Neil Gaiman on the future of the internet

Worth noting that Neil Gaiman is quite possibly the most active human user of Bluesky on the entire platform. He has absolutely stupendous output, and it's all kind and decent.

Sometimes I wonder if the cozy feeling of the &quot;old&quot; internet so many people are nostalgic for was really just a byproduct of a few enthusiasts gaining an outsize following because the net was financed by universities, governments and the military. Once the unwashed masses and commercial interests joined the party things &quot;went downhill&quot;.<p>You can still blog if you want, you just won&#x27;t get the automatic exposure.

For blogging to form communities (again&#x27;-ish), we&#x27;re going to need new protocols. I don&#x27;t think http is the future for growth. The nostalgic internet was a &quot;community,&quot; but more because it was a scene made up of other scenes, which each had bars to entry, signalling costs, social proof, status and competence hierarchies, and ultimately, real social networks. Imo, the old internet never disappeared, it just migrated to git.<p>What we&#x27;re probably overlooking is that <i>any</i> activity where people can collaborate to make something together at scale is basically magic. I don&#x27;t think people will go &quot;back&quot; to blogs because the form will need another zero-to-one moment where people collaborate with words to discover something new.

The problem is that it is not easy to find a real sense of community because there is no worthwhile way to search the available communities. I find this hugely frustrating. For all their distasteful aspects Twitter and Facebook do help some in this. Perhaps the solution is some sort of dynamic &quot;meta-social medium&quot; for finding communities. If well managed, the economics of such a medium would be huge.

No, blogging won&#x27;t return. Not in the same way as before. In the days of the dial up modem the written word was king. Twitter originally had SMS as a communication mechanism. But look at what the younger generations do, the use the internet for 3D gaming, for video watching.<p>It&#x27;s the same micro-attention span as a tweet, but the media has changed. In the immediate term it&#x27;s video content. But this will also give way to the next thing...<p>But, unfortunately the written word requires more attention than modern internet users have to spare.

The large platforms enable millions of eyeballs to be aggregated together to attract advertising dollars. In return, the eyeballs receive an algorithmic feed of bite sized dopamine hits (a Tweet, a short video, an Instagram image, etc). It is easier to attract an audience, is easier to sell ads against this audience, but is this audience as valuable to the creator as Cal&#x27;s 80K newsletter followers? They&#x27;re different business models and each has its own place.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eternal_September" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eternal_September</a>

Am I being too judgemental, that Cal did not put a working link to Neil&#x27;s blog in the post?