I personally started blogging in 2001 so I feel qualified to inject some opinions. Whilst the early blogging scene was cool, we should not glorify it too much.

I personally started blogging in 2001 so I feel qualified to inject some opinions. Whilst the early blogging scene was cool, we should not glorify it too much. Even then it wasn't mainstream. Most people did not blog and the few that did were mostly unsuccessful. Centralization was a thing from the very start. "Blog rolls" would ultimately aggregate into a few winning bloggers, whilst the rest gets near-zero traction. Just like the influencer model of today. It seems codified into the internet, the extreme inequality of distribution of attention. So I frown upon terms like "golden ages". There was no golden age. It didn't really work well back then for most people and in today's radically different landscape even more odds are stacked against you. Discovery is even more of an issue than before, there's basically no mainstream platform/app to discover blogs. Not even Google Search delivers. That puts blogging into the enthusiast sphere, same as it always was. Due to saturation and dumbed down mobile phones/apps, engagement will be underwhelming and razor thin. There will be little engagement and most of it will be shallow. If not toxic. The one thing I do remember as vastly better were comments/conversations. People were far more relaxed, reasonable, open-minded, less polarized. Having a comment section on almost every site was common, not so much anymore. Similarly, the changed landscape of extreme polarization online means you have to weigh your words very carefully. Best to blog about something extremely boring/neutral. None of this suggests that you shouldn't blog. I'm just saying there will be no blogging revival as it never was a mainstream tool and in a world with the masses now online, even less so. "Twitter threads just don’t do the trick — and neither will Elon’s alleged plan for allowing 4,000-character tweets (I swear, if I see anyone tweeting out 4,000 characters, that is an immediate block)." Not getting this self-own. You block a person forever for the single act of posting long form content, which likely will be visually presented in a truncated way? And one writes this in an article making the case for the return of blogs?