Venkatesh Rao with his position on the state of text media (the “Four Horsemen of Textopia”), from blogs, to Twitter threading, to ebooks and zines.
On blogs and experimenting:
One element of my broader response to the declining marginal value of virality (both financial and psychological) has been my experimentation with blogchains, a format that a handful of other bloggers have also adopted. I came up with it partly as an anti-viral strategy to actively curtail and reverse traffic growth. I didn’t want to unintentionally end up in a bleeding-red go-big-or-go-home regime, since I have no appetite to go big.
Another is my experimentation with getting rid of headlines (ie a human-centric discovery/addressing/packaging layer). You might have noticed that I’m doing a new blogchain with titles in the format MJD xxxx. It’s the opposite of clickbait. It’s active click-hostility. Things without evocative names have less of a chance of going viral and causing big spikes in hosting costs.
I still have a soft spot for long-form blog content, and things like Twitter (as much as I do participate and get enjoyment from it) are slurping away the attention.