Blogs did not break the web

Reminiscing about the old-school web is probably an underground hobby for everyone who was an active internet user between 1990 and 2010. I for one welcome every opportunity to do so and the most recent prompt came by way of Amy Hoy’s article titled ‘How the blog broke the web’¹. The premise of Amy’s article is that the internet was a wonderfully quirky place until democratised publishing tools came along that streamlined the process of getting stuff onto the web, and normalised certain practices around regular updates while killing others more aligned with static content, resulting in the reverse-chronological default organisation of content we see online today.

I

Let us, for a moment, assume blogs had never existed. Content on the web would have increased anyway, and that content would have had to be sorted in some manner. Unless everyone collectively decided to manually, continually reorder an ever-expanding stream of content, it was only a matter of time before we either automated the process or resorted to the most basic form of organising content we know.

Think of the diary, or the commonplace book. Both spiritual predecessors of the modern weblog. Neither is arranged by topic, season, theme, alphabet or mood. They are arranged chronologically simply because without knowing all content that will be produced in the future, there is no way of organising them. The same idea moved on to the web as a sensible default.

Is Wikipedia organised reverse-chronologically? Is the utterly fantastic Melon land organised reverse-chronologically? These are not websites with content that benefit from any specific organisation and so they are not. But this, my website, does benefit from reverse chronological ordering as a sensible default; and yet it also benefits from a search bar, thematic organisation etc.

Let us not forget the bygone era of skeuomorphism. The web was not always ’virtual’. It started out as a series of digital equivalents to physical entities and continued this way until we, as a society, collectively developed the cognitive faculty to think in terms of purely virtual content, streams, links and organisation. And when we did we realised there is no need to stick to a single organisational structure: on the web we can organise by theme, we can organise by authors, we can organise by chronology; and reverse chronology is simply a sensible default.

II

The other aspect of blogs that Amy’s article addresses is arguably more important. The streamlined publishing process, she points out, was easy but came at a cost: ’once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost.’

So here is a tool this helps more people blog, but those people would end up blogging in a manner defined by the tool. Without the tool those people would not have blogged at all, which is a bigger problem in my eyes. But what Amy seems to miss is that the people who were building their own sites, coding by hand, also adopted these tools not simply because it made things easy to do but because adhering to a certain developing standard was seen as a form of implicit expectation.

This is not new. Imaging getting a newspaper delivered to your house with memes plastered all over. A newspaper has certain expectations to meet. With democratised publishing, blogs stepped away from diaries and commonplace books inching closer to published chronicles and novelettes and monographs. Blogs did not shed their funky attire because the new tools running them prevented that—they did not—but instead because bloggers came to see what they were doing as serious work. And if you wanted your views taken seriously, a dozen unicorn, rainbow, cupcake, motorbike and gun stickers all over your webpage was not the best way to go about it.

It is has been said often (and not always in the right context) that it is not so much about the tools as it is about the people using them. In this case at least, this stands truer than ever. Customising pages is possible even with tools that make the fundamental online publishing process itself easy. For example Kirby, a popular flat-file CMS supports art-directed pages; the process is no more complex in Statamic, another CMS which I use on this website. Likewise with others, such as the many static site generators common on the IndieWeb, personalising a webpage is neither impossible nor difficult. It is possible that you can have serious blog posts with a sober tone interspersed with funky, out-of-this-world pages for more personal content. It is possible, but we choose not to.

The benefit of tools was also what made regular updating possible. Amy’s argument that customising a website powered by these fancy new tools was ’way more work than pure HTML ever was’ is a bit misinformed. A set of purely HTML pages become increasingly harder to maintain, and well-nigh impossible to consistently update. You would need a framework sooner or later unless you wanted to either rediscover the wheel or give up on your oldest pages with every passing year to allow your website to evolve into an unrecognisable, ameboid mass of HTML files. Everyone who wrote HTML pages by hand for their websites has at some point wondered if they could keep all the common parts and just change the ones that change across pages. This is not so much an invention of or a rule imposed by blogging tools as it is logical progression. There are, for example, why diaries come with dates printed or why notebooks come with rules.

III

At the heart of the web are the people using it. In reminiscing about the web in the ’90s and ’00s we often forget that we were the very people who built those websites. And we are the same people building the reverse-chronological, sober websites today without so much as a sign of glitter or auto-playing music. The web is not a separate entity that changed. We changed just as much.

I could put a pixel sticker of, say, a hot air balloon² here if I wanted to:

But normally I would simply choose not to. When the web was a unique, sparsely populated unknown land, it saw its first explorers—quirky people looking for quirky new lands to explore. The internet was it. The people in it were it. There was once gold in the mountain river, then a massive city got built around it with a massive influx of population and the weird ones became the minority, nay even grew up, and the voice of the masses had repainted the web in their echoes.

And that is perfectly fine. That was the natural progression of an unknown world. Nobody is to blame for it, nothing is to blame for it, least of all blogs.

What we can reflect on is making the web more personal. This will not change expectations. For the near future at least, not having sparkly gifs will continue to be associated with greater credibility than having them floating around a web page. But we can have both. And to do that we need tools that can simplify various processes. Not tools that do the creative work for us but tools than make repetitive tasks simpler and more efficient. Regardless, we will need tools. Coding every website by hand will never reasonably or logically be the norm because of how inefficient it is by design. Can the minority not do that anyway? They already are.

We also need to come to terms with the fact that while we love visiting unique websites—for lack of a better word—we love it precisely because they are not everywhere. Faced with the frustration of a myriad variations and absolutely no consistency whatsoever, and sound blaring from every tab we open, web browsing can become an effortful chore.

Was it functional fixedness that prevented us from expand beynond our tools, or was the situation more nuanced? We did not submit to our tools and change the web for the worse. To hope to return absolutely would mean rediscovering evolution, somewhat like Chesterton’s fence. The people who moved to tools solely for ease did not remain with blogs either, they moved further to even easier stuff: social media. Maybe those platforms broke the web. Maybe the algorithmic suggestions that replaced reverse-chronology broke the web and, like with Mastodon, we rediscovered that the solution was reverse-chronology all along.

IV

Blogs did not break the web, they made it. Technologies come and go, nostalgia is ever-present, but to undo progress in the name of reminiscence is questionable. Where are the passionate woodworkers and gardeners today? Still on their blogs. But look up woodworking and gardening and you will find yourself on a website with SEO-compliant AI drivel. Maybe discovery is the problem and not blogs.

The people writing about woodworking might not have any interest in writing code, but blogging tools nevertheless enable them to get online and put their passion on display for the benefit of us all. Back in the nineties and noughties people with an interest in D*&*D could make a funky website with little HTML knowledge compatible with Netscape four-point-whatever but broken on everything else. Today, web design is mature enough to have become a profession and “my site only works on Firefox 14” is the lede for a joke. The bar for making funky websites is higher too but the purpose that non-chronological websites served is not lost, just different-looking. If not higher, the bar is just different. Amy admits as much:

The early web itself, of course, was pretty exclusive: first, you had to be online, then you had to know HTML, and that wasn’t enough, you also had to have a hosting account, and know how to use it. There was no royal road. Each would-be Netizen had to bushwhack their own path.

And what else is missing from the old web? The lack of ads? Bird-watching enthusiast websites without ads for binoculars. Maybe ads broke the web, not the blogs that chose to carry them because running a bird-watching forum on a server hosting hundreds of thousands of visitors needed a little more computing power than the Powerbook 180 on which Justin Hall built the world’s first weblog.

Of course a person with a blog would write on their blog in defence of blogs. But I have tried to remain objective: amidst so many things steering the web in questionable directions, weblogs have the least to answer for.