Sci-fi author John Scalzi did what most of us didn’t do: He didn’t give up on his website.

Unlike most people, he never left his blog for social media. Instead, he used social media as a way to amplify the content he created and communicate with his readers.

When Twitter melted down, he was largely unaffected. Sure, he slowed down his tweeting, but just knuckled down on diversifying his social media channels. (Just how he can spread himself across so many channels is a marvel even to me.)

Fortunately, as noted, I still have this place. It just keeps going.

John Scalzi, State of Personal Social Media

Here’s another thing he does well. Personal blogging. And I think that is the secret to his active comments section – he never gave up on blogging his way SEO and algorithms bedamned.

For the longest time I thought I was an old fogey for missing the Internet of the 2000s, when blogs were about ordinary people sharing about their lives. And although they still do on Facebook, they are now behind corporate-controlled walled gardens where algorithms control what you can see.

I miss having a community of friends who sit down at the computer, reflect about their day, and write about their lives at length. I miss reading thoughtful, personal content from non-celebrities and “average” people I admire. 

Megan Portorreal, Bring Back the Blog: The Rise and Fall of Personal Blogging

For authors, personal blogging may be key to their marketing efforts. It’s so fun it might as well not be marketing! Another favourite author of mine, Anne R Allen also wrote something along the same lines in her post, Writers: Why Blogging is Essential in the Era of Fragmenting Social Media.

Author blogs are easy, fun, and only need to appeal to your target book readership, not vast hordes of consumers. They’re a venue for entertainment and information, not a hard-sell advertising machine. And they don’t need to take much time. 

Anne R Allen

It feels as if the voices of common people are being drowned out by people with deep pockets for ad dollars and who can hire content creators to produce content at a scale an ordinary people can’t compete with.

Due to SEO practices & #socialmedia personal blogs are being drowned out in search engines. That’s a shame because, as this article says, “Personal stories on personal #blogs are historical documents”
Strengthen your home on the Internet with a #blog, on a #website you own. Forget about #writing to SEO. Tell your story. Build a mailing list, develop a community from your home.

https://www.theverge.com/23513418/bring-back-personal-blogging

The comments about the article on HackerNews is interesting as well: https://brianlovin.com/hn/34207842

Doesn’t help that Google often de-ranks non-corporate content.

They used to ensure a mix of results: some blogs, some forum posts, some reviews, some videos. Now it’s just the bigger players.

https://brianlovin.com/hn/34207842

With AI tools coming to play in, of all places, search engines, this problem is going to be massively worse. Personal blogs may disappear from search engines altogether as people try to game the AI to appear in search, or Google or Bing or whatever prioritizes content that gives them ad dollars.

The solution is not to give in and resign yourself to your fate.

There are already separate discovery ecosystems where individual content are being highlighted. The problem is they are controlled by corporations still: WordPress.com has a great discovery feature, Substack as well. But how long until algorithms come in and mess things up?

We, the ordinary people, need to form our ecosystem, separate from the corporate-owned web. The question is, how?