In the really old days not that many people blogged. It was kinda weird. There’d be a handful of folk in your circle of interest who also blogged, and you’d maybe have a Blogroll linking out to their blogs and/or feeds.
In the old days, a bit after that, more people started blogging, and one had to be organised about following what was written. The fantastic technology that is RSS came about. I used Google Reader (RIP) and followed a ton of blogs. Then Google Reader was infamously killed off, and I switched to Feedly. Then I…dunno. I moved jobs, I didn’t have time, I made excuses, whatever. I stopped following blogs so closely, and instead got my current tech news from Twitter and from colleagues. This was all about seven years ago, and I even wrote about it.
In that time, probably around the late 2010’s, RSS started to fade (View Highlight)
his is to my eternal horror, and an illustration of the enshittification of the internet. Instead of having an easy way to share material openly using an standard and open format that people could consume with whatever platform or tool they wanted, a bunch of smart people wanting to make money off other people’s content decided it was far more sensible to put up walls. Instead of being able to pull a set of RSS feeds into one place, the reader would instead traipse around numerous platforms to read the material there. Eyeballs, amirite? That, plus a lively tech twitter scene and some clever algorithms meant that folk got their fill of tech news directly. It might have been from blogs, but often direct linked instead of from an RSS feed being followe (View Highlight)
