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When asked why he didn’t just write his thoughts down in private, Jason Kottke replied, “The Web is the place for you to express your thoughts and feelings and such… to put those things elsewhere seems absurd.”
That was the early internet. The assumption wasn’t that you’d build an audience. It was that you’d just… post. And the web would hold it — a living document. And whoever wandered by would find it.
Substack, Medium, whatever platform is ascendant this year — they share the same basic premise: your writing is content, and content wants an audience, and audience wants to be measured. Open rates. Subscriber counts. Comments. The numbers are always there, always watching you back.
I don’t think this is neutral. I think it changes what you write.
Jia Tolentino, in Trick Mirror, makes the point bluntly: “the lively belief that an unseen audience is present… can have a significant effect.” She’s talking about the internet broadly, but it’s just as true for the act of writing on it. The moment you believe someone is watching, you start performing. You stop thinking and start presenting.
A personal blog breaks that loop. Not because no one reads it — maybe people do — but because the it doesn’t demand that they do. There’s no subscriber number staring you down. No algorithm rewarding the post that went off. Just a URL, a timestamp, and whatever you actually thought that day.
There’s something almost countercultural about it now, which is strange because it used to just be… normal.
The early web was mostly people putting things out there with no expectation of return. Nobody was building a brand. They were just making something and leaving it on the internet, the way you’d leave a note on a bulletin board.
That’s closer to what writing actually is. Not a product. Not a signal. Just a person thinking out loud, and whoever finds it, finds it.
The people who care will always find the things they care about. That’s how the internet worked before it was colonized by engagement metrics, and it’s still how it works underneath all of that noise. You don’t need to optimize for discoverability. You need to say something true, and the right people — however few — will show up eventually.
Kottke had it right. Putting it anywhere else — any place that makes you feel the audience first, the thought second — does seem kind of absurd.
The blog was never the primitive version of what we have now. It might’ve been the honest one.