Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of Gawker.com, the flagship site of Gawker Media, a sprawling blog network that was put out of business by Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan in 2016. Nick Denton and I started Gawker in 2002 and I left in late 2003 to go to New York Magazine, so I missed some of Gawker’s greatest hits and biggest misses, but the early ‘00s were what I now think of as the heyday of blogging. (Talking Points Memo was started in 2000.)
Since then, popular blogs have been commercialized; added comment sections and video; migrated to social media platforms; and been subsumed by large media companies. The growth of social media in particular has wiped out a particular kind of blogging that I sometimes miss: a text-based dialogue between bloggers that required more thought and care than dashing off 180 or 240 characters and calling it a day. In order to participate in the dialogue, you had to invest some effort in what media professionals now call “building an audience” and you couldn’t do that simply by shitposting or responding in facile ways to real arguments.
This was largely a function of technical limitations. Commenting technology was just being developed and most blogs didn’t have it yet. While it was simple to spin up a blog with no technical knowledge — a breakthrough in itself that happened almost overnight — adding bells and whistles that allowed for easy cross-posting was difficult. Social media was basically nonexistent and what few social networks did exist (Six Degrees, or my former employer TheSquare.com) were not really used for posting news or having discussions. You couldn’t use paid advertising to direct people to your site unless you knew how to use digital ad systems which were also expensive and inaccessible to consumers in the days before Google AdSense and programmatic ads more generally.
So if you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it.
I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face. Before social media, if someone wanted to engage with you, they had to come to your house and be civil before you’d give them the time of day or let them in. And if they wanted you to engage with them, they’d have to make their own house compelling enough that you’d want to visit.
Social media is more like the town square, but without the norms and laws of an actual town square. Anonymity, in particular, allows bad actors to do malicious things with few consequences outside of account suspension, which can generally be worked around by simply spinning up a new account. There is little downside to being suspended, especially for determined trolls who are not trying to engage in any kind of healthy dialogue, but only to harass and create havoc.
(I say all of this as someone who grew up in a very rural place and loves the big city. This is not a knock on real-life town squares, which are generally governed by more than a vague terms-of-service agreement with boilerplate legalese that’s impenetrable and largely unenforceable.)
Early blogging was slower, less beholden to the hourly news cycle, and people were more inclined to talk about personal enthusiasms as well as what was going on in the world because blogs were considered an individual enterprise, not necessarily akin to a regular publication. One of my early blogs was mostly about economics, a Ukrainian punk band called Gogol Bordello, politics, and a bar on Canal street that turned into an Eastern European disco every night around midnight.
I did not expect Gawker to be as popular as it was, and had been working as an equity analyst when we started it. It quickly became a full-time job, and my personal theory about why it succeeded in the beginning is that it covered New York City media, and media people like to read about themselves. Eventually, they liked it enough that they wanted to write about it. We got a lot of early press coverage when Gawker had fewer than 20,000 users a month, which at the time seemed like an astronomical number of readers, but in the age of social media, SEO, syndication, and site referrals, would be considered an epic failure.
And those people were what product people would refer to as power users. They were invested as regular readers: they sent me emails and tips, thoughtful feedback, and sometimes very, very detailed critiques, lengthy and baroque.
As a writer who often works out what I think in the writing, this felt very stimulating even when I was writing about frivolous things — what Anna Wintour did in the Condé Nast elevator, why everyone in Williamsburg was wearing John Deere mesh caps, and what junior investment bankers were paying for bottle service at Marquee. But it was more valuable to me in the sense that it allowed me to read and engage with other people who were attacking more serious issues. (This is around the time I first met Josh Marshall.)
I grew up in a very right-wing, conservative family in rural Alabama. My dad was a local lineman and my mom was a janitor at my school, and we were Southern Baptist. Before I went to college (to be indoctrinated by liberals, as my family puts it) I don’t think I knew a single liberal or progressive, or at least not one my age. I was also in an information bubble — the internet technically existed but no one I knew had access to it in the mid ‘90s — and my only source of information outside of my tiny K-12 school, a former segregation academy, was the public library, which the right is now trying to censor for the exact reason that it presents a threat to actual (right-wing) indoctrination.
I was the first person in my family to go to college and by the time I left, I was sliiightly more liberal than I had been going in — not because anyone indoctrinated me but because I had more exposure to information, people who were not like me, and viewpoints I had not considered before. At 22, I would have probably identified as a socially liberal libertarian. (Now I think that’s a contradiction in terms, but 22 year old me figured if you were pro-choice and pro-drug legalization, that was enough, and it was still a big departure from the white Evangelical Christian dogma I was taught as a child.) I have a wide range of interests and am, I think, a reasonably curious person, so I often sought out conversations online with people I disagreed with and read them to better understand where they were coming from and to figure out what I thought. Some of the people who changed my thinking over time were early bloggers — both because there were new people I read whose views I began to agree with and also because there were people I started out reading whose views I began to reject, and some of which I eventually found abhorrent.
Research tells us that most people remain fairly ideologically aligned with their parents over time, and a full realignment is rare. When it does happen, it’s usually over a matter of decades. Mine happened much faster. I went from being a college Republican to a registered Democrat in less than five years, and my worldview felt like it had expanded tremendously. This is not because I change my mind easily or quickly but because my worldview was constantly challenged. I don’t attribute this solely to the internet — living in a city that isn’t culturally monolithic was a big factor too — but I am the kind of person who works out ideas through words, digital or otherwise. The sort of considered back and forth I remember from the thoughtful members of the early blogosphere is something that is harder to find now. It’s often drowned out by the firehose of social media, or simply harder to pay attention to because our brains are so addled from constant digital stimulation.
There are bright spots, though. I fear we’re in a newsletter bubble (how many subscriptions can one person pay for?) but the kind of longer, considered personal writing that I miss can be found in this form if you’re willing to look for it. And if you’re writing a newsletter yourself, it’s harder for someone with the handle @horseshit1962 to bury your argument under last year’s brainrot memes the way they can so easily on platforms like X or Facebook.
Some of the best blogs have evolved and expanded. Independent media is more important than ever, and Donald Trump’s recent attempts to censor mainstream outlets, comedians he doesn’t like, and “leftist” professors underscore the fact that speech is critical. The lesson for me, from the early blogosphere, is that quality of speech matters, too. There’s a part of me that hopes that the most toxic social media platforms will quietly implode because they’re not conducive to it, but that is wishcasting; as long as there are capitalist incentives behind them, they probably won’t. I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.
Trump may be able to intimidate Bob Iger, but it’s actually a lot harder to intimidate a million different outlets, each run by a single determined person.