, I read every physically printed news periodical the library had access to each month. It gave me a surprisingly rounded view of what was happening at any given time. That type of access to a curated or gatekept outside world is gone. From the macro news to the personalized views of people just writing online things changed. What I know now and probably created most of my nostalgia was that it was just the best writing rising to the top from writers that cared about what they were producing.
Today we live in a world flooded with nonsense that is generated not curated by a thoughtful writer at a keyboard sharing an ongoing narrative with a reader. This is probably why podcasts are so successful. It’s a platform where a voice we know and over time grow to trust is presented and we know that the conversation is happening and was not generated. Sure, we are at the precipice of that changing wholesale, but the multi-hour conversation format will persist and the voices in that space that have gained traction by building fairly large audiences. Those audiences in some ways are larger independent media incarceration than the traditional broadcast formats that are now diminished. It’s my guess that the best of it will end up outpacing all of the other forms of communication.
At this point in our missive journey today, let’s circle back to the blogging community and how it has morphed, twisted, or just evolved into things like Substack and other newsletter delivery formats. People are engaging and finding communities of place, circumstance, and interest within these missives. Content written and shared probably still bubbles to the top and is given a better runway for success than generated content. Tokenized writing does not endure itself to a community of readers. My guiding north store for creating content here is to just write and let the writing be at the center of creating. I don’t really want to read generated content and to that end I’m not going to participate in publishing it online. Full stop.