CJ Chilvers:

Most writers started writing to please the search engines (later just one search engine). To feed the beast, more “original” content was needed. The sharing moved to social media and got lost with the ephemera. Writers burned out producing longer and longer posts for ad pennies over trust and community.

Massive publications took over the attention of the majority, turning the sharing of a cool link into a bloated summary of whatever they were keeping you from seeing just long enough to show more ads.

This is now what your reader expects to see at every blog.

The trust is lost.

I think CJ is spot-on in his analysis of what happened to independent web publishing. But I’m hopeful that the unease surrounding the biggest social networks will start pushing people toward alternatives — some toward other centralized services and some toward their own websites.

➝ Source: cjchilvers.com