Marco Arment, on the state of blogging in 2015:
Every hour we spend on Twitter or Facebook instead of reading and writing elsewhere is just making this worse — and I’m as guilty as anyone.
Social networks have powerful benefits and are here to stay. But like any trend, we’ve swung too far in that direction for our own good, as both producers and consumers. I hope the pendulum starts to swing back soon, because it hasn’t yet. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.
If we want it to get better, we need to start pushing back against the trend, modernizing blogs, and building what we want to come next.
As someone who just recently caught a second-wind for blogging, this is somewhat depressing.
And yet, I completely understand where Marco is coming from. Big corporate news organizations have flocked to social media (like we all have), and have inspired terrible and distracting habits for readers. How can they (we) focus on all the good content out there, when we are constantly bombarded with Google ad-laden-social-media-clickbait garbage?
Marco’s thoughts seem to align with what Ben Thompson recently had to say on the issue.
Here he is defending the concept of a one-man blog as a business:
The honest truth is [that] my fervent belief in the individual blog not only as a product but also as a business is what led to my founding this site, not the other way around. And, after this past weekend’s “blogging-is-dead” overdose, I almost feel compelled to note that my conclusion – and experience – is the exact opposite of Klein’s and all the others’: I believe that Sullivan’s The Daily Dish will in the long run be remembered not as the last of a dying breed but as the pioneer of a new, sustainable journalism that strikes an essential balance to the corporate-backed advertising-based “scale” businesses that Klein (and the afore-linked Smith) is pursuing.
My biggest question for Marco: what exactly does he think is next for blogs?