In the late 90s and early 00s, blogs were originally "weblogs" or "web logs", just a sort of online diary. It was mainly something you wrote, rather than something for others to read.
Over time, the most interesting blogs became the most popular, and these were generally blogs on a fixed topic. The meaning of "blog" shifted to refer to these high-quality regularly-updated article sites, more like a magazine. It became highly commercialized as people tried to turn blogs into careers or side hustles. The original use of blogging, as a personal journal that only your friends care to read, was supplanted by social media.
Nowadays, pro-blogging has been supplanted by YouTube, since the ad revenue on video is much higher and the audience and discoverability much better. Not every blogger was able to make this transition, however, because the skillsets of a magazine writer and a television host are different.
bdcravens · 44m ago
I don't remember when I first heard the term "blog", but it must have been around 2001 or so because I had a page on my personal site that was blog.cfm (I think people were still often using the longer form "weblog" to refer to them). It was a series of entries, with a date, and was mostly tech musings with some personal updates mixed in.
(I hereby disavow any of the weird takes I may have had in my early 20s lol)
lucb1e · 4h ago
> 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?
ednite · 2h ago
I’m old enough to remember when blogs were basically personal journals. Totally agree things have changed. But those diary-style posts are still out there, they mostly circulate in small circles instead of being easy to stumble across.
The upside is self-expression didn’t die, it just evolved into new forms such as vlogs, newsletters, short clips, etc...
My own blog probably fits the “new” style, but for me it’s more about practicing storytelling and sharing something that resonates.
Thanks for sharing.
chupchap · 1h ago
I don't write online anymore. All my journal entries sit in a notes app (I use Obsidian) because I realised that the goal is for me to write for my own memory and reflection. Writing online is doing free labout for AI models. No thank you!
rickcarlino · 4h ago
So 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.
maplethorpe · 5h ago
> 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?
non_aligned · 4h ago
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.
JohnBooty · 4h ago
yeah by 2000ish I really didn't see egregious opsec violations at all as a rule. the world described by the linked article doesn't really match my experiences.
if you were tech-savvy enough to blog, you were tech-savvy enough to have some clue about that stuff.
also, people weren't like, "liveblogging." they didn't have personal internet devices in their pockets. typical personal noncommercial blogging was people talking about stuff they did days or weeks ago. and even early platforms like Livejournal had visibility filters on posts; people kept the personal stuff friends-only
that was just my personal experience. i guess the author had a different one
jhanschoo · 3h ago
You can still discover communities doing old-school blogging and personal site through webrings. They are still there as a niche, just not discoverable by search engines like they used to be.
sejje · 5h ago
E/N am I right?
My blog made me online friends that I still have today. We all had one and learned programming together.
theturtle · 2h ago
Well, yeah. But some of us were there before the beginning. Wordpress? Huh? You wrote your own code or you just wrote raw HTML.
1997 also was mostly in the books before the word "blog" ever appeared. The number of us writing on the "internet" numbered in the low thousands, not the millions.
My entire readership was online, not in-person, friends. If they knew I "wrote on the internet," my in-person associates didn't give a shit and probably didn't know how to use a browser yet.
Most of us pioneers are scattered to the winds, and a substantial number are dead now.
0xCMP · 5h ago
We'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.
JohnBooty · 4h ago
most of the "diary" type posting is very boring to consume
(most people are boring)
The "peak Livejournal era" (2001-2010?) was so much fun to me. I had a lot of friends with LJs. These were people I knew so their "boring" stuff was enjoyable to read. I had maybe a dozen or two friends who mutually followed me, plus there were some public figures with LJs I followed as well.
I really enjoyed the coziness and uncommercial-ness of it. People wrote so much more openly and thoughtfully.
I understand the OPSEC issues mentioned by the linked article, but the faux example he posted is kind of an unrealistic caricature. I don't remember people typically doing that kind of OPSEC-nightmare "live blogging" type stuff on noncommercial personal blogs.
non_aligned · 4h ago
> most people are boring
Nah. Unless your benchmark is "interesting to every person on the planet", in which case, sure. But then, I'd say that following celebrity and politician gossip is far less productive than following the life of my family, friends, and relatives.
Almost every person is interesting to several dozen other people. Exceptions happen, but are relatively rare.
You're correct on the other count: writing takes effort. Not writing to make things interesting, just... writing in general. If you want to summarize your day, it's gonna cost you 30 minutes of brain work. If you want to post to your Instagram reel, Snapchat, or whatever, just point your phone at your surroundings and hold the record button down for 10 seconds or so.
soupfordummies · 5h ago
Livejournal and then xanga…
Bled into MySpace which led to Facebook which was the beginning of the end.
nextworddev · 4h ago
Don’t forget blogspot -> Medium -> Substack… which has led to enshitfication of thought
lucyjojo · 2h ago
i dont get the substack hate
kiba · 5h ago
People 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.
indigodaddy · 2h ago
For some reason that bottom menu is really bothersome to my enjoyment of the site
username223 · 4h ago
> 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.
SoftTalker · 3h ago
Lots of people used real names on Usenet at least into the 1990s. It probably changed with eternal September.
ChrisArchitect · 4h ago
Early generations of 'social media', or in the context of this post I guess 'microblogging' were super personal, basic, and of the moment (without followup for 24hrs when another post happened). I'm talking like early Twitter posts would be what people were having for lunch. Or that they just woke up and were enjoying a coffee. And the classic "poopin'". It was like that for at least a few years before the posts got longer and more directed to conversational context or 'trying to say something more'.
The first "blog"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorn_Barger
https://firstsiteguide.com/robot-wisdom-and-jorn-barger/
https://robotwisdom2.blogspot.com/
https://www.wired.com/2005/07/robot-wisdom-on-the-street/
Over time, the most interesting blogs became the most popular, and these were generally blogs on a fixed topic. The meaning of "blog" shifted to refer to these high-quality regularly-updated article sites, more like a magazine. It became highly commercialized as people tried to turn blogs into careers or side hustles. The original use of blogging, as a personal journal that only your friends care to read, was supplanted by social media.
Nowadays, pro-blogging has been supplanted by YouTube, since the ad revenue on video is much higher and the audience and discoverability much better. Not every blogger was able to make this transition, however, because the skillsets of a magazine writer and a television host are different.
https://web.archive.org/web/20011129084149/http://mr-bill.ne...
(I hereby disavow any of the weird takes I may have had in my early 20s lol)
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?
The upside is self-expression didn’t die, it just evolved into new forms such as vlogs, newsletters, short clips, etc...
My own blog probably fits the “new” style, but for me it’s more about practicing storytelling and sharing something that resonates.
Thanks for sharing.
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?
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.
if you were tech-savvy enough to blog, you were tech-savvy enough to have some clue about that stuff.
also, people weren't like, "liveblogging." they didn't have personal internet devices in their pockets. typical personal noncommercial blogging was people talking about stuff they did days or weeks ago. and even early platforms like Livejournal had visibility filters on posts; people kept the personal stuff friends-only
that was just my personal experience. i guess the author had a different one
My blog made me online friends that I still have today. We all had one and learned programming together.
1997 also was mostly in the books before the word "blog" ever appeared. The number of us writing on the "internet" numbered in the low thousands, not the millions.
My entire readership was online, not in-person, friends. If they knew I "wrote on the internet," my in-person associates didn't give a shit and probably didn't know how to use a browser yet.
Most of us pioneers are scattered to the winds, and a substantial number are dead now.
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.
I really enjoyed the coziness and uncommercial-ness of it. People wrote so much more openly and thoughtfully.
I understand the OPSEC issues mentioned by the linked article, but the faux example he posted is kind of an unrealistic caricature. I don't remember people typically doing that kind of OPSEC-nightmare "live blogging" type stuff on noncommercial personal blogs.
Nah. Unless your benchmark is "interesting to every person on the planet", in which case, sure. But then, I'd say that following celebrity and politician gossip is far less productive than following the life of my family, friends, and relatives.
Almost every person is interesting to several dozen other people. Exceptions happen, but are relatively rare.
You're correct on the other count: writing takes effort. Not writing to make things interesting, just... writing in general. If you want to summarize your day, it's gonna cost you 30 minutes of brain work. If you want to post to your Instagram reel, Snapchat, or whatever, just point your phone at your surroundings and hold the record button down for 10 seconds or so.
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.
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.