Things Used to be Different: The Changing Face of Social Content

Earlier today, I was visiting one of the many niche and special interest blogs that I follow.

Somewhat to my dismay, there was an announcement at the end of the most recent post that the blog owner had decided to shut down the blog after some 18 years. The reason? Well, I'll try to flesh that out in this post...

The announcement made me feel slightly sad on two levels; one because this particular portal of content was going away, and two because I've seen a lot of these kinds of announcements in recent years.

I suppose I would feel less concerned if I kept finding new venues as replacements... but that's not happening.

Upon reflection, there's little doubt that the entire nature of "social content" is changing, and has changed considerably since I got started on all of this.

Perhaps single most noticeable change over the years is that people's span of attention seems to have gotten shorter and shorter.

When I started my very first blog in 1998, there was no Facebook and there was no Twitter and there was no Instagram and there was no tiktok. The deeper meaning of that is essentially that there was really no short content. You had something that was interesting on your mind, and you shared it in something that was more or less an "article format."

Online communities tended to grow up around particular interests and niches, and people would share experiences and stories, and many would just talk about their lives at some length. It was a dialogue; a conversation.

And it was not that hard to find these interests and niches.

If you knew what you were looking for, or what you wanted to find, search engines would actually help you do that, rather than just lead you to a bunch of websites created for no purpose other than to advertise other websites, or for the purpose of selling some product that was not even remotely related to the search terms you put in.

Not that I have anything against the commercial web, per se, although I find it irritating when searching leads mostly to what people want to sell rather than to what people want to read.

The beginning of the end really came with Facebook — although perhaps we should give credit to MySpace which came a little before Facebook. The main thing that happened at that point was that actually making any kind of statement at length was replaced by a format that encouraged just a few words and thumbs up and a photo.

Silly me, I actually tried blogging on Facebook for a while... until I realized it was the completely wrong format.

Over the years, web content has gotten shorter and shorter. I think what perhaps depresses me a little bit about it is the general impression that explaining or talking about anything in detail is gradually becoming obsolete. If you can't say it in 256 characters, nobody cares and it becomes TL;DR.

I don't lament this as a reflection on people's reading skills and interests, it's more of a general commentary on the direction of society... in terms of time. People simply don't have time to read anything detailed... because there is so much we're expected to keep up with. The days of actually reading many blogs are over... everybody wants the "Cliff's Notes" version of whatever content they're looking at. Or, these days, it would be the "AI synopsis."

A couple of days ago I was trying to get some information about troubleshooting our rechargeable lawn mower. An array of different searches primarily led me to sites that either were selling lawn mowers, or video clips of people being frustrated over their broken lawn mowers, or sites that were doing reviews of lawn mowers, but getting to anything that actually had a detailed account of what I needed was all but impossible.

Meanwhile, the "intelligent" search on where to get warranty work done insisted on sending me to Canada because we live close to the Canadian border and — as the crow flies — the nearest service center is about 15 miles (24km) away in Victoria BC... but I'm not going to go to another country to get my lawn mower repaired!

I suppose the cynic in me right now is scanning the horizon for the members of the "peanut gallery" who are thinking "why don't you just get rid of the lawn mower and get a new one?"

I don't do that because I just paid $700 for this one less than a year ago, and I'm sorry if that's chump change to you, it's not to me — it's probably closer to two years budget for garden equipment!

In closing, I am very grateful for Steemit, and for the fact that this remains one of the few places that still actively supports real blogging, not just tweets and memes. Long may it last!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!

How about you? Have you been part of blogging and content creation for a long time? Have you watched the nature of content become shorter and shorter? How do you feel about that? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2024.04.22 01:41 PDT
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