Venkatesh Rao:

Despite its very different political-economic DNA, the blogosphere has become enshittified as clearly as Facebook, Google, or Amazon. Not just at the level of aging software, but at the level of the aging people who inhabit it, maintain it, and continue to churn out content on it, though at a rapidly decelerating rate. And it’s hard to blame any particular party in the picture. The technical decisions that lead to the sort of messy problem that afflicted this site can’t be attributed to malice, objectionable politics, or billionaires behaving badly. They’re within the band of ordinary technology management decisions I see all over the place in my consulting work. Humans are just not good at building complex technologies that mature to a graceful immortality. The WordPress-based blogosphere is at the outer limit of complexity we are capable of getting to.

As someone committed to blogging, I worry about this — especially the “aging people who maintain it” problem. When people who blog, or even who once blogged, retire, will engineers from the post-blogging social-media era think that a platform like this is worth saving?