The Sad State of Blogs

Sniff. It’s like he can see into our soul:

…Twitter changed how conservatives interacted. Who needed mass emails when we could send a tweet and be seen by other conservatives? That ease of interaction and ability to mobilize people had a downside. I credit/blame Twitter for the demise of most smaller conservative websites.

I went through our blogroll recently, and deleted dozens of links to defunct or barely functioning conservative blogs. It was truly shocking how many no longer exist or rarely post. Part of it certainly is dreaded Blogger Burnout. But part of it is that Twitter is the new blogosphere.

Twitter helped destroy the conservative ecosystem of small blogs by replacing it with something easier to use and more effective.

If you want a sense of conservative blog attrition, take a gander at Ace’s sidebar – I’d guess that 90% of the links are inactive.

I think it’s a shame that blogs have declined over the past 5 years, but maybe that’s because I personally couldn’t get comfortable with Twitter’s short format. I know that NiceDeb thrived on Twitter, using it as a platform for communication and blog promotion. But in an age* where there’s already too much bumper-sticker-level policy discussion, Twitter just seemed like an exacerbator (which, I was just surprised to learn, is an actual word).

Ah well, we’ll just keep plugging away, hoping to recapture relevance and readership despite our antediluvian medium.

*Sounds like a movie trailer. “In an age . . . where Twitter ruled supreme. In a land . . . where blogs dried up and blew away. One man stood up…”