As kijin mentions in their comment, maintaining your blog was a labor of love - personally I miss the old internet - the early days, when it was a wild wild west, when my internet time was still divided with my BBS time. Everything grows up, and as things become more popular, they become more mainstream and open up to wider audiences. I know those old days are gone (and very fondly remembered) but I also know that what was my favorite past time has become a great career - one I can wake up to every morning, eager to do my job. There is a lot more noise out there now as all of this has become common, and there are millions of blogs - but there are still great ones out there, worth following and consuming - and hopefully the noise learns to not be uniform and figure out their own identities, and appeal properly to the consumers. I am thankful for how things have evolved, even when wistful.
Is this a result of the success of the 'old blogosphere' and mirroring the challenges of monetization so many tech companies are challenged by.
1. build an audience
2. start monetising
3. quit your job
4. drive more audience and try to monetise
Quickly, you end up serving the monetisation and the soft money that goes to influential bloggers to say nice things. It's sad, but unfortunately not the first time an industry/content/company has lost it's core success and function as a result of the need to pay the bills.
How to overcome this and stay independent? That's the exciting challenge!
> there are still independent voices blogging on Medium and other sites ...
Medium is just another proprietary platform that is trying to create a walled garden. Their garden is impeccably curated and looks fantastic on mobile, but it's a walled garden just the same.
Speaking of walled gardens, one thing that I find especially suffocating about today's "blogosphere" is the uncanny uniformity of design, typography, and overall structure that everyone seems to be adopting. Every Medium blog looks the same. Ditto for every svbtle blog, and pretty much every other blogging platform that has appeared in the last few years. Gone are the insane customizability of BlogSpot and Tumblr. Now as soon as a blog loads, I can tell "Yeah, it's just another svbtle blog. Gotta move my mouse away from that weird Kudos button!"
The new services fly banners like "we let you focus on your content" and "just write, don't worry about anything else", but what they really insinuate is the flawed assumption that your literal words are the only thing that you will ever want to communicate to your audience. Not the design. Not the typography. Not the way you organize your content. Not even your own personalized domain name. In exchange for a bit of convenience, they give you a uniform to wear. And just in case you don't like the uniform, they tell you that it is a symbol of honor and prestige (because only the best bloggers are invited to wear it, etc.)
In the past, I used to browse random blogs when I wanted inspiration for a new web design. Every blog was different. Sure, they often looked amateurish, but they were always packed with unique ideas about what a blog could look like and behave. People took care of their blogs the same way they took care of their gardens, the same way they customized their MySpace page to the limit, the same way that some of us even today spend several hours customizing the shell prompt. Maintaining your blog was a labor of love, and the efforts showed through the clunky tabless windows of IE 6.
When you sell your home and lease a condo, it's not just ownership that you're giving up. You're also giving up personalization. After all, every condo looks the same from the outside; and you're not really supposed to know what goes on inside, either. All these years we've been chanting the mantra, "Content comes first." By "content" we've usually meant words, and nothing but words. Everything else is at the service of words. But when taken to the extreme, even you yourself become a servant of your words. You become nothing but a bunch of words, as if all your readers were autistic.
I actually vastly prefer design which emphases text.
As contrasts: Blogspot's dynamic themes are utterly unusable for me. I can't read them, I can't navigate through them, and worst of all: I can't take a page and render it in Readability. As a result, I simply avoid those blogs.
Svtble and Medium are good (though the Kudos spot is a bug and I remove it via local CSS).
Otherwise, if every page on the Internet looked like a Readability rendering, I'd rejoice.
Tumblr is still well and alive, and hosts multiple blogs that I read. The nice thing about Tumblr is you probably won't realize you're on tumblr unless you notice the little transparent action bar in the top right.
