Don’t Trade Your Original Voice

Somewhat to be expected when you repopulate your RSS reader with blogs after months of abstaining from attention paid to the blogosphere, as the links come in you end up reading a lot of blog posts about blogging, because whatever else this, that, or the other blogger posts about they’re nearly always also t some point blogging about blogging.

Which introduction means here I am again blogging about other bloggers blogging about blogging. I’ll take them in the order in which I came across them.

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Robert:

Just because we can’t feel the company doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Just because people don’t upvote, share, or comment on our posts doesn’t mean we don’t have a grateful audience. We may not hear the applause, but that doesn’t mean no one’s watching.

Leon:

And what of the blog, the platform closest to the barebones of the web, unmediated by billionaire-owned companies? In a sense blogs enjoy the perverse benefit of being unconnected by default. RSS allows subscription and notification, but doesn’t provide the means to amplify. However, there’s always the threat that a compromising post is found by people who wish you harm, especially when linking is fundamental to the practice of self-publishing online. What does a web and blogosphere that mitigates this risk even look like?

Seth:

Everyone can put text on a screen in 2025, but not everyone can write. And if you can write, you’ve got options. From a blog post, to an email, to a text message – so much of it comes from the years blogging, of publishing on the web.

Frills:

It leaves me finding other outlets to be creative, so that I'm not coding 24/7. For a while, I was sitting with the self-inflicted guilt of this. I felt I was abandoning the Indie Web space, a place that had given me energy in times gone by. But I have since worked through that: it's a hobby, not an obligation. People have still come and gone, and left messages in my guestbook to leave their mark (thank you!). That's the joy of this space, it doesn't disappear, like a post on a Facebook timeline, it persists, and will still be there when I feel the spark again to pick it back up.

Watts:

It’s as much of an age-old question as anything of the internet age is, but I think about it every few years. Slapping up a web page full of personal thoughts in 1999 didn’t carry the same weight that it does in 2024; employers, even ones literally in the internet space, didn’t necessarily do a web search on your name to see what came up.

Stephanie:

As tempting as it would be to simply reminisce about the early internet and vent about what it has become, nostalgia is seldom productive. The thought “what are you going to do about it?” kept popping into my head while skimming through the comments on the aforementioned Reddit post. What I’m going to do about it is dust off that part of my brain that was once devoted to regular blogging and document my attempts to reestablish a healthier relationship with the internet.

Cassie:

There is joy and value in expressing ourselves how we are, not how some bullshit external rules tell us how to be — because there is always one culture or mode of expression that is valued by the people making the AI, and those who exist outside of that hegemony are treated as wrong and in need of revision. I don’t want to sound like an elementary schooler who never learned to use a comma and therefore simply avoids them. I want to experience the beautiful, unique minds of the bloggers I follow. I want authenticity, not the yassified, sanitized version of you. I will continue to cling to my strung-out sentences.

Sebastian:

This is the essence of blogging. This diversity. Sometimes surprising. Unpredictable associations, insights, comparisons, or observations. A touch of madness in everyday life that can entertain, surprise, and show how different we are, and yet in this diversity we love to provide ourselves with pleasant experiences and spend time together.

Sophie:

I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them. I’m writing about things I care about because I like sharing and I like teaching. I spend hours writing these posts and AI spends seconds summarising them.

Ava:

The containerization of many aspects of ours is widespread on the web. Separate social media accounts or blogs for any interest or purpose or influencers pandering to a very specific niche. It's difficult to find people to follow online that don't do this, because the algorithmic pressure rewards this behavior. Embrace that you stand out being more authentic and human online, existing outside of these algorithms. It means you're someone that is relatable and has many different facets to explore, instead of being a brandsafe, one-sided image of a person.

Ratika:

Usually anniversary posts are accompanied by looking back on what things have been like and any lessons learned. But I don’t have anything interesting to share. I have enjoyed writing here, and I know that I will keep coming back, as I’ve done several times, after thinking that I was done with blogging.

Apis:

Occasionally I’ll look through the posts again, give them a reread, and sometimes I even feel inclined to finish one. Every time I try this, though, I find myself trying to rewrite large chunks of the post. I’ll rewrite this or that sentence. I’ll move this paragraph over here. No, that’s not the right sentiment for that section, let’s rephrase that. By the time I’ve run out of steam, I still have a draft on my hands, but now it looks a little different. Now I’ve left myself an echo of an echo.

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I’m especially stuck on, in one case, and struck by, in the other, two things in particular from all of this.

First, the thing I’m stuck on is Seth’s post is a response to something on the Substack of someone who’d just joined Andreessen Horowitz, and it takes as its title a subheading it found there: “Blogging is a trade.” I dislike this intensely, especially since it comes in the context of a quote wherein the Substacker in question says, “Winning, for bloggers, means writing the reference take on a good topic.”

This is not winning for bloggers, at least not writ large, although it’s almost certainly winning for the subset of bloggers who aren’t bloggers but in fact and instead are content marketers.

To be clear: this is also winning for some subset of actual bloggers, too, since there are plenty of, say, personal bloggers who write about, say, technology and would be perfectly happy to find that something they’ve blogged is considered a go-to reference point. It’s just that, for me, the blogging that’s actually interesting is the blogging that very much is not a trade and very much an avocation or hobby. It might also very much be part of who one considers themselves to be, but a trade? I’ll pass.

(Yes, I understand the weirdness of saying that as someone who spent three years in the early- to mid-90s doing stand-alone journalism by blog, but then that never became in any sense financially self-sustaining, so even that, in the end, wasn’t much of a trade.)

Second, the thing I’m struck by is the post from Cassie in which she’s detailing a series of reactions to the ways in which WordPress’s new LLM assistant wants to rewrite people’s writing. This thing where she says she wants to “experience the beautiful, unique minds of the bloggers I follow” rather than “the yassified, sanitized version of you” to me is the direct antithesis to this idea of blogging as a trade.

Cassie’s thoughts here are so important—and no one who has been reading me over time is surprised I say that—I’m going to quote a few more of them here.

[I]t is our unique writing styles — the structures we use and gravitate toward and the decisions we make to conform to or break those structures — that make us individuals.

(Pair with the irony that LLMs’ penchant for using em dashes is risking the loss of useful punctuation in things written by actual people.)

Blogging, as we’ve discussed of late, is romantic. It is, as Kevin Lawver once suggested it be, the great empathy engine of the web—where, as Winnie Lim once implored us, we can be whole persons. LLMs like WordPress’ do what they do, Cassie suggests, “at the cost of original voice”. I’d almost argue, and I guess maybe I am arguing, that if you’re suppressing original voice, you aren’t even blogging.

“Voice,” as Christopher Locke once said, “is what happens when you shitcan the coverup.”