Let's Reclaim the Blogosphere NOW!

The demise of Technorati in 2016 marks the Epoch when the era of small blogs by indie bloggers came to an end, and the age of large social media giants and greedy corporations began, as that's where most of the internet traffic started moving towards from then on.

The era of indie bloggers perhaps begain in the early 2000s with the growth of open source CMS software like Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. and it was all very great till it lasted.

Today, nobody likes visiting a blogspot site or a wordpress site or even a little site owned by an indie guy. It seems as though Big Tech has somehow successfully plugged this narrative that only large social media brands have good content, everything else on the interwebs is pure garbage.

I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist but those running their small to medium blogs will surely agree that traffic coming to their sites from other avenues like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, etc. has considerably declined over time. It seems as though there are active admins and moderators on these forums who's full time job it is to mark links coming from these indie bloggers as "spam" or "off-topic" or even "low effort"! Again, not to sound too much "tin-foily" but it's difficult to imagine that they must be doing this without some form of quid pro quo, most likely from the one who benefits from this (the Big Tech platforms).

Consider this Reddit post from last month, for example, titled "Pinterest used to be great for traffic, now it's not worth your time" which describes how the scale and magnitude of page views coming from Pinterest has declined over time to indie blogs, and how Pinterest support is refusing to even acknowledge that it's a problem. The thread further explores how even Google's organic traffic towards indie blogs has also declined considerably over the years and headed in other directions (especially since those famous algorithm changes).

The problem, to some extent, lies with the other side of the equation too (the audience). Today's consumerism based culture has made us so much over-dependent on the "safety of brands" factor that we can't even think of a non-branded product or service or even a thing to be of any value. When we want to go to a restaurant, we will undoubtedly pick a McD or Dominos or Burger King. We can't even think of the idea that the nearby mom-and-pop store might be producing even more delicious food than a McD. Just as we can't think of a possibility that some random indie blogger on the blogspot domain might be creating some good quality content which can, at least, equal the standards set by reddit, quora, etc.

Not all audience think like that but most of them surely think like that. A great paradigm shift is needed, and a change in attitude of the average netizen. They should be able to take that initial leap of faith, they should be able to trust that indie blogger that first time. In all likelihood, the indie blogger is no different than the netizen herself, just another dude or dudette on the interwebs, spilling their heart out, just typing some stuff on their keyboard and putting it online!

And what's also needed is a platform like Technorati, a platform where indie bloggers can meet and talk to each other. A sportive spirit or gamification wherein such blogs are ranked based on content (like it used to happen on the old Technorati site!) also wouldn't hurt.

But all of that is a distant dream. What you should do at first is to just try and spend a little less time on Big Tech forums like twitter and reddit, and use that time instead to read some indie blogs, and possibly interact with them! It also wouldn't hurt if you try and click a blogspot or wordpress link on Google search page next time instead of already popular names like NYT or WAPO or WSJ. And, of course, if you're convinced of my narrative, it also wouldn't hurt if you try and convince other netizens of the same!