Sunday Musings: I Didn't Realize how much I've Missed Social Blogging!

As I got up and went about my quiet Sunday morning, I suddenly recognized that I have a great deal of gratitude for this community known as Steemit. That is, until just now, I didn’t realize just how much I have missed being part of an actual blogging community—what used to be called “Social Blogging.”

I have written about it before; but to recap—social blogging was basically what most of the Social Internet was about, before the days of MySpace and Facebook. 

People wrote about their lives and experiences and interests... and there was often a lot of interaction and active dialogue in the subsequent comments. In some sense, it was a form of "public journaling," but it was highly interactive.

Often, there would be "subcommunities" that sprung up around interests and hobbies and particular topics... from "spirituality" to "gardening" to "craft beers" to whatever else you could imagine.

Social communities online grew up around blogging and creating “real” content, like we do here.

I have no doubt that there was a “market” for MySpace and Facebook, but—at the risk of coming across as an intellectual snob—these venues took the depth and intelligence out of the social Internet.

These days, we sort of take the format of social media for granted, and conveniently forget that-- in their earliest incarnations-- they were basically “for kids.” 

In 2006, if you were much over the age of 25, you were pretty much considered an “old fossil” on MySpace and Facebook… them being “for everyone” was pretty much a subsequent development. Adults blogged; kids did social media. Think about it: Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook as a college connections site…

The Separation of Content and Social

If you think about it, neither MySpace nor Facebook were ever about “depth of content,” they were about “social.” Along with twitter, these venues were the roots of the “soundbyte Internet;” basically presenting life through an endless stream of headlines with little background explanation or substantiation.

What Happened to the Dispossessed Bloggers?

What’s worth noting is that there was more than “a little group” of dispossessed and frustrated bloggers out there, by about 2008. One of the major (now defunct) players was Xanga, which at its peak hosted 27 million personal blogs. Can you imagine Steemit with 27 million members? There’s an ambition for you! 

And they was just one of many… TypePad (still exists, but grew into a corporate blog host), Diary-X (generally younger users), MyDearDiary, LiveJournal (still exists, in a watered down form) and numerous others inhabited the social blogging sphere.

Looking back to 2006-08, the development of MySpace, Facebook and twitter set about a sort of “forced migration” for a lot of bloggers and content creators.

We were mostly aged 25-50, and liked to write about all sorts of things. Now we were suddenly left with options a lot of us really didn’t like:

If we wanted to be “social” we could get on Facebook and post pictures of our dinner and babies, and share clever quotes… but Facebook sure as hell wasn’t set up for blogging. Ever tried blogging on Facebook? The entire format is set up to discourage people from writing more than 50 words.

On the other hand, if we wanted to “write” (we were told) we needed to become more factual and “journalistic” and set up our blogs on WordPress or Blogger and become experts on some niche topic like “The History of British Soil” or “Frank Zappa’s Nose Hair.” We needed to "become serious," because "nobody cares about personal general interest blogs."

Of course, that was somewhat of a lie. The extended truth was personal general interest blogs were not commercially viable, and a hard sell for advertising dollars. And by 2008, the Commercial Internet was in full bloom.

And Now We're here on Steemit!

I did some of each… but my level of enthusiasm basically waned. 

I went in the direction of writing free standing articles—which was OK, but also sort of boring. Whereas I was quite good at it, creating "static" content was just not as interesting as creating "dynamic" content.

I never became super active on Facebook because it always felt “too fluffy.” Sure, there were occasional good discussions... but they are few and far between. I mean, c’mon people… I don’t need to see the 900th picture of your dinner, or the way your eyebrows look after you plucked them.

I won't bore you with details of other venues that have come and gone, in attempts to rekindle this interesting niche Steemit is trying to carve out, here. But I will say there are a lot of people who would use this site if it executes well, and hangs in there for the long run... I would estimate reaching 20 million users is not unrealistic. 

Anyway, this is my moment of gratitude for Steemit being here, and even trying this brave experiment!

How about YOU? Were you ever part of the "social blogging scene" of 10-15 years ago? What did you do online in the "pre-Facebook" days? Does Steemit feel like a "return to something," or is this all new to you? Where do you hope this will all take us? Leave a comment and share your experience-- start the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)