The Blogs Are Dead
Blogsport’s closing down and I keep thinking about what that means—thirteen years they ran it, started by two students back in 2005 who just built it for their friends, and then they had to open it up because there was so much interest. By 2009 it was growing crazy-fast, exponentially, so they actually made it professional. Georg Klauda ended up basically running the whole thing unpaid, which makes sense why after thirteen years of dealing with servers and support emails and legal complaints and taxes, while not actually blogging yourself, you’d just be done. We’re exhausted,
he said, and I believe him.
The interesting part—or maybe the sad part—is that 2009 was peak blogging in a way that won’t happen again. Not the hype of it, but the actual reality of it. Real people were maintaining their own blogs, linking to each other, commenting on each other’s posts. There was maybe ten thousand blogs on Blogsport at some point, though only a few hundred were active when they shut it down. Everyone eventually moved to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. You take a photo with your phone, it’s instantly there, the algorithm shows it to people. A blog requires someone to actually go find it, sit down, read words. That friction doesn’t scale the way frictionless platforms do.
The archive situation is the thing that gets to me, I think. All that writing, thirteen years of it, and they want to save it but the legal situation is impossible. People want their old stuff deleted—everyone has things from their twenties they’re embarrassed about. Someone has to be responsible for it all, forever, and that’s not a burden anyone’s going to take on for free. So maybe they’ll preserve it offline, make it available some way that’s not public. Maybe not. Either way something gets lost.
It gets to me, how every corner of the internet that wasn’t owned by Facebook or Google or Twitter is just getting absorbed into them now. You hear people say blogs are dead and have been for years, but Blogsport closing is like a final proof, something concrete that marks when the internet actually changed from being something people ran to something people used.