Back in the days of yore, when Facebook hadn't even been a twinkle in Zuck's eye, blogs ruled what existed of the Web. "Normies" had only recently started to venture outside of CompuServ, AOL, Delphi, and the like.
In the primitive world of pre-Google Search, stumbling upon a well-written blog felt like finding a clean bathroom on the Interstate just in the nick of time. You had bounced around from link to link and weren't 100% certain how you had gotten there. First, you'd Bookmark the site because you were sure you couldn't find your way back here any other way. Then, you'd read the newest article. And, after all of that time and focus, you'd be presented with a textarea there at the bottom of the article that asked for your thoughts...
For your thoughts... Hmm... Well, okay, maybe you'll just leave something short. After all, you just read something that felt like it had value, ads had barely started to be a thing online and there weren't many (or any) on this site, so you hadn't felt like you had to wade through crud to get here. So, sure, why not validate the author of the article for their effort? Why not make that connection? Albeit virtually, with someone who you will never meet IRL...
This was before blogging had become a business; before, adsense and clickthrough rates; before monetizing and content farming. It was before all of that.
Yes, there was a before all of that.
The blogger was a Crier in the Emptiness. Setting words out into the digital void without anything to protect them. Even a note in a bottle felt more cared for than a blog back in the day.
But, then, not long after the rise of Blogger, WordPress, and the like, when we could finally use words like Blogosphere to describe our little corner of the Internet, the Spammers arrived. Automated comments that would take advantage of the fact that blog comments often allowed posters to link back to their own sites as part of their post (we were of course attempting to build a web of community, and what better way to aid that effort than to exchange links between the like minded) started to use those links toward their own SPAM-flavored ends.
It began to feel like an arms race: spam vs anti-spam, then captcha, then recaptcha, and finally AI Defeating All of That. Yes, in case you hadn't heard, the Artificial Intelligence can now defeat all of those stupid cryptic puzzles that we have solved over the years. In fact, our solutions were used to train the AI in the first place. So, what did we expect was going to happen? It never was about protecting us in the first place. It was about collecting data and finding a way to monetize it.
And, along the way, on the other side of the fence, mostly due to chasing clicks, each of which could earn the site owner a few cents, the content homogenized. It proved more reliable to get eyeballs (who actually cared about readers anymore) with a misleading clickbait-flavored title and very generic content.
You see, true discourse had moved off the blogs and onto social media, which in the beginning, was often referred to as micro-blogging. Why commit to hosting a site of your own anymore, let mySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc do that for you! And with all of those eyeballs there, there was already a guaranteed audience, and a built-in way to comment on these quick, random thoughts closing the engagement dopamine feedback loop.
What had begun as a truly rare treat -- a connection with a reader who you may never encounter in the real world -- that your words had touched, now had the value of a single M&M in a Costco-Sized Economy Pack. The bulk of the denizens of the Internet had moved on from following the personal blog. Blogging became the domain of businesses trying to content-mine potential clients. This left the Blogosphere feeling a bit post-apocalyptic.
Meanwhile, over on Social Media, in an effort to squeeze every last cent out of those eyeballs, some of the platforms are now using AI to create content designed to anger, enrage, disenfranchise, berate -- to do absolutely anything to keep those squishy eye-globules focused on ads.
So, here I am, an old-school blogger (with content dating back to 1996), in 2025, still writing. And, after a site migration, I looked at the checkbox to enable commenting and I paused. AI Spambots have turned Comment Forms into an attack-vector. People have fallen out of the habit of actually commenting on the blog and prefer to comment on Social Media posts promoting the blog instead. When asked why, those people often say that they feel like they are adding more value by helping to boost the visibility of the content through re-posting and sharing it. And, in the modern landscape, they do have a point.
So, I join the ranks of zen habits and a few other remaining old-school blogs. There are no comments here. Comment on the link that brought you here and please remember to tag me (@stevenjaycohen on most platforms). Or, if you are a regular follower of the blog, please consider sharing the content on your own social media accounts -- and do remember to tag me when you do.