The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Blogger in 2025

The idea that someone is going to set up a blog online and amass a meaningful audience--enough for them to be thought of as a public figure in some degree, perhaps enough to make a living blogging, maybe even become rich and famous doing this, realizing that dream of celebrity that is for many the sole hope of escape from being a penniless Nobody in America--was always a longshot--and indeed, an extreme longshot (as with pretty much all of the aspiration commended to everyone in this culture). From the start the ratio of bloggers to audience was so high as to invite unfavorable comparison with buying a lottery ticket (less work, bigger prize than even the winners at this other game are likely to see), while even if the idea of competition did not lose all meaning amid the overwhelming crowdedness of the field, the Internet was the furthest thing from a "level playing field" that could be imagined.

But the terms of the "game" only got worse, much worse, over time, as winners leaped ahead of a field that just went on getting more crowded with all this meant in the pursuit of eyeballs--as the Internet we knew mutated into something else. What we call "search" was increasingly subject to manipulation by ad dollar-chasers and search engine manipulators, making it harder for the Internet user to find anything they actually wanted. Paywalls proliferated, obstructing movement for those who still had any inclination to search the web themselves. Social media accounts lured people away from old-fashioned Internet surfing to just logging into their accounts to passively stare at their feeds. And of course, it has to be acknowledged that in the process Internet culture, and culture as a whole, was shifting away from long-form writing to Tweet-length written communication, and indeed from the written to the audiovisual as the "vlogger" replaced the "blogger."

As if all that were not enough the Internet's gatekeepers (search engines, social media platforms, syndicators of written content, etc.) went to war against "fake news" and "misinformation" and "extremism," which campaign was really cover for (besides an assault on those whose opinions are really offensive to Silicon Valley) a war against Internet small fry--because the endless fake news put out by the big media outlets, and of course by those who paid them for advertising, was just fine by them (all as even the most perniciously fake news-flogging small-timers got a pass if they did made the companies money by hooking users so they were subject to more ads), after which so-called "helpful" updates dealt those not on their good side one blow after another.

At that point many a blogger looking at their current level of traffic and comparing it to what they had even a short time earlier may have felt themselves in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but as is so often the way with the survivors holding on in such a hellscape in tales of that sort yet another threat emerged to threaten the survivors with final extermination. Those chatbots over which Silicon Valley's courtiers in the media gushed so stupidly, in the course of replacing increasingly broken old-fashioned search by taking questions and giving answers, were spared their users the trouble of actually going to sites for information. (A Perplexity, for example, gives its sources, but I suspect few bother with them any more than they do the endnotes when they read a book, if they ever do.) The result is that much less actual human visitation for the sites the chatbots consult, with TollBit telling us that this last has meant a 96 percent collapse in traffic to publishers compared with search engines, just one visit for every twenty-five they would have got before, with every sign that this tendency will only increase, and fast, in the months and years to come.

In short, since at least the early twenty-first century pretty much every new development seems to have gone against the independent blogger, rather than for them--against their chances of "discovery" by, let alone "engagement" with members of a potential audience--with, I think, besides the fact of AI giving the public its answers sans any need for conventional research efforts of their own, the fact that AI may increasingly be the generator of content online, the merely human writer forced to compete with ever-growing armies of chatbots pouring forth words on command, perhaps not brilliantly, but certainly with a speed and tirelessness and versatility no human with their own interests and passions can match, making talk of "competition" an absurdity.

In spite of it all I suspect many who have stuck it out this long will refuse to wholly give up. But it is certainly making their blogging for an audience of none likely to just go on shrinking from even that level an ever more thankless task, as many others decide that it is time to walk away.