Andy Baio has been blogging for fourteen years and he’s still at it. As he launches a new design for waxy.org, he offers some thoughts on the anachronism of persisting with this media form in 2016.
But there a few reasons why I’m sad about the decline of independent blogging, and why I think they’re still worth fighting for.
Ultimately, it comes down to two things: ownership and control.
Last week, Twitter announced they’re shutting down Vine. Twitter, itself, may be acquired and changed in some terrible way. It’s not hard to imagine a post-Verizon Yahoo selling off Tumblr. Medium keeps pivoting, trying to find a successful revenue model. There’s no guarantee any of these platforms will be around in their current state in a year, let alone ten years from now.
Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.
I’ve been tinkering with a similar post of my own (though not a redesign), tentatively titled, “Why Am I Still Doing This?” But it’s not ready yet. In the meantime, you can read Baio’s post at waxy.org.
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