Blogs Used to Be Different

Summary

Blogs used to be very different. 06 Sep, 2025 I saw someone earlier post about how intrusive it felt to read a personal blog post. They made a point that folks like them who have grown up on short form microblogging like Twitter and Tumblr have a big leap to make when reading longer form blogposts. Not sure how many folks have that same issue but from the blogs I've read in the last decade, there has been a huge shift in content. Ten years ago if you were blogging on Tumblr or Wordpress you were writing to an audience in an attempt to promote something. Your blog would have a theme, a niche, and a sales funnel. Blog every single day about food, cars, videogames, whatever and at the end remind the reader to buy your book or t-shirts. They worked just like Substack would today. "Make money being a blogger!" "Here are the top ten ways to blog!" "Blogging is dead! Long Live Blogging!" "My free ebook teaches you how to blog!" Today people still do this with youtube channels, substacks, and tiktok accounts. The rest of the blogs around here are either personal notes or technical writing. Go look on hacker news and it's a sea of tech blogs showing you how they rewrote a popular program in Rust in only 36 hours. But if you dial it all the way back over twenty years 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 (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. Not only did we include wildly personal information on a daily basis, but we rambled on like a 14 year old girl armed with a spiral notebook and gel pens. We would write out a one way conversation as though we were checking in with someone we hadn't talked to in a long time and they asked about our day: "Just got back from the gas station. Washed the Civic this afternoon and went up the...