Blogs used to be very different.
I saw someone earlier post about how intrusive it felt to read a personal blog post. They made a point that folks like them who have grown up on short form microblogging like Twitter and Tumblr have a big leap to make when reading longer form blogposts. Not sure how many folks have that same issue but from the blogs I've read in the last decade, there has been a huge shift in content.
Ten years ago if you were blogging on Tumblr or Wordpress you were writing to an audience in an attempt to promote something. Your blog would have a theme, a niche, and a sales funnel. Blog every single day about food, cars, videogames, whatever and at the end remind the reader to buy your book or t-shirts. They worked just like Substack would today. "Make money being a blogger!" "Here are the top ten ways to blog!" "Blogging is dead! Long Live Blogging!" "My free ebook teaches you how to blog!"
Today people still do this with youtube channels, substacks, and tiktok accounts. The rest of the blogs around here are either personal notes or technical writing. Go look on hacker news and it's a sea of tech blogs showing you how they rewrote a popular program in Rust in only 36 hours.
But if you dial it all the way back over twenty years ago blogs weren't a place to promote yourself and your side hustle. Blogs were personal diaries. Most of us didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's (lol Foursquare wtf were we thinking) and the idea of sitting down at the end of the day and pouring everything that happened into a journal entry was completely normal.
For those of us with limited tech knowledge there were places like Livejournal that let anyone blog once they created an account. More advanced users rolled their own websites on Geocities or Angelfire to create a personal site to blog on. (We didn't have internet at the house until 98-99 so I did miss out on anything older.) Then there were super elite folks out there who self hosted their own sites.
Not only did we include wildly personal information on a daily basis, but we rambled on like a 14 year old girl armed with a spiral notebook and gel pens. We would write out a one way conversation as though we were checking in with someone we hadn't talked to in a long time and they asked about our day:
"Just got back from the gas station. Washed the Civic this afternoon and went up there tonight to take pics for my forum banner. Kelly was up there, she said her boss wouldn't get mad as long as I bought gas or cigarettes or something. I got both.
I'm going to the car show tomorrow morning at 8 at Forrest Park, come by and say hi! I'll be in the grey 4th gen Civic with the white wheels. My buddy Jason wants to get lunch at this new pizza place by his house on west 9th street. Hope it's good.
Anyway, time to get some sleep, busy day tomorrow. -Trav"
And we would post like this on a near daily basis. Even when folks got wise to the concept of letting strangers know all your business before you planned to do it - they still did so - just the next day after it happened. We treated our blogs like the digital diaries they started off as.
This was also before everyone and their mother was online. Your parent's didn't have social media profiles. Your grandmother didn't have instagram. The only people reading your online journal were your other friends IRL 89% of the time. The use of screen names for everything also kept you semi anonymous. Getting a photo of yourself online meant having a digital camera or scanning a real photograph into your computer. Your avatar was typically something you pulled off a google search.
The internet and its reach were considerably smaller back then.