Blogs and Social Media – Brainstorming

At the beginning blogs were for the most part a matter of special interests. These artsy photo shots you wanted to display, the recipes of your nana, your life as an  Asperger and so on.

Then came Zuckerberg. His college interest was about shaming fellow students. He created Facebook. I’m not using FB, because I started taking interest in such affairs fairly recently, but leave all marketing aside and there is nothing but an ordinary blog. With time some gadgets were added to upload and play videos, send files and so forth, but nothing of it was extraordinary.

The whole reason why almost everybody is blogging now is that we as human beings have a tendency to be mean. And FB was the first ‘mean first’ blogging site.

Along came reddit. This started fairly innocently and was about following news and discussing matters of the day. Mean bloggers + politics = even meaner bloggers. Somehow, the age of doxxing began.

I’m not on reddit either so far and I can’t speak of its shortcomings, but somehow ‘Twitter’ rose up to more attention. Twitter differs from other blogs because never-ending texts were replaced with the one-thought-one-post concept. Anywhere in a discussion a different user can come in and make an argument or issue a correction to a post. Also new is that comments and posts are one and the same thing, giving everybody the same tools to slug it out.

The situation today is that Facebook is the basis for many arrests of political opposition around the world. We can’t prove that the company might even be cooperating, but we know that they are very gullible to governments. Until fairly recently Twitter was more defiant driving governments (like Germany) mad and having the lickspittle media complaining about it on end.

Now Twitter cracks down on its users. The tool gab.ai from Texas promises freedom of speech. However, Germans who access gab.ai receive a warning message not to break the law. If gab.ai is willing to kowtow to the German government (and given the threats to fine them I understand it), I’m sure that they will not resist the Chinese, the Pakistani, the Russians and so forth.

Along comes disqus. Disqus allows more signs per post and groups people into channels. You can join a discussion or issue a new post to one of the established channels. I can’t really tell, but I think that is equivalent to the FB Group concept. Disqus, however, does not have the reputation of constantly blocking users, closing accounts, or (I can’t prove it) passing information to totalitarian governments. They have found their niche by offering a widget that manages the comment section of many blogs (most famously Breitbart News).

As far as I can tell disqus is also better programmed than slow-motion Twitter.

And then of course there is WordPress and (Blogger) blogspot who are very traditional. Their strength is that they still serve the cat-photo-autism-poetry clientele well with features most other sites can’t provide. The weakness is indeed the lack of connection between the different bloggers.

That is my quick, uninformed brainstorming on Blogs and social media. Tell me what you think in the comment section?

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