Essentially the author is longing for a day before social media existed, but the world has changed fast - and that's ok.
The medium has diversified away from just blogs, but the amount mediums and creators has exploded.
Many of those people who used to blog on Blogspot have moved on to YouTube, TikTok Twitter, Instagram, Medium, WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, and more.
So the whole premise is bunk. "Blogs" in their 2005 term may have changed. But the amount of people publishing 280+ character content on Twitter, Instagram (as video or image descriptions), and all others is more than ever.
Instagram and YouTube are where many of the eyeballs are.
The author longs for self-expression in blog format, the self-expression is there more than ever, just not in the one strict format that existed that way for a brief moment.
Part of it is where the eyeballs are, and part of it is what the content creators are using.
Blogs were written and read on computers. Now people consume, and increasingly produce, on phones. Hence blogs (long-form text) -> social media (short-form text) -> vlogs (long-form video) -> tiktok (short-form video)
Author's point about blogs is that Twitter, Instagram, etc aren't blogs and that's what he wants. Author's failure is that he is wrong, as blogs do still exist, including the Blogger service.
People publishing blogs were not “creators”. They were ordinary people publishing their personal, not-fashionable, unfiltered ramblings. That’s what we lost. It’s obvious that with the growth of internet access “variety” has grown exponentially, but it’s the same kind of variety you get from supermarket products, not real life experiences.
> just not in the one strict format
It’s exactly the other way around. 95% of all “content” on the platforms you mentioned looks the same today. The goal is now success, not sharing for the sake of sharing, and that severely limits how much you express yourself.
That last point is wrong, it doesn’t make any sense, for example, Banksy. He’s not sharing for the sake of sharing and he has no trouble expressing himself, even pissing off the governments of the world more often than not
The medium has diversified away from just blogs, but the amount mediums and creators has exploded.
Many of those people who used to blog on Blogspot have moved on to YouTube, TikTok Twitter, Instagram, Medium, WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, and more.
So the whole premise is bunk. "Blogs" in their 2005 term may have changed. But the amount of people publishing 280+ character content on Twitter, Instagram (as video or image descriptions), and all others is more than ever.
Instagram and YouTube are where many of the eyeballs are.
The author longs for self-expression in blog format, the self-expression is there more than ever, just not in the one strict format that existed that way for a brief moment.