We're in a weird limbo shift without the right cultural infrastructure to encourage, support, distribute, and curate good quality personal writing and research.
If people are writing thoughtful, quality things on personal sites or gardens, I don't know how we'd ever find them.
RSS isn't dead. Following single sites still works.
But community distribution and curation are the missing pieces.
@sod Seems a bit arrogant of Venkatesh Rao (in the post linked by Maggie Appleton) to claim the death of blogs (for the how-manyth time?) mainly because he's changing his focus.
@devilgate Yeah, I'm with you. It's also weird that he ends the post with, and I'm paraphrasing here, see you at my new blog hosted on Substack. 😊 (As they put it themselves, Substack is just "[a] blog – but with email.")
@jonah I do follow a few Substack writers through my feed reader, but I haven't really used the service for discovery. I'll have to give it a try.
I agree with Maggie that this is an issue for a lot of people, but personally, I've worked around it by following a variety of interesting people, newsletters, and linkblogs. I also keep an eye on sites like are.na and lobste.rs, where stuff I care about tends to bubble up. It does take more effort compared to just having everything handed to you by an engagement algorithm, though.
