How To Destroy A Blog

You notice it everywhere—the ugliest websites are usually the most successful. MySpace, before they destroyed it. Facebook. YouTube. Google. Wikipedia. Something about an obscene design makes people invest more time in it, put more emotion into the space. The ugliness matches the person using it, maybe. Or maybe it just doesn’t matter what it looks like.

Hipster Runoff had no business working. Bright clashing colors, horrible layout, the design actively hostile. But Carles, the guy behind it, had built something that actually worked. He wrote about bad music, kids melting down on the internet, the weird behavior of online culture. The comments were insane. People cared enough to fight in those threads.

Then Carles got tired. After years of this, he lost interest and decided to focus on his fashion brand—basically just a t-shirt. He handed the whole thing off to a couple of new writers.

The readers tore into them. For a solid week the comments were a bloodbath. Fraud. Betrayal. They wanted Hipster Runoff to die. They were that angry.

Carles came back a few days later, removed the new writers, tried to save it. Too late. Some readers were already gone. Others thought it was calculated. And some just decided they didn’t want Carles back anymore.

Here’s the thing that everyone has to learn the hard way: a blog is only as good as the person writing it. The design is irrelevant. The logo is irrelevant. The brand doesn’t matter. You can’t just swap out the author and expect the thing to survive. The voice is everything.

Meanwhile, I wonder where Robert Basic is these days. Someone should set him up with a free WordPress account, get him writing again. Even if it’s just about why he was ever famous in the first place.