Like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of a magazine Joker.comthe flagship site of Gawker Media, a sprawling blog network that was put out of business by Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan in 2016. Nick Denton and I started Gawker in 2002 and I left in late 2003 to go to New York Magazine, so I missed some of Gawker’s greatest successes and biggest failures, but the early decade The first of the 21st century was what I now think of as the heyday of blogging. (The Talking Points memo began in 2000.)
Since then, popular blogs have been commercialized; Added comment and video sections. Migrated to social media platforms; It has been listed by major media companies. The growth of social media in particular has erased a certain type of blogging that I sometimes miss: textual dialogue between bloggers that used to require more thought and care than writing 180 or 240 characters and calling it a day. In order to participate in the conversation, you had to invest some effort in what people in the media now call “audience building,” and you couldn’t do that simply by tweeting or responding in easy ways to real arguments.
This was largely a function of technical limitations. Commenting technology was developing and most blogs didn’t have it yet. While it would have been easy to start a blog without any technical knowledge, it is a huge accomplishment in itself It happened almost overnight – It was difficult to add bells and whistles that would allow for easy cross-deployment. Social media basically didn’t exist, and the few social networks that did exist (Six Degrees, or my former employer TheSquare.com) weren’t really used to spread news or have discussions. You can’t use paid advertising to direct people to your site unless you know how to use digital advertising systems that were also expensive and inaccessible to consumers in the days before Google AdSense and programmatic advertising in general.
So, if you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough so that they would visit it, right away, because they wanted to. If they wanted to respond to you, they had to do so on their own blog and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media to emerge. If someone wants to troll you, they’ll have to do it on their own site and hope you take the bait because otherwise no one will see it.
I guess now that’s the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going to a town square where there aren’t particularly strict laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face. Before social media, if someone wanted to do business with you, they had to come to your house and be civil before you would give them the time of day or let them in. If they want you to interact with them, they need to make their home attractive enough for you to want to visit.
Social media is like a city square, but without the rules and laws of an actual city square. Anonymity, in particular, allows bad actors to do malicious things with few consequences outside of account suspension, which can generally be overcome by simply creating a new account. There is little downside to commenting, especially for determined trolls who are not trying to engage in any kind of healthy dialogue, but just to harass and create chaos.
(I say all this as someone who grew up in a very rural place and loves the big city. This is no knock on real-life city arenas, which are generally governed by little more than a vague terms-of-service agreement with largely impenetrable and unenforceable legal rules.)
Early blogging was slower, less influenced by the hourly news cycle, and people were more likely to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogging was considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily closer to regular publishing. One of my early blogs was mostly about economics, a Ukrainian punk band called Gogol Bordello, politics, and the bar on Canal Street that turned into an Eastern European disco every night around midnight.
I didn’t expect Gawker to be as popular as it was, and I was working as a stock analyst when we started it. It quickly became a full-time job, and my personal theory on why it was so successful in the beginning is that it covered the New York City media, and media people love reading about themselves. Eventually, they liked the book enough that they wanted to write about it. We got a lot of early press coverage when Gawker had less than 20,000 monthly users, which at the time seemed like an astronomical readership, but in the age of social media, SEO, promotion, and site referrals would be considered an abject failure.
These people were what product producers referred to as power users. They were as invested as regular readers: they sent me emails and tips, thoughtful comments, and sometimes very detailed, long and lame critiques.
As a writer who often works to understand what I’m thinking about in writing, this was very stimulating even when I was writing about trivial things—what Anna Wintour did in a Condé Nast elevator, why everyone in Williamsburg wore John Deere mesh hats, what young investment bankers were paying for bottle service at the Marche. But it was more valuable to me, because it allowed me to read and interact with other people who were attacking more serious issues. (This was around the time I first met Josh Marshall).
I grew up in a very right-wing conservative family in rural Alabama. My father was a local lineman and my mother was a janitor at my school, and we were both Southern Baptists. Before I went to college (to be indoctrinated by liberals, as my family says) I don’t think I knew a single liberal or progressive person, or at least not someone my age. I was also in an information bubble — the Internet technically existed but no one I knew had access to it in the mid-’90s — and the only source of information I had outside of my small K-12 school, a former segregated academy, was the public library, which the right is now trying to censor for the precise reason that it represents a threat to actual (right-wing) indoctrination.
I was the first person in my family to go to college, and by the time I left, I was too Slightly I became more liberal than I was going along—not because someone indoctrinated me, but because I became more exposed to information, people who weren’t like me, and viewpoints I’d never considered before. When I was 22, I probably would have considered myself a social liberal. (Now I think that’s a contradiction in terms, but when I was 22 I realized that if you were pro-choice and pro-drug legalization, that was enough, and it was still a huge departure from the white evangelical Christian faith I learned as a kid.) I have a wide range of interests, and I think I’m a fairly curious person, so I would often seek out online conversations with people who I disagreed with them and read them to better understand where they were coming from and to understand it. Outside of what I thought. Some of the people who changed my thinking over time were early bloggers – both because there were new people whose opinions I read and began to agree with, and also because there were new people whose opinions I began to read and whose opinions I began to reject, some of whom I eventually found repugnant.
research It tells us that most people remain more or less ideologically aligned with their parents over time, and that complete realignment is rare. When that happens, it usually takes decades. It happened much faster. I went from being a college Republican to a registered Democrat in less than five years, and I felt like my worldview had expanded tremendously. This is not because I change my mind easily or quickly, but because my worldview has been constantly challenged. I don’t attribute this just to the internet—living in a city that’s not culturally homogeneous was a big factor, too—but I’m the type of person who elicits ideas through words, digital or otherwise. The kind of back-and-forth I remember from thoughtful members of the early blogosphere is something that’s hard to find now. They are often inundated by social media, or simply difficult to pay attention to because our brains are so cluttered from constant digital stimulation.
But there are bright spots. I’m afraid we’re in a newsletter bubble (how many subscriptions can one person pay for?) but the kind of longer, personal writing I miss can be found in this form if you’re willing to look for it. And if you’re writing a newsletter yourself, it’s hard for someone with the handle @horseshit1962 to bury your argument under the mind-bending memes of yesteryear the way they can so easily on platforms like X or Facebook.
Some of the best blogs have evolved and expanded. Independent media is more important than ever, and Donald Trump’s recent attempts to censor mainstream media, comedians he doesn’t like, and “left-wing” professors underscore the fact that expression is crucial. The lesson I learned from the early blogging world is that quality of speech is also important. There’s a part of me that hopes the more toxic social media platforms will quietly collapse because they’re not helping, but that’s just wishful thinking; As long as there are capital incentives behind them, they will likely not do so. I still look for people with the early energy of bloggers, though — people who are willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t just performance, trolling, or outright fraud. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.
Trump may be able to intimidate Bob Iger, but it is actually much more difficult to intimidate a million different outlets, each run by one determined person.