> In my opinion the answer is honestly pretty simple: blogs and RSS feeds.
This point is made very often, and I do believe it was true for many people, but I honestly didn’t care about individual blogs at all when I was a young net user.
I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it? All the action for me was on forums and chat rooms. Like the author mentions, it’s exactly the type of excitement that naturally led to early social media, which I was also a huge fan of for the close friends I already had.
The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same feeling again online. In part because I am no longer a child, in part because there are just too many people online now, in part because too many of those people’s brains are twitter-rotted.
It’s fine, I have my close circles to keep my human social spirit alive.
> I didn’t care about the 1,000 words a single person wrote about their trip abroad. There was no way to interact with it?
I wonder, have you ever read a novel? Hundreds of pages a single person wrote about a story that happened (usually) entirely in their head, printed on paper, no way to interact with it. It's a great experience if the author has some skill at this.
Yes, I have read novels. I don’t think blog posts and novels compare at all.
I can't downvote, but this comment feels a little rude or standoffish towards someone who read what you wrote, thought about it, and gave a response.
You said you didn't care for 1000 words that someone wrote about their trip abroad, and that's clearly an example to illustrate something, but it's not clear what, because it's contrived and falls apart easily: nobody else really read those blogs either, people read blogs from people and topics they're interested in.
So what about 1000 word blog from an a single individual that does interest you? Or more than 1000 words from a single individual on a different topic, like a novel?
> I honestly didn’t care about individual blogs at all when I was a young net user.
Wow. This was me too. I was excited to hop on the Rockman.EXE Online forums and tell people about my homepage I was constantly redesigning/rebuilding.
> The defeatist in me feels like I will just never have that same feeling again online.
I feel you, but I’m still chasing that. Close circles are where it’s at though, maybe we gotta be happy with that. SIGH