Is blogging cool again?

Back in ye olden days, pretty much everyone had their own blog. Reading blogs were like watching YouTube videos. Some people even got super popular blogs and became influencers (or "popular bloggers" as we used to call it).

Nowadays, our attention spans are low, with things like Reels, Shorts and TikTok. Now, I am guilty of using them myself, and my ADHD ass already has a low attention span, but I have noticed how bad they can be for you.

Short-form content like reels give you exactly what you want in a bite-sized format, with an algorithm telling you what you want. The issue I see with this is that the short-form content is much longer than we had a decade ago with Vine, which gives the uploader more time to capture your attention (or lose it), making sure you stick around longer.

A decade ago, we had Vine. This was somewhat similar to the short-form content we have now, but they were limited to 6 seconds only. It was criticised even back then, but looking back it was a lot better than what we have nowadays. The 6 second limit also made the creators thing differently and forced them to be creative to make entertaining videos. We don't have that these days. There is a reason why Vine compilations got big after Vine got shut down (though it was partly due to nostalgia and missing the app).

To me, both short-form and long-form contents can be quite addicting and take up way too much time. I find myself spending way too much time on YouTube these days. The one thing I truly miss is being able to read more, especially things like blogs. Even after blogging stopped being popular, we still had Twitter. Twitter was never a proper blog, but it was a microblogging platform where you could post your thoughts in less than 140 characters. I used to spend so much time on Twitter back in the day. However, around 2019-2020, Twitter got so bad that I stopped using it, and then Elon Musk bought it and turned it into X. Even alternatives like Bluesky and Mastodon hasn't really done it for me. I do miss the old days of Twitter.

Blogging (or macro-blogging?) is not something I have seen in nearly 20 years. I am old enough to remember blogs, but young enough to not having explored them much. I do want that to change, however. I think writing is super fun, and reading words on a screen can be quite fun as well.

My plan with this blog is to try keep it active with my thoughts, and whatever garbage I can think of doing (and I do a lot of garbage). We'll see how well this goes.