There’s a sense that we lost something important when we turned our back on individual blogs and gave all our attention to Twitter, Facebook, and their ilk. Inspired writing and thinking turned into homogenized mush with click-bait headlines. Ads are everywhere, and the mechanisms that power them have been exploited for far more than just pure commercial gain.

It’d be easy to blame Facebook or Twitter of course, but I like John Battelle’s take better:

I think in the end, our failure wasn’t that we let Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon get too big, or too powerful. No, I think instead we failed to consider the impact of the technologies and the companies we were building. We failed to play our hand forward, we failed to realize that these nascent technologies were fragile and ungoverned and liable to be exploited by people less idealistic than we were.

Some people never really gave up on the independent blog, of course. Dave Winer certainly didn’t. Neither did John Gruber. My friend Bryan Jones kept at it faithfully as well. Kudos to them, and many more like them.