Justin Jacobs

I am so back, baby! 

To blogging that is. If there was a theme to whatever-the-hell 2023 was, I would say it was the year when the social internet started to fracture. While it’s easy to assign most of the blame on one belligerent billionaire for destroying Twitter, I think there has been a growing malaise within the public arena online that made spending our entire days there unsustainable. We’ve all known for years that places like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are weaponized to keep us starting at our phones by any means necessary, but it feels like this was the year that all of these monoliths started to crack with features nobody wants, algorithms that will take you from puppy photos to extremist propaganda in seconds, and a general blandness that has made these places just feel not great to hang out in. 

In the months since Twitter essentially broke I’ve found myself a bit of an internet nomad. There has been a mad dash by social networks like Blue Sky, Threads and Mastodon to fill the void left in Elon’s wake, but none of these would-be successors seem to have what it takes.

 As much as I love Mastodon’s plucky, indie spirit, their basic onboarding and UI was too obscure to gain traction within the broader Twitter using public. Those in the techsphere who I follow were quick to jump ship to Mastodon, and pretty much everyone who has made their home there seems to love it. Every time I log on it seems like my feed is full of fun, clever posts that are mostly about apps and podcasts. It feels a lot like the early days of Twitter, before the politics, sports and culture writers jumped aboard 

I deleted my Facebook account in 2016 for reasons I probably don’t have to explain, but I kept my Instagram because it was still a pretty pure and enjoyable photo viewing experience. Now Instagram is basically a place for older people who don’t want to download TikTok to watch Reels. I’m guilty of this. You have to choose which devils you want to dance with. I chose mine.

I thought it was smart for the Meta Corp to leverage their huge Instagram user base to create their own Twitter competitor in Threads, which came out of the gate with the basic structure of a microblogging platform that most Twitter users could easily pick up. Creating a sign-up process and friend finder that uses your existing Instagram account makes getting up and running fairly seamless. Threads has been the number one free app on iOS for a while now. I’ve honestly been impressed by how quickly Threads has been able to improve in every way except…

The algorithm!

 My god the For You section of Threads is a tire fire that makes even Twitter’s algorithm based feed seem good in comparison. It’s not just that Threads defaults you to a feed of suggested posts, it’s that 90 percent of these posts either have no bearing on any of my interest, or are genuinely offensive content that shouldn’t be allowed on any social network. It’s truly baffling how bad their algorithm for suggested content is given how good it seems to be on Instagram. Whenever I start scrolling through my reels I’m immediately shown a buffet of old wrestling promos, food videos, Barry Sanders highlights, and whatever other random marginalia that fits my interest almost to a T. Since most of my follows on Threads are the same as my follows from Instagram, I’m not sure how my For You page is such a dumpster fire. Meta really needs to get it figured out. They have a ton of momentum right now. Even people who seemed extremely loyal to Mastodon and genuinely seem to hate Facebook have been dipping their toes in. 

Then there’s Blue Sky, the project started by former Twitter founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey. If you’re the type of person who spent way too much time on Twitter you may remember how excited everyone was when Blue Sky was announced. The promise of just going back to a stripped down Twitter like we used to use seemed too good to be true. It was. The rollout of Blue Sky has been excruciating slow. They are using an invite only sign-up process that has been hilarious to watch as people from Twitter with enough klout try to jump ship, but since their audience is still in the old place, they can never truly be free. When I finally got my hands on an invite code I found the Blue Sky to be the new home of the Reply Guy, and since all replies to people you floor seem to show up on the main feed, the entire reading experience on Blue Sky is a nightmare. Maybe there is an option to turn off the replies, but I honestly haven’t been interested enough in the platform to dig around the interface. 

Then of course there is still Twitter, or X, but I’m going to keep calling it Twitter until that place is burned into a pile of ash. I know that I look back on the history of Twitter with rose colored glasses. I have been using the site since 2007, and for almost a decade truly loved spending time there. It quickly replaced my RSS feeds as the way I took in the internet. As politics and public opinion started to mix heavily with social media, it became clear that a place like Twitter was probably going to do more harm than good. A site made to share links and clever quips is no place for heated political debate. In the years since late-2015 I’ve really soured on Twitter being anything other than a place to keep track of whatever my favorite writers are working on. When Elon took over and immediately ripped out Twitter’s heart – their API that allowed apps like TweetDeck and Twitterific to provide pure feeds of people you follow without ads to operate – I knew the end was nigh. These days Twitter feels like the desert hills of Mad Max. Just users that refuse to go to a different social media site for whatever reason posting into a barren sea of ads for sex toys, prepper shelters, and the most obnoxious Blue Check users on the planet. 

So where does that leave me, dear reader? Well I’ve been spending considerably less time on social media. I will check in on Mastodon, Threads and Twitter a couple times a day, but it’s no longer my go-to distraction throughout the day. In the wake of Twitter’s collapse I’ve also found myself going back to browsing the web like the good 2000’s era blog boy that I am. Most days I’ll head over to the NY Times to take in some news, play the Crossword as well as Wordle and Connections. After that I’ll run through my go to news sources NPR, Washington Post, BBC, and I’ll listen to something like NPR’s Up First podcast to fill me in on anything I may have missed news-wise from the day before. There’s a ton of other podcasts that I listen to throughout the week but that’s probably a subject for another day. 

The thing I still love most about the internet are the blogs that have somehow survived through the Web 2.0 era. Places like Daring Fireball, Kottke.org, Waxy.org and Defector (formerly the OG Deadspin crew) are truly a joy to visit. These sites are run by people who have something to say in more than 170-500 characters. I love blogs because they give the space needed for a person to be three dimensional on the internet. When you read a good blog you know that the person writing it has taken some time to get their thoughts together. There’s a level of care that it takes to jump into a word document, scribble something down, then jump into a CMS before you get to the shiny red launch button that is “Post.” Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s art in firing off a perfect Tweet. It just pales in comparison with the sincerity of someone taking the time to explain why they love… or hate in a longer format. 

I’m not so naïve to believe that social networks are going to go away in the next decade. I get that people’s lives are full of a million things that make it difficult to sit down and read thousands of words online everyday. I do hope that while we try to figure out what the hell social media means in 2024, we take back some control of how we both try to consume and create online. I would very much love it if the conversations we chose to have with each other in these virtual social spaces had a little more meaning in these turbulent times.

Long live the blog.