How Blogging Ruined the Web

welcome to the modern web where we have wonders such as children addicted to Tik Tok an infinite feed of content slop and as usual another good take from Twitter when I look at the Modern web it makes me miss the good old days of the internet do you remember the days before your screen time was 16 hours a day a time when people actually did creative things online instead of repeating the same things as everyone else a time when you would visit more than just five websites but it was taken away from us we can never return to the good old old days of the internet but Mark Zuckerberg is not to blame it's not Jack dory's fault it's not even Steve Jobs fault although inv vening the iPhone will go down as one of the worst moments in history it's all the fault of blogs wait a minute blogs when was the last time you even read through a blog post wait is this what people actually used to do on the internet read walls of text for fun but it's true blogs ruined the internet and ever since the rise of blogs the internet has never been the same let me tell you the story of how Millennials writing Daily Posts on the internet was the butterfly effect that irrevocably changed the future of the internet forever let's go back to the prehistoric days of the internet the internet was a new frontier and nobody quite knew what to do with it there wasn't any social media no apps only a bunch of nerds with very slow internet connections back in the '90s and the early 2000s if you wanted to share something with the world there weren't any platforms to post it on if you really wanted to share your weird hobby online and have people make fun of you you you created your own website I still remember the first website I made I made it when I was 10 years old the background was a repeating gift of a Starfield the font was 12 pixels Times New Roman it was gudy it was horrible it was my website it was a fan side to my favorite Nintendo game series yes I was a Nintendo kid please don't bully me this was my favorite website when I was a kid and my website was just one of many there were websites about every subject and every website was different unique and weird you could watch a live stream of a coffee machine at one frame a second you could spend all day following every link on a website and learning the most random things that you had never heard of before dates didn't matter because every page on my website was an alltime classic baby I have links to the same pages on the homepage for years and I would update my old content and improve on it it wasn't just a Newsfeed of posts here today gone tomorrow and back then the web wasn't that complex all you needed to know in order to make a website where just a few HTML tags for those of you who don't know it was like formatting your text on a message board wait wait wait I'm showing my age uh it was like formatting your post on Reddit just wrap your text in a few HTML tags and your web page came to life and everything was built by hand there weren't any complex tools content Management systems and no JavaScript Frameworks This truly was the Golden Age of making websites you just opened up notepad and started writing your web page from scratch and it was all fun and games until this guy came along his name is Justin Hall and he invented blogging in 1994 he was a college student and colleges were one of the only places you could even access the early internet normal people still weren't on it so you had to be one of the cool kids to even be using it at the time and Justin was one of the early adopters in 1994 Justin started his own website link.net or as he called it at the time Justin's links from the underground and is still active to this day but it didn't start out as a Blog the word hadn't even been invented yet back then you would just post random things on your website if you explored his website you would just find links to whatever he found interesting along with a little bit of his commentary back then search engines weren't really a thing so if you wanted to find something cool online you couldn't just type in Google and find thousands of useless blog spam results you had to surf the worldwide web and you did it from link pages and collections like this the web was a much smaller place in 1993 there were only about 600 websites in total you could literally surf the entire web over a couple of weekends besides links Justin also started posting intimate details about his life it really was a web diary as early blogs were called he would post about his childhood traumas about sex and drugs at the time nobody else was posting stuff like this online so people took interest and he went early internet viral in 1995 as many as 27,000 people were visiting his website every single day all of his posts were linked to from the homepage but with with more being added all the time it was starting to become a giant jumble of links returning visitors started complaining that it was becoming difficult to find what's new so in January 1996 he decided to reorganize his website and at the top of the homepage he would post a new entry every single day and along with it came the day's date it had officially become a Blog he wasn't the first to add a date to every new post but the trend was starting to emerge in the rapidly growing niche of web Diaries as it turned out this was the start of a new parad for the web the layout of Justin's old site was The Meta of the old internet each website was not a feed of content that was constantly updating like how most websites are now it was more like a knowledge base a curated library of information and the way you found posts was not by scrolling down and going back pages of content to find old posts the homepage was more like a table of contents from the table of contents you found out where you wanted to go as you slowly dive deeper into the website important posts were preserved for as long as the Creator wanted to keep them on the homepage it's a big difference from the modern web Paradigm where old posts are almost never seen again but let's get back to the history lesson in the late '90s blogging was very new and blogs weren't even called blogs at the time first they were called Web Diaries which later became web blogs and finally blogs as it started to change from only being intimate diary entries and blogs were growing in number but they still just weren't that popular that's because having a Blog was not as easy as just writing a PO post and clicking publish like it is now blogging used to be a long manual process where you would have to write out the entire post with HTML tags then edit the homepage and the previous and next links yourself it was doable sure but it was definitely very clunky if it was to go mainstream the people needed something easier and that's what the people got blogging platforms like blogger and live Journal started to appear right around the turn of the Millennium more blogging tools and platforms were appearing but they still hadn't become a cultural revolution yet they lacked features and didn't give you much control over your website but things started to change with the blogging platform movable type in 2001 this early blogging platform made it easy to write a blog no more manually digging around in the code every time you wanted to add or edit a post it was an early CMS that produced the HTML for you it was nothing fancy no databases or dynamic content just a few Pearl scripts that took some simple inputs and outputed a website for you best of all you could download it for free and set it up on your own web server it made it easy and you could customize it to your heart's content with your own code or Snippets from others now early blogs weren't pretty when you wanted to update the design of your website you had to do it on every single page I remember manually doing this when I first started making websites in 2003 before I had even heard of a Content management system and it was a pain managing dozens of different pages it often resulted in broken links and inconsistencies when you would change one page but forget to change the rest but with a Content management system like movable type it was now easy to have hundreds of different posts and Pages because it automated all of the pain away and it was just a start WordPress took things to the next level in 2003 WordPress was released and it completely ate the market it was free open- source and also easy to set up on your own web server movable type made the mistake in 2004 of changing their license resulting in many switching to Wordpress to this day WordPress is still the most popular CMS not just for blogs but for the entire Internet it's used by 43% of all websites which is crazy and blogging took over it was now easy to create and edit your blog right here on the web you can now rate your content no need to open up a text editor you can do it all from the convenience of your browser this was the Revolution and now that blogging was accessible to everyone everybody lived happily ever after in a Utopia of blogs and free expression right wrong the convenience of the blogging platforms also came with a curse because when blogging arrived homepages disappeared now I started using the internet after the Advent of the blog but back in my day we still had plenty of homepages back when websites had homepages and not just a Blog role you can find tons of information on websites but the sites I frequented back then weren't laid out as a Blog from newest to oldest there were links to different sections on the sidebar it was almost like a mini encyclopedia on each website everything that somebody knew about some weird specific subject that nobody else did a homepage was a table of contents not a Newsfeed you had the freedom to explore the website as you wished this was the web that I fell in love with and participated in but times were changing I wanted to start making money online and if you wanted money you made WordPress websites so I started learning but tools like WordPress were much more rigid they were built for blogging first and foremost when I first started to use WordPress I couldn't even figure out how to make a homepage because the default homepage was just a feed of blog posts nothing else people are always going to pick the easiest option writing a Blog was easy with WordPress but if you wanted more if you wanted to have a completely customized website it took a lot more programming skill it wasn't as easy as just editing HTML tags I had to learn an entire new programming language PHP it was way more work than it used to be and what was the easy route just don't change anything use the default layout and guess what the default layout was the almighty blog so over time more and more websites started to look like this instead of this my favorite homepages eventually stopped updating and disappeared the age of content had begun the internet was now consumable you no longer read and browse through the entire website you just reloaded the page to see the latest blog post but not everyone wants or needs to write a blog what happens if your content doesn't make sense in the blog format many hobbyists previously laid out their website as a table of content contents but now everyone wanted to jump on the new shiny way of making websites some things like a programming tutorial don't really work well as a daily or weekly web blog it should be something that you can revisit for years to come but that's not the way you did things now you went with blogging software like WordPress and by the time you realized it wasn't the right tool for the job it was too late you had already spent all that time switching you weren't going to switch back right the definition of a website had changed now it was just a never-ending that needed to be constantly updated the people are waiting for more content but this change didn't just affect the personal website now every social media is now dominated by the almighty reverse chronological sort newest to oldest Twitter Facebook Reddit YouTube are all prioritized to show you the most recent posts first and sometimes it's almost impossible to find the old stuff sure sometimes you get recommended an old video if the algorithm decides it's time to recommend a 9-year-old 240p video of sponge Bob exploding or something but much more often YouTube's algorithm uses an extreme recency bias that only shows the new and exciting I've seen it firsthand if you stop uploading to YouTube your channel rapidly starts sinking Into Obscurity it doesn't matter if you make a Timeless absolute classic of a video YouTube will eventually stop recommending it just because it's simply not new algorithms also give the content creators a lot less control before at least you could post a new blog post and everyone could see it but now it's up to the algorith gthm if they're even going to show your video to subscribers or not so reverse chronological order took over the Internet it's become the default motus operand of the internet and the old web is dead and gone you can still find some remnants of the old web but it's on life support they've almost been buried by the blog and its children and all this happened just to satisfy the needs of a small niche of web Diaries but just like that blogs had changed the internet forever this video was largely based on this article by Amy Hoy called how blogs broke the web if you want to learn more and hear her firsthand account I'll link it in the description it's a great article but this is all just a theory on internet Theory but I think it makes a lot of sense sure the blog is not responsible for everything wrong with The Modern internet but it definitely shifted the Paradigm to that of content consumption we're now in the age of infinite content The Logical extreme maybe the internet would have become something very different without the blog with social media as we know it like Facebook and FKA Twitter even exist without the blogs that came before it I'd kind of like to see that alternate future we could have gone down

Support my work on Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/ericmurphy My website: https://ericmurphy.xyz Watch my videos on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@ericnmurphy How Blogs Broke the Web: https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/ Justin Hall's documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxD4mqFtySQ 0:00 The decline of the web 1:08 What we do here is go back 4:57 An ode to the personal website 8:26 The end of homepages 12:10 The modern web