The Future Of Blogging

OpenAI recently admitted that unless they steal vast amounts of online content they cannot run their business. In a submission to the UK House of Lords, OpenAI explained how copyright stands in the way of training their Large Language Models. Without that right to steal content their business isn’t viable.

Is the whole history of the internet a history of theft? Theft seems integral to the DNA of the internet.

As the internet first became popular, many people’s earliest experiences involved stealing music. Napster was one of the first hits of the World Wide Web. An early mantra of the digital age was that creativity had no inherent value. “Information wants to free” was a common refrain. The net’s first gurus proclaimed that curation and creation were equally valuable.

Today there are services that help you to take “high performing posts” from other people and paste them into your social media feed. If it gained engagement for someone else, then it will work for you. Or so the idea goes. Content isn’t self-expression. It’s fashion. Posts are like t-shirts. Buy the one that looked cool on someone else and you will look cool too.

The Newsletter Era Will Pass

A few years ago I predicted that blogging would make a comeback. A blognaissance. I thought the limitations of social media would fuel a hunger for longform writing. It would be the perfect place to find a more diverse range of voices.

I was kind of right.

We didn’t get a blogging renaissance. Instead, we got the newsletter era.

Sure, a Substack and a blog are kind of the same thing. But few people see it that way. Say you have a Substack and people will sign up. Mention your blog and the conversation just trails off.

Newsletters are popular because they give writers a direct connection with their audience. Every creator wants that. To see the faces of those who love their art.

But the money behind the newsletter era has no passion for any of that. Venture capital. Silicon Valley. They are disinterested and uninterested in what creators want and need. They need only the output. Grist for the mill. Attention-grabbing content that brings eyeballs. Feeds the algorithm. It doesn’t matter if context collapses. It just helps make it harder to differentiate ideas from ads, information from misinformation, people from bots.

This is the era of newsletters. But it won’t last. Nothing online does.

Two Pillars Have Fallen

Had you told me early in 2022 that I would be done with Twitter and WordPress by the end of 2024, I wouldn’t have believed it. Both were constants in my life; the core of how I interacted with the online world.

Recent weeks have seen WordPress mired in controversy. This site runs on WordPress. It lives on WPEngine, the web host that WordPress has gone to war with. And this site relies on the Advanced Custom Fields, the plug-in that WordPress controversially chose to co-opt. It set fire to the reputation of the technology that hosted most of the written content on the web.

Meanwhile, the new owner of Twitter bought it, broke it, renamed it, then wrecked it some more. What was once the internet’s intellectual ecosystem is now a digital propaganda machine.

I keep thinking about the sunk-cost fallacy. Was I committed to these things because of my past investment in them? Did I keep using Twitter because it had been so good once? It was a great place to meet people and find opportunities. Was I committed to WordPress because I had spent so much time and money building this site with it?

Would I recommend either today? No.

If in 2008 Twitter had been what it is now, I would never have joined. And WordPress’ problems are bigger than just the current conflicts.

WordPress Is No Longer Best In Class

When I started this blog, WordPress felt modern and fresh. A database system to manage content felt like the future. It was customisable and fast. But WordPress today feels slow, complicated and fragile.

And it failed to keep up with what creatives need. It isn’t easy to add a newsletter, or host a commerce option, or customise the appearance of the site. Yes, you can do a lot of things with plug-ins and site builders. But every layer you add makes things slower and less secure.

My site being hacked was a wake-up call.

During the past year of reflection I came to realise that I wasn’t sick of blogging. I was sick of WordPress. My 2,000 posts should feel like a lovely personal archive. A thing of value. Not some treasure locked in a basement without a key.

I spent a lot on the design and the building of this site. But every little change – updating the copyright date, changing the social icons, or updating plug-ins – risks breaking the site. The problem isn’t the blog. The tech is broken.

Blogging Was The Best Expression Of The Internet

Blogging is the the most natural and best expression of how the internet can be a force for good. Blogging is human-centric, earnest, oriented towards creativity. Blogging was born from marginalised voices; mommybloggers, ex-vangelicals, and identity advocates. Bloggers shared a passion to speak truth to power, or at least to speak their truth with power. Everyday life mattered, even if, or perhaps especially if, the blog was the only place where it could safely be given voice.

Of course, blogging has at times been little more than a capitalist carnival. In some ways it ate itself when it shifted its focus from human stories to selling adspace. Monetisation was the noise blogs made as they went to seed, died, and fermented in the musty soil of the online jungle.

One long-forgotten thing bloggers used to talk about was accountability. We told our stories in public as a way to be accountable for the kind of people we were becoming. To stick to the path. Achieve the goals. And not repeat the mistakes of those whose actions had hurt us in the past.

Blogging early on carried the etiquette of analogue writing. If you wrote an interesting blog post, someone would quote from it and reference your work, usually with a link. Acknowledgment was shared. So was traffic. Audiences grew together. Intermingled. A failure to float all boats was unethical, for the same reasons that plagiarism is problematic. It’s a form of theft.

My Blogging Future

The future for me involves saying goodbye to WordPress and revisiting the passion that fired the earliest days of this blog. It involves being more writerly. Also more artistic.

For those of you who are interested in the technical side of this, I will be going over to Jamstack and the world of Static Site Generators.

The irony is, that’s where I began. My first blogs were static sites I coded myself. I went to WordPress because people said those weren’t “real blogs.” Now the future of blogging take me back to where I was in 2004!

I am thrilled that 2025 will see me leaving WordPress, WPEngine managed hosting, WooCommerce, Google Analytics, and MailChimp. For a long time I thought I was sick of blogging. Truth is, I was sick of these companies. But the blogging, writing, and sharing ideas and experiences – I still love that!

Conclusion

Blogging is an artistic expression now. I can’t argue that you should do it for any kind of pragmatic reason. It has to be a choice that lives within a lot of other choices. About how to work. How to live. And how to be in the world.

The way forward remains unclear. I am sailing my little boat into strange new waters. Can we still find connection and community? Is it possible to be noticed? Is it just the tech that is broken, or are the techbros broken as well? What other technological sunk-costs am I blind to? Am I making a bold choice or a catastrophic mistake?

Twenty years on, I find myself wondering: where do I begin as a blogger?