The Dinosaurs Still Own Your Feed
The RSS readers I knew hadn’t changed in years. The same blogs sitting at the top of every chart, the same names filling every feed, and below them—nothing. A generation of people who might have had something interesting to say had decided that the better use of their energy was collecting likes and reblogs, which I understand intellectually but can’t quite forgive. The established blogs—the ones that had been running since the mid-2000s—still dominated every corner of the space. Nobody was replacing them. The pipeline was empty.
What I keep waiting for is new writers who understand what a blog is actually good for. Personal blogs are the hardest and most necessary category: someone writing about their life with the skill and nerve to make it worth reading by strangers. The barrier isn’t technical—WordPress exists, domains cost almost nothing—it’s that you need two things that don’t always coexist: a genuine voice and enough exhibitionism to actually use it. Not lifestyle content, not aspirational journaling, but a real person, specific and messy, writing about what happens to them with enough honesty that reading it feels like meeting someone. I’ve been trying to do this for years. I know how hard it is and how necessary it is to keep trying.
The collaborative version—a group of people with genuinely different sensibilities working under a shared name—can work if the tension between them stays visible. Rookie understood this: not a house style, but a set of voices that argued with each other even when they didn’t mean to. Most group blogs make the mistake of smoothing everything into consensus until nobody’s personality survives. The ones that last let the friction show.
At the other extreme from personal writing is pure curation. Pick a subject, stake territory, post everything that moves through the internet about it, and do it fast. Hypebeast built an empire on sneakers and streetwear this way. Beautiful/Decay did it with art. Booooooom with photography. The model works, but it requires a discipline harder than it looks—multiple posts daily, a wide net of source feeds, and enough taste to make your selections feel like editorial judgment rather than aggregation. The laptop becomes a second body.
Fashion blogging was already overcrowded and has since become near-total wallpaper. Daily outfit posts multiplied until the signal disappeared. But Swedish bloggers like Kenza proved the format could be elevated—strong opinions, high-quality photography, an actual personality that came through the images rather than just posing in front of them. The difference between a fashion blog and a personal style journal is whether you have something to say about the clothes or just about wearing them.
Pure music blogs—here’s a song, here’s the tracklist, here’s the press release rewritten in your voice—have been mostly dead for years. They compete directly with the platforms and labels that distribute music faster without needing an intermediary. The ones that survived found something to add: real interviews, early premieres, essays about what a record meant beyond its credits. Stereogum understood this. Hipster Runoff, in its strange way, understood it better than most—it turned music criticism into absurdist performance art about the culture consuming the music. That version of music writing is still almost entirely uninhabited.
Political blogging attracts two kinds of writers: the comfortable pundit who discovered RSS in 2006 and hasn’t updated their politics since, and the person who found conviction before they found nuance. Both could be replaced to everyone’s benefit. What’s missing is the version that can hold rigorous analysis and genuine cultural commentary in the same piece—not partisan point-scoring or outrage-as-content, but actual thinking done in public. Netzpolitik, the German tech-policy and press-freedom blog, showed that intellectual seriousness wasn’t incompatible with being readable. That space exists in every language and is mostly empty in all of them.
Tech writing has the largest potential readership of any online category and the worst ratio of content to actual reader. Sites like Engadget and Mashable speak to the person who already knows and already cares. What’s missing is the bridge: someone who can explain what the technology does to people who use it without caring about the specs. That audience is everyone who owns a phone but can’t name the chip inside it, which is most of the world.
The easiest throne is the one nobody else wanted. Find something specific enough that the mainstream only notices it when someone dies or when it briefly surfaces in a trend piece, and become the definitive voice on it. The readership will be small and entirely yours. The risk is the horizon shrinking—the niche becomes the whole world, and the perspective that made you interesting inside it curdles into something defensive and provincial.
Sex writing has the highest ceiling and the most consistent failures in all of blogging. The gap between pornography and serious discussion about sex is enormous, and almost everyone who tries to fill it falls into either prudishness or vulgarity without the intelligence that makes either one interesting. Slutever showed what was possible when someone wrote about sex with actual candor—not titillation, not education, just honest reporting from a personal life. That space is still mostly vacant, waiting for people with both the nerve and the craft.
And then there’s the only category I actually care about: whatever nobody else is doing. Notes of Berlin photographed the handwritten notes strangers leave around the city. Paula Deen Riding Things did exactly what the name promises. These projects seem absurd until they’re completely obvious—one-person operations following an idea so specific that nobody else would bother. The established names will keep their readers. The algorithm will keep the feed full. But somewhere right now someone is about to start a blog about something I don’t know exists yet, and that’s still the only part of the internet I’m genuinely excited about.