What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging
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But good stuff came out of that crud. Now people do their writing on Facebook and Reddit. Those have much lower or no placement in Google.
I find google results impoverished compared to 6-10 years ago. You used to get commentary from people, and it wasn't half bad. Now most searches return commercial results.
I often give up and go search relevant subreddits for many types of queries.
99% of Reddit and Facebook are crap too. Anything produced by humanity in general will be. But good stuff gets produced too.
Somewhere, somehow, a switch was flipped and "discourse?" became "discounts!".
But in niches where there's no reason for experts or ordinary people to create text on standalone sites, the results are junk. I remember this being different.
Now to find good stuff I have to search Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
So if you have 1,000,000 blogs, and 99.9% are shit, you still have 1,000 good blogs! If only 0.01% of blogs were good, you'd still have 100 great blogs- which is excellent for the public good.
The same long tail effects appear on things like Wikipedia, too. Wikipedia on average might have say 10-20% reliability, because 80-90% of the pages are crap. But that's because most of those pages are really obscure. The 10% that are most observed- say, pages about chemistry and physics- are updated very regularly, even quicker that science textbooks.
It seems that people are really bad at thinking about this clearly, probably because we imagine quality is a yes-or-no proposition.
For you to make this claim, you are also claiming that the parent post is blaming "all of society's problems" of yester-year (pre-Facebook) on AOL. That's a rather obtuse reading, bordering on deliberate.
I'm curious to hear your opinions on the quality of Wikipedia, and its success and/or failure! Is it doing well, or poorly? Do you prefer say, Encyclopedia Britannica? Genuinely curious.
The problem is to keep people interested in your stuff the content has to change multiple times per day. You can't just write a single post every couple days when you feel like you have something important to say - most of your potential readers will drift away.
The vast majority of people trying to make money gave up trying to produce that much content by themselves and joined some sort of group blog (or have "guest bloggers", like Kos). At that point it's less a blog and more of an online magazine. I'm thinking sites like Huffpo and Gawker. As a business/creative model, how are they different from the online presence of The Atlantic or National Review?
Most of the people who still produce all the content on their blog are really just news aggregators. Provide a link, write a joke or a sentence indicating why it's important, and your done with that post.
Sullivan has a wealthy, educated audience that should be catnip to advertisers -- particularly with his particularly distinct influence among gay and politically liberal niches. He's possibly the most well-known blogger today and his Dish audience piggybacks from his previous work with The Atlantic. And while it's not easy to run a website, the capital required is minimal compared to virtually any other form of publication.
If he can't make it, can anyone? Much less a publication with heavier administrative and staff costs like virtually every newspaper or magazine.
The occasional personal blog isn't dead or dying, but the number of eyeballs reading them will be an increasingly small proportion of the total.
But I would say at least speaking for myself that for politics, I would expect to either see some very original, quality thinking, or some sort of substantial research being done if I'm going to be paying for it. Party-line punditry's supply already verges on the infinite. (Not a crack at Sullivan. I never read his blog, I have no opinion about the writing I've never read. Just an observation from the other political blogs I read.)
How didn't he make it work? He made it work, but he wants to try something different. I don't think his decision says anything about blogging that it doesn't say about many other go-it-your-own-way ventures like writing physical books, recording music, gigging, crafting, etc.
On the other, we're conflating blogging with indie commercial media businesses.
Blogging isn't dead, but indie commercial media businesses may be in their death throes.
Why do we fret? Is it because the listicle is such a mindworm that it has made us forget what we liked about the indie voice? That we can't help ourselves?
There was this saying, "interesting news finds me", meaning that a properly tuned social network and media diet is a good filter for what you should ingest, better than trying to be omnivorous and a slave to fear of missing out (FOMO). Over time, it's become closer to "interesting people find me" as more of my intake comes from the people I follow (and the ones I mute).
But there are great opportunities for us to create better filters, for better routing mechanisms to our short attention spans.
I just don't know whether there will ever be a commercial motivation to create it, or whether there'll be enough of a market willing to give up their FOMO and outsource their self-discipline to consume it...
On the other hand, I don't know that I'd call the blogosphere vibrant or even very interesting: Crappy mobile browers/keyboards, link aggregators, Facebook, and Twitter basically shot the web as we knew it dead for the mainstream. My intuition is that this is a natural consequence response to decentralization when the tools to gather your information into one place are poor. You wind up with link aggregators, and then comments on them, and then the link aggregators become the content. Like what's going right now in this thread, instead of a blog link bouncing around between disparate interlinked blog posts.
An open exchange of long form ideas between a network of people who each run their own blog has an important place in internet culture, but it doesn't scale very well. It was a golden age, for a time, but the aggregation model as the potential to open those ideas up to a much broader range of people.
[0] I'm actually not sure if the AP allows people to easily "follow" all stories filed by specific reporters, but it doesn't seem like it.
The main idea is consistency.
There's a consistent interface and experience to hacker news, reddit, and even facebook.
Not only that, there's a consistent community. HN is HN, reddit groups by subreddits, and Facebook is your personal social circle.
When I click through to a new blog, I have no idea what to expect, and a few bad websites ruin my expectation of all the good ones.
-- that applies to both the interface and the community. Both are foreign and unfamiliar.
The same thing applies to webcomics, to musicians, etc. These are the exception, not the rule. There are thousands of blogs started every day! So if you're serious about making a living from your blog, it's worth having the "big blogger" dreams, but you'll probably end up doing other things to pay the bills along the way.
When I look at this through the Clay Shirky "publish-then-filter" mindset, what I see is that we have a problem with our filters--whether those filters are RSS aggregators, search engines, follower lists, inboxes, subscription services, it doesn't matter. Look to the work of people like Paul Ford (@ftrain) and little hacks like SavePublishing.com.
Solving this filtering problem and creating a focus of attention--that's a huge opportunity. Not Uber huge, or monetarily huge, but huge as a public service to free up the mental capacity of a lot of talented people whose filters are very likely tuned by default to the commercial aggregators.
Now go to their Twitter feed or Facebook feed. Oh there are their latest urls!
it's not a matter of perception. It's the truth. It's hard to find the latest content for a site/blog through RSS. But it's easy to find it in their twitter/FB
Honestly, good riddance. I hope that Sullivan and Eich both fade into obscurity.
> the allied campaign was a model of restraint and liberation, the most precise invasion in world history
makes me think they've really lost touch with reality. I'm not here to say that Saddam Hussein was some angel, but to put our role in those words leaves me wanting better critical thinking.
Andrew Sullivan is a man and he has his good and bad. So let's not "one issue" the man and suppose that he's good simply because he's for gay marriage (a position that he stands to gain from I might add).
I'd rather see better, true "liberals", elevated over Andrew Sullivan. Glenn Greenwald comes mind ...
But the thing was, he changed. Gradually, he came to notice that the modern Republican party was doing lots of bad things.
Certainly, this puts him nowhere near writers like Daniel Davies and James Fallows, who clearly saw the war was going to be a disaster, before it happened.
But at least Sullivan was able to change his mind. Though maybe he didn't fully recant Iraq. I can't recall the details now. I just recall my impression of the time that, whatever he was, he wasn't a zealot. He genuinely seemed to be thinking through and considering his opinions.
But yeah, far more a fan of Greenwald. Or Ioz, if anyone remembers him.
Anyway, the point of my reply is that I don't think the Sullivan of today would agree with that quote, and I suspect he wrote that not long after the invasion. That doesn't make it a smart thing to have been written, but simply quoting that gives an inaccurate view of Sullivan. Unless I'm wrong on the details of when he said it and what he changed his mind about.
http://pando.com/2015/01/28/andrew-sullivan-is-not-the-futur...
I never shared Sullivan's views. I could be misremembering how much he shifted in that period, since I didn't follow him closely. But the article doesn't address those years, only earlier times. (which sound pretty bad, if the characterization is accurate)
Edit: here is a piece that comments on Ames and Sullivan. It's how I remember his later writing. No moral hero, but a man clearly aware that he made an enormous error on iraq.
http://thedailybanter.com/2013/01/andrew-sullivans-political...
I don't see comments on his blog. That's not really blogging.
Bloggers, who take comments, actually entertaining community dialog are doing just fine. Sullivan will have no impact as that just isn't what he does.
Regardless, a more than cursory glance at the Dish would show that curated reader engagement is one of the most important parts of the site. One can easily make the case that the quality of that content stands in sharp contrast to the thoughtless automated approach that many bloggers take.
I visit there regularly. That author actually produces a lot of things, engages in a variety of places, etc...
Sullivan really isn't the same kind of writer, nor thinker for that matter.
I also frequently don't like the results of community feedback shaping a blog; a lot of times it just puts the writer on the defensive all the time, and can easily become toxic and contribute to burnout. If you can read even the best comments on the best blogs and not want to just give up on humanity forever, you're a better man than I (either that, or you were one of the people writing those comments and thought they were awesome).
There's already plenty of places on the Internet for people to discuss things written elsewhere on the Internet, like right here for example. Or Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or any number of other places where you have persistent communities of commenters. If it's just comments at the bottom of an article, you end up with a lot of drive-by comments that are even more dumb or pointlessly cruel or boring or strangely insistent about your potential to make $2500/day at home on your computer, just like I did! Because you totally can.
And I like writers on the defensive. When they write crap, and they take comments, the crap comes up awful quick.
Notice how a lot of sites don't take comments? Notice how many of them are very seriously moderated?
One could argue trolls, and that's a fair case. However, not actually being out there enough to take feedback on one's words tends to make nice, magic, bubbles, filled with unicorns and rainbows.
Sullivan occupies one of those bubbles.
And it's not just comments. It's dialogs, even among peers. Sullivan largely just broadcasted.
Either way, his departure means pretty much nothing.
I don't use an RSS reader or similar, so when I read a blog post, it's generally because it reaches me through some form of social media -- friends or coworkers sending links around via IM or email, Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, or so forth. All of these mechanisms come with a built-in avenue for comment. All of these mechanisms also ensure that, unless I know the author directly, someone other than the author thought the post merited reading. This works as a natural feedback cycle if the author cares about impact at all. (And if they don't, comments wouldn't help.)
And as the internet democratizes, perhaps the best feedback mechanism is for commenters to have their own blogs. Nothing requires giving the world a chance to speak at your own pulpit.
Here's a post from _today_ that contains emails from 9 people: http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2015/01/31/busted-with-an-egg...
He has a regular "Dissent of the Day" post where he goes out of his way to post critical emails from readers. For your perusal: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aandrewsullivan.com%20...
Your comments in this thread are nothing but incuriosity dressed up as intelligence.
Ironically, the parent serves as an example for the kind of thoughtless, knee-jerk commentary that comment threads can (and do) breed.
Or, the blogger panders to the worst of his commenters and it forms a cesspool of mutually reinforcing bigotry.
But comments are a double-edged sword, too. You have to police them or the trolls and stormfront types will chase all the normal people away. So it takes time you could have spent writing.