A common complaint amongst the old guard bloggers is that the old web as we knew it is dying. This is false.
The old web has actually been dead for many years; killed by the rise of social media, the lure of video, the corruption of SEO, and the double threat posed by mobile devices being both effectively useless for text content creation and difficult to build pages for that also look good on desktop screens.
The good news is that the web isn't actually dead dead, just mostly dead.
And mostly dead is, as we all know, partly alive.
There are still pockets of the old web out there. Blogs and forums devoted to arcane subjects, fan sites for nearly forgotten TV shows, compilations of local histories or just web toys and gamesooh.directory is a particularly good collection of such sites if you want to dive in..
The very best thing to keep the web partly alive is to maintain some content yourself - start a blog, join a forum and contribute to the conversation, even podcast if that is your thing. But that takes a lot of time and not everyone has the energy or the knowhow to create like this.
The second best thing to do is to show your support for pages you enjoy by being nice and making a slight effort. There are different levels of Niceness but roughly from least to most effort:
- Liking or upvoting a URL on a forum or social media that someone else posted.
- Commenting on a URL somebody else posted saying how much you enjoyed the content.
- Posting a URL on social media/discord server yourself, suggesting that others might also like to read it.
- Dropping a quick note of appreciation to the author via email or DM.
- Actually paying money for the content via Patreon, etc.
You will notice that a lot of my suggestions actually use social media - something I profess to dislike. I have two defenses to this, firstly I am a huuuge hypocrite but secondly social media would be a lot less objectionable if it didn't try to embrace everything it one place. Posting URLs to Facebook or TwitterAt this point it is trite to state that X is a stupid name, but X really is a stupid name. or Discord exposes your friends to pages they might find interesting while cracking the shell to the outside world just a little.
If everyone took the time to Be Nice to just one site a day then everyones feeds would be filled with all sorts of interesting stuff.
I have been trying to live by this advice for a while now - posting and "boosting" links on Mastodon, and occasionally contacting authors and podcasters directly to let them know that at least one person has enjoyed what they are doing. My experience has been nothing but positive.
On the other side, here is an example of a incredibly Nice email I received this week.
(I am not fishing for people to do this to me - play it forward to the next worthy site you read)