
What Andrew Sullivan's exit says about the future of blogging - benbreen
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/30/7948091/andrew-sullivan-leaving-blogging
======
julianpye
The emergence of blogging allowed individual voices outside of control of the
larger media to reach their own audiences. Because of this 10 years ago noone
wanted to have AOL as their walled garden. Everyone wanted to search and
discover themselves. Google brought an algorithm that allowed voices to
emerge, but it also spawned the SEO industry to manipulate that distribution
channel and make it more difficult. Today most people never leave Facebook and
FB's new feed rules will make sure that you have to pay to be heard. So maybe
Facebook has become like AOL, has become like the print magnates even prior to
that. Time for disruption again?

~~~
spyspy
Sure, let's blame all of society's problems on Facebook some more. That's a
new idea. I hate how much this idea get's promoted here. That fact is that 99%
of blogs are complete shit. Along with the democratization of opinions came a
lot of crud. Of courses there are good quality ones commenters will be
frothing to post about, but expecting an ecosystem of junk to remain
consistently successful is purely utopian.

~~~
graeme
>That fact is that 99% of blogs are complete shit. Along with the
democratization of opinions came a lot of crud.

But good stuff came out of that crud. Now people do their writing on Facebook
and Reddit. Those have much lower or no placement in Google.

I find google results impoverished compared to 6-10 years ago. You used to get
commentary from people, and it wasn't half bad. Now most searches return
commercial results.

I often give up and go search relevant subreddits for many types of queries.

99% of Reddit and Facebook are crap too. Anything produced by humanity in
general will be. But good stuff gets produced too.

~~~
ashark
It seems to me that somewhere around 2007-2009 the spammers won, and Google's
search quality plummeted. It hasn't recovered. If anything it's kept gradually
getting worse. A handful of top sites show up for damn near every search,
followed by page after page of spam sites and clickbait. Remember when the
second page would sometimes have some nice and relevant links on it?

~~~
graeme
I think that's only half the equation though. I follow a few niches where non-
spammers produce content regularly, and you get good results. My own niche is
one. The barrier to entry to create reasonable content is high, so spammers
have stayed out. The second and third and even fourth pages routinely produce
good results.

But in niches where there's no reason for experts or ordinary people to create
text on standalone sites, the results are junk. I remember this being
different.

Now to find good stuff I have to search Hacker News, Reddit, etc.

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tsotha
Andrew Sullivan's exit really doesn't mean very much. Blogging is a lot of
work and doesn't pay very well, so it's kind of a surprise he lasted this
long. I know a whole lot of people who tried to write a blog, but it's such a
grind they pretty much gave up after six months or so (on the outside). The
time between posts gets longer and longer in some sort of asymptotic death
spiral, and eventually they put up a short post that says, basically, "I
quit".

The problem is to keep people interested in your stuff the content has to
change multiple times per day. You can't just write a single post every couple
days when you feel like you have something important to say - most of your
potential readers will drift away.

The vast majority of people trying to make money gave up trying to produce
that much content by themselves and joined some sort of group blog (or have
"guest bloggers", like Kos). At that point it's less a blog and more of an
online magazine. I'm thinking sites like Huffpo and Gawker. As a
business/creative model, how are they different from the online presence of
_The Atlantic_ or _National Review_?

Most of the people who still produce all the content on their blog are really
just news aggregators. Provide a link, write a joke or a sentence indicating
why it's important, and your done with that post.

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thanatosmin
Scale may be a problem for blogging, but Andrew Sullivan's exit says nothing
about it. He simply wants to devote time to other things in his life.

------
Chevalier
I'm not Sullivan's biggest fan, but... if Sullivan can't make it as a blogger,
who can?

Sullivan has a wealthy, educated audience that should be catnip to advertisers
-- particularly with his particularly distinct influence among gay and
politically liberal niches. He's possibly the most well-known blogger today
and his Dish audience piggybacks from his previous work with The Atlantic. And
while it's not easy to run a website, the capital required is minimal compared
to virtually any other form of publication.

If he can't make it, can anyone? Much less a publication with heavier
administrative and staff costs like virtually every newspaper or magazine.

~~~
jerf
It's realistic to me that individual bloggers can't live on advertising. The
well-known corrosive effects of ads are too big to deny. I'd particularly cite
the need it creates to pump out tons of "views" to tons of "eyeballs" which is
corrosive to _any_ sort of quality that might let one stand apart from a crowd
of others doing the same thing. (And please note how I phrased that, it's very
important. I'm not saying they can't have quality in some snobbish sense, I
mean it leaves them unable to cultivate any unusual quality that might let
them dominate some micro-niche under such constraints.) But I've got at least
one guy in my Patreon lineup that I'm essentially sponsoring to write his
blog. In that particular case it's not political, but there's no particular
reason why that couldn't work.

But I would say at least speaking for myself that for politics, I would expect
to either see some very original, quality thinking, or some sort of
substantial research being done if I'm going to be paying for it. Party-line
punditry's supply already verges on the infinite. (Not a crack at Sullivan. I
never read his blog, I have no opinion about the writing I've never read. Just
an observation from the other political blogs I read.)

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pnathan
I had never heard of him prior to 2 weeks ago. He is exceptionally thoughtful.
His reason for quitting blogging seemed reasonable, especially given the
timeframes involved. I don't think it says anything about blogging in general
that one intelligent person is moving to a new position.

On the other hand, I don't know that I'd call the blogosphere vibrant or even
very interesting: Crappy mobile browers/keyboards, link aggregators, Facebook,
and Twitter basically shot the web as we knew it dead for the mainstream. My
intuition is that this is a natural consequence response to decentralization
when the tools to gather your information into one place are poor. You wind up
with link aggregators, and then comments on them, and then the link
aggregators become the content. Like what's going _right now_ in this thread,
instead of a blog link bouncing around between disparate interlinked blog
posts.

~~~
karmacondon
The original blogosphere concept may be fading, but I don't think that
bloggers or readers are suffering because of it. In a sense individual
bloggers are like AP reporters and aggregators are the new newspapers. Dozens
of AP stories are filed every day and local newspapers pick and choose which
ones to include in each edition. The major difference between the traditional
newspaper model and link aggregators is that we can easily see all stories
filed by an individual blogger, whether they get picked up by our "hometown"
paper or not[0]. Sharing a link to a blog post on facebook will never replace
quality journalism of course, but I think we've come full circle back to this
model because it works. Most people don't have the time or inclination to
follow a multitude of different blogs or maintain their own. They just want
news and opinion selected for them, by trained editors or a community, and the
ability to comment on those stories.

An open exchange of long form ideas between a network of people who each run
their own blog has an important place in internet culture, but it doesn't
scale very well. It was a golden age, for a time, but the aggregation model as
the potential to open those ideas up to a much broader range of people.

[0] I'm actually not sure if the AP allows people to easily "follow" all
stories filed by specific reporters, but it doesn't seem like it.

~~~
sukilot
But most aren't reading the blogs,they ate skipping that and chattering in the
aggregator comments section.

------
Steko
I like Sully and read the Dish daily but I'm glad I won't have to watch the
next 2-10 years of him trying to justify his Hillary Derangement Syndrome when
her policy positions basically mirror Obama's, whom he reliably supports.

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themodelplumber
Given the style of blogging, I'm not surprised. High output, fast
thinking...it seems more like one of many _types_ of blogging, rather than
blogging itself. And it seems like the type of thing that could easily
imbalance your life, which may explain the need to make an exit. Hope he finds
what he's looking for. Personally more blogging is in my future but several
posts a day is probably out of the question.

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misiti3780
It doesn't say anything about the future of blogging in my opinion. I think
the future of blogging is bleak for people who want to make a career (aka a
salary) doing it. There is so much noise and so much bullshit online, not to
mention amplified/fake stories and zero fact checking (read Ryan Holiday's
book Trust Me Im Lying). It doesn't mean people are going to stop reading them
or blogging, but the traffic / ad space $ will probably continue to go down as
more content continues to spews online.

~~~
visakanv
You don't make a career from the blog itself- you get headhunted because of
the attention and the awareness gets you, and you get hired or solicited for
all sorts of interesting, lucrative projects.

~~~
misiti3780
im not sure i agree - i think a lot of blogs (in the past anyways) were
created with the intension of selling them - i also think there is a handful
of bloggers out there that make a salary off blog traffic + book sales
(www.nakedcapitalism.com / www.zerohedge.com /
[http://www.ritholtz.com/blog](http://www.ritholtz.com/blog) / etc.)

~~~
visakanv
Right, allow me to refine my statement– tonnes of bloggers start with the
intention of selling them, but few bloggers actually make it to that sort of
scale.

The same thing applies to webcomics, to musicians, etc. These are the
exception, not the rule. There are thousands of blogs started every day! So if
you're serious about making a living from your blog, it's worth having the
"big blogger" dreams, but you'll probably end up doing other things to pay the
bills along the way.

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jacquesm
That he won't be doing much of it. Other than that not a whole lot.

------
AznHisoka
I not only miss blogging, but RSS feeds as well. Seems like everyone is
ditching it in favor of Twitter and FB

~~~
firebones
Blogging and RSS feeds are still out there. Ask not why it seems like everyone
is moving to Twitter, ask why your perception and tastes have shifted to
perceive that as the primary channel?

When I look at this through the Clay Shirky "publish-then-filter" mindset,
what I see is that we have a problem with our filters--whether those filters
are RSS aggregators, search engines, follower lists, inboxes, subscription
services, it doesn't matter. Look to the work of people like Paul Ford
(@ftrain) and little hacks like SavePublishing.com.

Solving this filtering problem and creating a focus of attention--that's a
huge opportunity. Not Uber huge, or monetarily huge, but huge as a public
service to free up the mental capacity of a lot of talented people whose
filters are very likely tuned by default to the commercial aggregators.

~~~
AznHisoka
Go to major sites like Wired, heck even any Medium blog. Where is the RSS
feed???

Now go to their Twitter feed or Facebook feed. Oh there are their latest urls!

it's not a matter of perception. It's the truth. It's hard to find the latest
content for a site/blog through RSS. But it's easy to find it in their
twitter/FB

------
detcader
I guarentee that Glenn Greenwald would still be blogging if he hadn't gone
Salon -> Guardian -> Intercept. And I don't see how what he did wouldn't still
be still possible...

------
flint
Ah, nothing?

------
jackmaney
I hadn't even heard of Andrew Sullivan until I bumped into his defense of
Brendan Eich.

Honestly, good riddance. I hope that Sullivan and Eich both fade into
obscurity.

~~~
gmunu
Does it matter that Andrew Sullivan was one of the early and very vocal
champions of gay marriage? Or that he is quite openly gay and married himself?
If you haven't heard of him, you might not have known that and it may change
the way you view his defense of Brendan Eich. In addition to being a champion
of gay marriage, Sullivan is a proponent of liberalism in the old sense of the
word. I think his defense of gay marriage was always so compelling because he
gave respect to people who disagreed with them while showing how wrong they
were on the issue.

~~~
craigching
It's fine to pick and choose the things you stand for, but the man has to be
taken as a whole (IMHO). I want to like Andrew Sullivan for some of the things
he stands for, but he was also a vocal proponent of the Iraq war and many
other issues that I stand against. Someone who says this about the Iraq war:

> the allied campaign was a model of restraint and liberation, the most
> precise invasion in world history

makes me think they've really lost touch with reality. I'm not here to say
that Saddam Hussein was some angel, but to put our role in those words leaves
me wanting better critical thinking.

Andrew Sullivan is a man and he has his good and bad. So let's not "one issue"
the man and suppose that he's good simply because he's for gay marriage (a
position that he stands to gain from I might add).

I'd rather see better, true "liberals", elevated over Andrew Sullivan. Glenn
Greenwald comes mind ...

~~~
graeme
What year did Sullivan say that? I recall thinking, circa 2004-6, "gosh,
Andrew Sullivan is wrong about Iraq. How does he not see how wrong he is?"

But the thing was, he changed. Gradually, he came to notice that the modern
Republican party was doing lots of bad things.

Certainly, this puts him nowhere near writers like Daniel Davies and James
Fallows, who clearly saw the war was going to be a disaster, _before_ it
happened.

But at least Sullivan was able to change his mind. Though maybe he didn't
fully recant Iraq. I can't recall the details now. I just recall my impression
of the time that, whatever he was, he wasn't a zealot. He genuinely seemed to
be thinking through and considering his opinions.

But yeah, far more a fan of Greenwald. Or Ioz, if anyone remembers him.

Anyway, the point of my reply is that I don't think the Sullivan of today
would agree with that quote, and I suspect he wrote that not long after the
invasion. That doesn't make it a smart thing to have been written, but simply
quoting that gives an inaccurate view of Sullivan. Unless I'm wrong on the
details of when he said it and what he changed his mind about.

~~~
firebones
I ran across this the other night. Pointing you to it because it seems to
offer a complementary counterpoint to your benefit of the doubt point of view.

[http://pando.com/2015/01/28/andrew-sullivan-is-not-the-
futur...](http://pando.com/2015/01/28/andrew-sullivan-is-not-the-future-of-
journalism/)

~~~
graeme
That piece doesn't address Sullivan's change circa 2006-08. IIRC, he Began to
oppose the Iraq war, and the republican party, where he had been a strong
supporter previously.

I never shared Sullivan's views. I could be misremembering how much he shifted
in that period, since I didn't follow him closely. But the article doesn't
address those years, only earlier times. (which sound pretty bad, if the
characterization is accurate)

Edit: here is a piece that comments on Ames and Sullivan. It's how I remember
his later writing. No moral hero, but a man clearly aware that he made an
enormous error on iraq.

[http://thedailybanter.com/2013/01/andrew-sullivans-
political...](http://thedailybanter.com/2013/01/andrew-sullivans-political-
transformation-bravery-or-spineless-populism/)

------
ddingus
Nothing at all.

I don't see comments on his blog. That's not really blogging.

Bloggers, who take comments, actually entertaining community dialog are doing
just fine. Sullivan will have no impact as that just isn't what he does.

~~~
mwfunk
I don't want to read someone having a conversation with their community, I
want to read what they themselves think without the lurking context of the
subset of their audience that demands to speak up and be heard right then and
there.

I also frequently don't like the results of community feedback shaping a blog;
a lot of times it just puts the writer on the defensive all the time, and can
easily become toxic and contribute to burnout. If you can read even the best
comments on the best blogs and not want to just give up on humanity forever,
you're a better man than I (either that, or you were one of the people writing
those comments and thought they were awesome).

There's already plenty of places on the Internet for people to discuss things
written elsewhere on the Internet, like right here for example. Or Reddit or
Facebook or Twitter or any number of other places where you have persistent
communities of commenters. If it's just comments at the bottom of an article,
you end up with a lot of drive-by comments that are even more dumb or
pointlessly cruel or boring or strangely insistent about your potential to
make $2500/day at home on your computer, just like I did! Because you totally
can.

~~~
ddingus
He's broadcasting, not blogging.

And I like writers on the defensive. When they write crap, and they take
comments, the crap comes up awful quick.

Notice how a lot of sites don't take comments? Notice how many of them are
very seriously moderated?

One could argue trolls, and that's a fair case. However, not actually being
out there enough to take feedback on one's words tends to make nice, magic,
bubbles, filled with unicorns and rainbows.

Sullivan occupies one of those bubbles.

And it's not just comments. It's dialogs, even among peers. Sullivan largely
just broadcasted.

Either way, his departure means pretty much nothing.

~~~
jfarmer
Have you actually read his blog? Readers email him all the time. He typically
posts 2-3 of those emails every day and responds to them publicly. Often,
he'll go back and forth with multiple readers in this way.

Here's a post from _today_ that contains emails from 9 people:
[http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2015/01/31/busted-with-an-
egg...](http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2015/01/31/busted-with-an-eggcorn-
ctd-10/)

He has a regular "Dissent of the Day" post where he goes out of his way to
post critical emails from readers. For your perusal:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aandrewsullivan.com%20...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aandrewsullivan.com%20dissent%20of%20the%20day)

Your comments in this thread are nothing but incuriosity dressed up as
intelligence.

~~~
remarkEon
Moreover, the fact that a reader had to email him served as sort of as a pre-
screen, wherein someone had to take those extra 2 or 3 steps to put something
together instead of just dropping whatever thoughtless or halfbaked idea came
to the forefront of their mind in the comment box and hitting enter because
you're logged in with facebook. I don't think having comments allowed on a
blog are indicative of quality discourse at all.

~~~
jfarmer
Yeah. Andrew probably write something once every few months about why he
prefers to interact with readers this way vs. comment threads. He's even
polled his audience in the past and the _audience_ overwhelmingly favors
interacting in this way, often echoing your exact sentiment.

Ironically, the parent serves as an example for the kind of thoughtless, knee-
jerk commentary that comment threads can (and do) breed.

