Nostalgia over blogging vs the current social media hellscape

RSS never tracked you

RSS never tracked you the way HTTP or HTML never tracked you. What tracks you with HTTP/HTML are rendering engines for HTML and Javascript. I can say with absolute certainty that tracking-tech during blogging's height was used to track audience, click-through rates, and other site-engagement metrics. RSS was the loss-leader for clicks on sites. This particular post uses one of those tricks; an opening paragraph promising more, which if you're reading this through RSS you will have to click through to read. Tracking RSS feeds was done through tracking pixels back in the day because you couldn't trust Javascript to run in the RSS readers but HTML rendering generally worked.

Email never throttled you.

Email absolutely did, absolutely. The problem with spinning up a self-hosted newsletter service in 2025 is getting your IP reputation good enough that the big mail-box vendors (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo/AOL) let you deliver. This issue was in its infancy in 2005, but was an emerging problem as IP reputation became clear as a low-cost first-pass anti-spam technique. Mailing list operators ran into this all the time back in 2005 as various subscribers moved behind security appliances doing IP reputation.

Blogs never begged for dopamine.

On a factual basis, this is false. Sole operators like myself lived for comments, that dopamine hit from people liking what I wrote. If I couldn't get that, I'd enjoy reshare statistics (see the first point about RSS tracking). Many commercial blogging platforms even created RSS feeds for comments on specific articles to make it easier to keep up on discussions. If that isn't dopamine, I don't know what is.

The old web wasn’t perfect.
But it was yours.

True, to a point. I tagged this article blogger because that's what I hosted this blog through for most of its first decade.  You know, a centralized blogging platform akin to LiveJournal or Dreamwidth back then, or Medium and Substack today. I didn't own the platform. After I moved to my own domain and Movable Type, this was true. And yeah, it wasn't perfect but it was most definitely mine.

There is another layer to this post beyond the simply factual, and that's a critique of platforms. Blogging in its heyday was perhaps the last major gasp of the Old Internet, where a bunch of hobbyists create something beautiful and widely adopted, which then gets enclosed by commercial interests. Blogging was absolutely not centralized. That lack of centralization means there was no unitary profit motive looking to drive engagement to increase sales, those were limited to individual sites.

Blogging's decline is traceable to two big trends:

• Google killed Google Reader, which was the dominant RSS reader by a long shot. This death forced a bunch of folks to look for alternate platforms. My stats show my readership plummeted over 50% on death-day.
• Twitter and other early social media provided a much shorter dopamine feedback loop than the blog-publish-comments loop.

The fact that Google Reader's death functionally killed RSS-based distribution is proof that blogging was already beginning to centralize. Google couldn't control production and distribution, only engagement; and the real money was in controlling all three. Google wanted what Twitter had, which was the entire production, distribution, and engagement framework on the same site with the same owners and tracking infrastructure. Once they had that, start engineering dopamine feedback loops to improve stickiness and engagement; and we have all the algorithmic and dark pattern pathologies we know and loathe today.

Modern internet users have been trained for a decade in a half to expect social media to involve a single, or small number of sites to do everything, and individual posts are short enough to deal with while waiting for a bus or the kids to walk from school to car. The old blog+rss model simply can't compete with this, and better fits as attention-competition to a given user's news media consumption. Medium and Substack both offering paid subscription options for individual blogs is proof that news media is the competition to blogging, not social media.

The nostalgic exhortation to set up a blog and distribute through RSS is in the same vein as calls to return to IRC and dump Slack/Teams. Some people/groups can do that, but the platform features are different enough that the old tools don't feel feature-complete and that lack nudges folk back into the commercial walled gardens.