Natural Enemies
Put two bloggers in a room and watch the extraordinary performance of mutual goodwill. "Love what you’re doing." "Yours is great too." It has the energy of a Cold War summit: formal smiles, careful language, and the constant awareness that you are competing for the same finite pool of attention. The hostility is real. It just gets laundered into politeness the moment someone might be watching.
Online, the mask comes off. Why did that brand invite her to their event and not me? What does she have that I don’t? These questions run as background processes in every blogger’s head, whether they admit it or not. A blogging scene is not a community so much as a crowd of individuals who’ve agreed to call themselves one.
Which is why Blog Battle landed with the force it did. The premise was simple: two blogs enter, one wins, you click. Hot or Not for the blogosphere, built on the same brutal economy of the split-second judgment. Someone makes a snap decision based on a screenshot and somewhere a fashion blogger refreshes her analytics wondering why her traffic suddenly dipped.
The reactions were illuminating in their range. Vanessa Blome found it funny, if disorienting: I don’t always know every blog.
Lisa Bäuerle, whose blog had landed in the top fifty, still wasn’t sure what it meant: What exactly does this achieve? Not that I’m complaining, but still…
Annemarie Pohle just couldn’t stop clicking. And Franziska Kopka named the darker inevitability—the moment when teenagers start mobilizing their followers to game the rankings, turning a novelty into a junior varsity arms race.
Jakob Adler went further. The whole concept reduced blogs to a screenshot-level first impression—no one would actually read the thing they were voting on. The outcomes would be driven not by quality but by personal grievance: That bitch stole my friend’s article idea and she’s ugly anyway.
A judgment that has nothing to do with writing and everything to do with the social dynamics that blogging was supposed to transcend.
He’s not wrong. There’s something both honest and depressing about a tool that makes explicit what was always operating beneath the surface of blogging culture. The competition was always there; Blog Battle just gave it a UI. In response to the criticism, the site eventually removed the losers list—only winners displayed now, which solves approximately none of the underlying problem but makes the whole enterprise feel slightly less like a public humiliation engine. Around five hundred blogs were in rotation. The winners at that point included Laufmasche, Schwerelos, and Hypnotized. Whether anyone remembers them now is another question entirely.