There was a time when blogs were a big deal. We had our own network of blogs, we had a website called Technorati that ranked them and where we could see who was writing about stuff we were interested in.

The early blogs I found really great. We had people discussing all manner of things, with ‘pingbacks’ between blogs allowing for the crosslinking so even though you didn’t comment on their website, there was a link to the author referred to. WordPress.com does that, and to an extent it still happens in open source blogs, though a few things happened that changed the way things worked.

For example, at the same time, to make their sites more popular, crosslinking was done, and sometimes it was done to such an extent by people who had more marketing than thought that the search engines smacked it down in their search engine results. Search Engine results were important, so that was done more carefully. It was all very cliquish, and in some ways very elitist. Though I knew and even worked with some of the more famous bloggers, they weren’t interested in the content created. They were interested in their own audience, as well they should have been.

For all of the flaws, it wasn’t a bad system. It was decentralized, and the only real limit on content you could find was your ability to find it. Search engines cashed in a bit more because search engines were used a lot more. Nowadays, people are fed pulped fictions with some interesting stuff every now and then.

Social networks showed up and threw everything out the window. When you have centralized networks, you have the centralized ability to shadow ban people on the network, and once it hits critical mass, it becomes arbitrary, with the owner of the network enforcing their own version of what is right or wrong without even a conversation. Facebook does it, Twitter does it, Instagram does it… so the only path to not being shadow banned for something real or imagined is to simply leave the network.

But it doesn’t really end there. Now everyone is training an AI on user data, and no one has control over what user data they train on and how it is used. Chandra Steele writes a bit about how it feels like it’s the end of the shared Internet:

“…This is why the Tumblr and WordPress news [about selling information to AI companies] seems like a heavy blow to a shared internet. It’s taken away the possibility to return to the purer place we came from. PCMag Security Analyst Kim Key reached out to Automattic, which owns both platforms, and the company did not confirm or deny the rumors, though it did direct her to a statement that seems to indicate that if the deal goes through, users will be able to opt out from having their work included in AI training…”

“WordPress Wants to Turn My Old Blog Into an AI Zombie, and It Breaks My Heart“, Chandra Steele, PCMag.com, February 29th, 2024

It’s not the end of the shared Internet at all. Some of us don’t write on PCMag.com, and there are plenty of other options that exist. WordPress.com was just a later website built with open source technology, but before that we had GreyMatter, etc. She mentions 2009 for her blog – I was blogging since 1999. A lot happened in those 10 years.

These technologies still exist. If we want control of our content, we should move off of platforms where we cannot. I’m considering this myself in the context of WordPress.com. I only got here because I was tired of the trouble of maintaining my own sites, but during the time I have used WordPress.com, website hosting has improved to include managed open source content management systems, the open source content management systems themselves have become more easy to maintain and more powerful…

If you feel boxed in, get out of the box. I’m considering options myself since I feel my own trust was betrayed by WordPress.com, and they haven’t really discussed with us what is going on since that bombshell was dropped.

What we need to remember is that we always have options. The only way to effect change is to actually change ourselves. Don’t like a network? Get off it. No one will die.

If you write good content, they’ll find you.