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FOCUS: In Which Long-Time Netizen & Programmer-at-Arms Dave Winer Records a Podcast for Me, 
Personally:

a€oeThe Fall of the Blogospherea€D, by Stable Diffusion, via NightCafe

But since I have a Gutenberg-Galaxy brain, I feed it to text-recognition software 
<http://otter.ai>, and then edit the transcript.


But let me first link to a subsequent piece in which Dave muses about what he would like to see:

Dave Winer: Textcasting: a€~Like podcasting, for text. Podcasting is great: We can do the same for 
text. Let's do it!: In textcasting, the equivalent of an MP3 is a documenta€!. Optional titles, 
Markdown support, Links, Simple styling, Enclosures (podcasting), Unlimited length, Editable. To 
support it you don't have to support every feature. But you shouldn't make it impossible to peer
with a service that supports the full speca€!. We're at a good moment where there is no dominant 
feed reader or microblogging site. Ita€™ sa€! fluida€L Ita€™ s a good time to get in at the 
beginning of something that could be even bigger than podcasting, for text. I am Dave Winer, I 
created blogging, feeds and podcasting. I did it once, I'd like to do it again, only better this 
timea€!

The way I thought of this ten years ago, during the decline and fall, was that it all should work 
in the way that network communication worked in Vernor Vingea€™ s amazing mindbending 
science-fiction space-opera novel A Fire Upon the Degpa€’’HEXAPODIA IS THE KEY 
INSIGHT!a€”sorry-not-sorrv


.The full message is pumped out from the source to the receiver, and the receiver displaysa€! as 
much of the full message as bandwidth, hardware, event, and contingency allow. I would write a blog 
post. My software would turn some of it into a header tweet, a (short) tweet thread, and a link 
back to the full version. My software would turn a paragraph or two into a Facebook-friendly 
version. And all other social
media sites would receive whatever was the maximal component of it that they could grok, with a 
link back.

Of course, this was all a non-starter: the point of a social media company is to create a walled 
garden, and the point of a walled garden is to trap you in it and glue your eyeballs to the screen 
so that you can be sold the fake diabetes cures, and crypto grifts.

Allowing anybody other than badly desired super-creators to automate distribution of what the make 
to the social media site, and especially to easily create a path through which readers could bypass 
the social media site in the future, ws 100% opposed to the venture-capital advertising-supported 
money-making purpose of Web2.

So Google kills itsa€”very imperfecta€’’Reader because it wants to trap readers into its walled 
garden calleda€! you know, I actually forget! Google+. Total flop. Facebook and Twitter benefit 
enormously. Google doesna€™t. But, still, it never brings it back, because the idea is figuring out 
how to trap the eyeballs and then glue them to the screen.

This is why I still hope-against-hope that Web3 is not merely a mindless, pointless set of 
grifters. And this is why I very much want to back Manton Reese <http:/micro,blog> and Dave Winer 
chttp://scripting,com/> and Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie chttp://substack.org>, and backed Ev 
Williams <https://ev.medium.com/>, as people with at least a theory about how to make Web3 work, 
somehow, someday.
And then we might have a good system of an information utility network, and a well functioning 
public sphere for a modern democracy

Here is the Dave Winer <http://scripting .com/> transcript:

Dave Winer: a€~I have a lot of thoughtsa€!. While Twitter was camped out on top of what remained of 
the blogospherea€”and to some extent [it] still [is]a€!a€”the problem was is that if you were 
writing for a web audiencea€”as I was continuously: never stoppeda€”then you were coming up against 
the limits of the distribution systemsa€! Twitter, Facebook, Medium, RSS still,
anda€! blogsa€!. Those for me were the main ones. I wanted my writing to flow through all of 
thosea€!.

Google Readera€!. RSS and Google Reader [were] two different things. Because Google Reader only 
supported a subseta€! and became a very important part of the problema€! that there was no common 
denominator^ I ofa€! [a] documenta€! that they would all understand^! titles, links, simple 
styling, unlimited or length restrictions, the ability to edit, and enclosures for podcastsa€!. I
became immersed in these things, because I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get alla€! to work 
togethera€!. In 2017,1 gave up, and I just saida€! I'm just going to make the blogging work the way 
I wanted it to worka€!. Very quickly [I] put together the content management system that I had in 
1997a€”no, way better than what I had 97, let's be clear about that. But fundamentally, the
same basic ideaa€!.

I could decide whether or not an item was short or long, or [if] it was short and [could] become 
long. I had an editor that could accommodate all thosea€! and allow me to reorder what was on the 
homepagea€!. I could edit it through the day. And then, at the end of the day, it would go out by 
email. Those were the basic featuresa€! unlimited lengtha€! titles or nota€! edit[able]a€!
enclosures for podcasts, style links, basic stuffa€!.

Twitter saida€! initially,that posts could only be 140 charactersa€! [and] could not have 
titlesa€!. Google Readera€! said posts must have titles right there. You've now had an empty set 
createda€!. This is the explanation for why Twitter could not have RSS feedsa€!.

The problem was that Google Reader called [Twittera€™ s] RSS feeds errors because they didn't have 
titles. So what they did was theya€! repeated the text of the tweeta€! in the title and in the 
bodya€!. Google Reader just dumbly displayed both. And then the users complaineda€!. Twittera€! if 
I were them, I totally would have given upa€!. Google was being Google, the big company,
and it didn't give a sa€”-a€!. That was their positioning statement.a€! Whenever I tried to talk to 
the people at Google Reader all I got was a lecture about how busy they were and how they didn't 
have any time to do anythinga€!. The undertone was: We hate our jobs. We got assigned thisa€!. Here 
I was the guy who created the medium that they were usinga€!. Those problems have been
replicateda€!. The installed base of feed readersa€! all basically took their lead from Google 
Readera€!. Ita€™ s now nine years in and we're still dealing with ita€!.

Mastodon has RSS feeds. And their feeds do not have titlesa€!. Manton Reesea€™ s micro.dota€! 
wonderful worka€!. He talked them into doing it the right way. And, you know, I was stand up and 
cheera€!.

It wasn't just Google Reader and Twittera€!. It was also Facebooka€!. Facebook had no titlesa€! 
couldn't do linksa€! no styling, no enclosures. Just plain old texta€!. When I was cross posting to 
Facebooka€! [from] my blog, I was reluctant to use links, because I knew people reading it on 
Facebook wouldn't see the linksa€I. All these limits and trade offs and bullsa€”a€! become
additive to the point wherea€! the writing becomes disgustingly bullsa€”. Writing should flowa€l. I 
get into a zone when I'm writinga€!. And [if] you add a bunch of extra bullsa€”- to ita€!. I'm not 
thinking about the thing that I'm writing about. I'm thinking about how do I coax out of this 
complex, crazy situation of people not listening to each other, anda€! never listening to writers. 
It
[is] just being stupid or ignoranta€!. Ignoring what is is what ignorant means, right?a€!.

Now Medium comes alonga€!. Pundits and politicians start treating Medium like it's the place of 
recorda€!. Unfortunately, it's aa€! money-losing startupa€! the worst possible choice for 
on-the-record writinga€!. It looked great, Medium, beautiful editor. It's a breakthrough in a lot 
of ways. The one thing you can't do is revisea€!. I post something to Medium and that's it. If I 
want to make
changes to it, I have to go over there and make the changes by hand.

We maya€! [be] liberateda€! but only if we can get some kind of agreementa€! as to what a document 
isa€!. Just support the thingsa€!. The question is, what can we learn from the mistakes we made?a€! 
There's no dialogue between developers and users. Users don't put any energy into trying to help 
developers that want to make software that's for thema€I. I went to several journalism
conferences and said: Look, all I want to do is make software for you. Would you work with me on 
that?a€! In the 80s. And 90sa€!. Things moved so quickly thena€! because users and developers were 
in constant contacta€!. We knew who we were making products for. And we knew what they wanteda€!.

There's a great story, Guy Kawasakia€! Apple evangelista€!comes to a reception that my company 
hada€! hands me a piece of papera€! froma€! the new vice president of products at Applea€!. The 
list was the features that every one of my users wanted and [they] werea€! in the next version of 
the product, because we were so in tune with thema€!.

[There] was it was a wonderful time, very brief period that Apple and developers really did do some 
stuff together, because there were users running the company, and seriously interested in making 
the software bettera€!. We just need enough users to take an interest in what we're doing and use 
the product and respond to the new features that we add. And ask for more features. It's really
all that we need. It's the food that makes our stuff grow. And then what we can do is we can pass 
back to you guysa€!.

We can give you an order of magnitude more functionality. And it worksa€!.

The subtext here: Please don't ever let Google take control of a market againa€!. It's vulnerable 
right nowa€!. They all have tried to dominate podcastinga€!. None of them can do ita€!. Podcasting 
is going to stay open. But right nowa€! were dealing with a post-war blogging platform. Wea€™ ve 
been through World War IIIa€!.. Don't ever let them take control againa€!. When it starts to
happen, make sure that you don't go with them. You go with independent developers that are working 
in your interesta€!.

I just simply can't believe that I see Google getting ready to come back into RSS land, and I also 
see users begging them to do it. Anda€! I am shaking my heada€! that we're going down that road 
again. No way.


Anyway, I've been talking for 15 minutes and that's long enough. Thanks for listeninga€!

Here is the backstory he is reacting to:

•  John Scalzi: How to Weave the Artisan Web: a€~l. Create/reactivate your own sitea€!. 2. Write or 
otherwise present work on your site at least once a weeka€!. 3. Regularly visit the sites of 
other[s]a€!. 4. Promote/link the work of others, on your own site and also on your other social 
media channelsa€!. Now, why should we bring back that artisan, hand-crafted Web? Oh, I dona€™ t 
know.
Wouldna€™t it be nice to have a site thata€™ s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or 
algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially 
spyware for governments and/or corporations?a€!

•  Matthew Yglesias: What I learned co-founding Vox: a€~There was and is an audience fora€! 
explanatory journalisma€!. [But] there werena€™ t customersa€!. Voxa€™ s readers werena€™ t 
customers; Vox was an ad sales businessa€!. To serve the needs of advertisers, you needed to serve 
the needs of the platformsa€!. Everyone complains about having to read through a few hundred words 
before
getting to the recipea€!. That was because Google gave priority to recipe pages that were 
structured like real articlesa€!. Platform dependence made product innovation essentially 
impossible. It was also editorially constraininga€!. Most of the media trendsa€! deplore[d] are 
direct consequences of Facebooka€™ s influence over journalism in the mid-2010sa€!. Hard-core 
identity politics and
simplistic socialism performed incredibly well on Facebooka€!. You ended up with this whole cohort 
of discourse structured around a€oels Bernie Sanders perfect in every way or is it problematic to 
vote for a white man?a€D as the only possible lens for examining American politics and societya€!

•  Brad DeLong: Aze Forlorn Hope Azt Was Vox.com: a€~When Jackie Calmes moved from the Wall Street 
Journal to the New York Times she rapidly went from one of my must-reads to a rarely-reada€!. Dan 
Froomkin interviewed her, and she explained whya€! a€oebeat reportinga€! the pressures youa€™re 
under to maintain sourcesa€!a€D and a€oel felt more pressure ofa€! bothsidesisma€! [at]
the New York Timesa€\ [which] bends over backwardsa€!. If youa€™re saying Republicans do something 
wrong you have to indicate that Democrats bear some blame tooa€!a€D. It seems to me that it would 
be much more fun to write explainers than clickbait or beat sweeteners, and find yourself working 
for your sources first, your bosses second, the advertisers third, and the reader not at all. And
yet I have no reason to disbelieve Matta€™ s observation that vox.com could not hold onto reporters 
by promising them a better-suited if worse-paid place to be their best selvesa€!

•  Brad DeLong: Old-Style Blogging Should Be New Again!: a€~Calls to virtuous collective action 
need to be carefully crafted to not ask more of the audience than it will be willing to delivera€!. 
We need to have an accurate theory of what caused the Fall of the Blogosphere in the first place. 
Why did the audiencea€”and, yes, the creators tooa€”succumb to the Siren song, and wind up 
doomscrolling
through clickbait so that their glued-to-the-screen eyeballs could be sold to advertisers 
convincing them that the worse is actually the better product as they sell their fake diabetes 
cures and crypto grifts?a€! Peoplea€! shrug and say "attention economya€D and a€oehuman rapid, 
response, dopamine loopsa€D. Some of thema€! hopea€! Apple's advertising tracking transparency a€! 
put[s]a€! enough
sand in the gears of the advertising-attention machine that we humans can then escapea€!

•  Dan Drezner: Back to Old School Blogging?: a€~The incentive structure might be shifting back to 
blogging!a€! Three things killed the old blogospherea€! moneya€! Twittera€! the smartphonea€! 
[which] further encouraged tweet-length ideas over anything longera€!. Each of these trends has now 
been partially reverseda€!. The Washington Postal focus[ing] on news and investigations at the
expense of analysis or commentarya€!. Substacka€! has enabled some to earn an incomea€!. As for 
Twitter, wella€!. Finally, Substacka€™ s subscription-based distribution has also conquered the 
phone problem. Folks read blogs as newsletter emails straight to their phonea€!. Maybe incentives 
are shifting backa€!. And yeta€!. it is not in fact, 2002, but 2022a€!. The money hasna€™t shifted 
all that
much.                                                                                               
                                                                                        I have my 
doubts about the sustainability of the newsletter economya€!. Blogospherea€! superstarsa€! [may not 
be] possible in such a polarized political climate. Considera€! Mickey Kaus, Andrew Sullivan, and 
Josh Marshall. Ita€™ s hard to imagine any of them having a civil conversation these daysa€!

•  Brad DeLong: Aze Washington Post Decides Azt It No Longer Has to Fear A34e Blogosphere. Do 
Hijinks Ensue? a€~I disagree that Twitter was a far superior focal point for "finding quick links, 
reactions, and responsesa€O. RSS was the One True Protocol. Admittedly, RSS had a problem 
amalgamating in presenting a combination of micro, blocking and longer form. But it always seemed 
to me that
hashtags and feed-filtering could easily take care of that: #Microblog, #BlogPost, #Longforma€!. 
But then Google killed Google reader, and Twitter was there, and became the clown car that stumbled 
into a gold mine. So perhaps, now we have another chance? Do remember that the original aspiration 
for <http://vox.com> was to take the energy of the blogosphere and expand it out into an
organization   that would make money and transform the public spherea€!. [But] you cana€™ t do 
explainer journalism and still be a money-making subcontractor for Google and FaceBook ads unless 
you already have Ezraa€™ s audience and reputationa€!. We are very confident that getting into the 
advertising-supported game makes it all about impossible to continue doing your best work. And
distributing   it all for freea€”well, it is a nonstarter to hope that you can gain a reputation 
which will then open other doors one of which will be remunerativea€!

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