The Silver Blog

Well, a kind of silver anniversary.

Last Monday was a significant anniversary in the evolution of the web. It was 25 years to the day since the first serious blog appeared. It was called Scripting News and the url was (and remains) at scripting.com. Its author is a software wizard named Dave Winer, who’s updated it every day since 1994. And despite its wide readership, it has never run ads. This may be partly because Dave doesn’t need the money (he sold his company to Symantec in 1987 for a substantial sum) but it’s mainly because he didn’t want to compete for the attention of his readers. “I see running ads on my blog,” he once wrote, “as picking up loose change that’s fallen out of peoples’ pockets. I want to hit a home run. I’m swinging for the fences. Not picking up litter.”

Which is interesting in tempus fugit kind of way. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised as this place has been going since 2004 this month, which is 15 years. And I thought I was an early adopter. Like Winer, I eschew advertising. That’s because I detest the things getting in the way of the content on sites I visit – hence I use ad-blocker in the most aggressive settings possible – and I practice what I preach. This place is not monetised. Indeed, it costs me money in hosting fees along with the domain registration.

I still get requests for guest posts though. I still ignore them as I am not in the habit of hosting random links to irrelevant sites.

I think I’ve changed a bit over the years. There was a time when I was very angry. Now its more a case of a weary resignation with the way the world is going. I guess we’ve seen it all before, so there is nothing new under the sun.

How long will I continue? Who knows? All I do know is that the assessment of social media is pretty spot on:

But then two awkward realities intervened. The first was that “discussion” on these platforms was curated by algorithms that were geared more to increasing user “engagement” (and therefore profit) rather than rational deliberation. The second was that many users of social media seemed to have a limited appetite for rational discussion. Twitter degenerated into a toxic sewer and parts of Facebook and YouTube metamorphosed into relay stations for conspiracy theories, hate speech and worse. So if social media constituted a part of the public sphere, it was a mighty polluted one.

Quite so. I relented with Farcebook due to work needs, but I’d concur that it is a rich seam of incessant idiocy. Twitter I have still managed to avoid and toxic sewer is very much an accurate description. Given this, why do people kowtow to the Twitter mob instead of robustly telling them where to put their offence taking?

Anyway, unlike the hard-of-thinking that you see on social media, blogging offers an opportunity to engage in a discussion that will delve into an argument beyond posting a picture of something some vacuous celebrity said as if it is a trump card, or the demented brain farts of some offendatron who cannot construct an argument that needs more the 140 characters.

So, yeah, I’ll stick with blogging for a while longer yet.