I Miss the Blogosphere - Can We Bring it Back?

Substack is great, but it doesn’t seed conversations like I wish it would

I’ve listened to a fair number of podcasts over the past few years that touch on the rise and fall of the blogosphere—in the early to late-oughts—as the central organizing medium for the political-intellectual-journalistic discourse.

It’s poignant listening to these reminiscences, because even though I was only a very minor participant in the blogosphere (I co-authored with Jamie Berger a lively but not especially well read blog, “Masculinity and its Discontents,” for the alt weekly where I worked), the experience of reading blogs was formative for me.

Above all, I loved being witness to, and occasional participant in, the rolling conversation between bloggers that was so intrinsic to the ecosystem.

Here, e.g., is Ezra Klein talking to Ross Douthat about that aspect of their time coming up as bloggers:

Klein: I’ve thought a lot about why I think the blogosphere was healthier than what came after it, and whether or not that was just because I was in my 20s, and people liked what was happening when they were in their 20s. The music was better.

But I do think this was, to me, the reality of it. It was fundamentally conversational. You wrote things in the expectation that the people you were writing about would read them, and they would answer you.

And I don’t think that is how a lot of media works now. Instead of talking to the people you’re talking about, you talk about them on X or Twitter. You quote-tweet and dunk on them, and then you look for the hearts and the retweets. It has really changed the currency.

I remember — so I began my blog in 2003, and the only way you could get readership — I mean, there were no algorithms. You were not winning Google Search results.

The way you got readership was through these links back and forth. Right now, what happens is the reward, and the way that audience is secured is you get people who agree with you to retweet it, to restack it, whatever it might be.

But back then I actually wanted — I disagreed with Andrew Sullivan on all kinds of things. And it was good for me if Andrew Sullivan block-quoted me and then argued, and then I would block-quote him and argue back. And we would go back and forth.

And it wasn’t that it could never be disrespectful — it was often heated. But there was still a sense that you were in relationship.

At their best¹, these back-and-forths were intellectual duels that were every bit as rich as the post-war contests between, say, William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal, or Ralph Ellison and Irving Howe, or Norman Mailer vs. the entire feminist intellectual class.

And you didn’t just get to watch the name brand bloggers fight it out with each other, across days or weeks, you got to participate in the conversation yourself via the comments sections of the various blogs, where often you weren’t just hashing it out with other commenters but with the top-level bloggers themselves, who would respond to you in the comments and sometimes, if you said something really smart (or really stupid), elevate your comment to pride of place in a new standalone post on their blog, with set-up or further commentary from them. That then might prompt a response from another top tier blogger, and so on.

Even if your role in the drama was very small, in other words, you felt like you were a part of something much bigger. And in retrospect, you were. I was. It was pluralistic democracy in action. It surfaced a bunch of important writers, many of whom are still major players. It changed how mainstream journalism operated. And it ramified out to affect electoral politics.

Then—tragically—it was just gone, cannibalized above all, as Klein suggests, by Twitter, which organized the discourse even faster, with even lower barrier to entry.

I thought about this all, recently, when I came across a Substack post by Awais Aftab in which he offered a minor, rather technical critique of Emmett Rensin’s recent profile of Unshrunk author/anti-psychiatry phenom Laura Delano.

Here’s Aftab² on Rensin³:

In his majestic and memorable essay “Over the Borderline” (The Lamp, July 31, 2026) — a long and insightful profile of Laura Delano — Emmett Rensin (excellent writer, please devote some attention to his growing oeuvre, if you aren’t already following him) says at one point that borderline personality is a disorder that he doesn’t believe “properly exists.” He doesn’t quite elaborate on what that means, and the one example he discusses in some detail—his skepticism about splitting—isn’t particularly compelling.

This reads to me so much like an old school blog post. There’s the very smart, very in-the-weeds dissent about a small aspect of a very long essay that the author otherwise finds admirable. There’s the generous block-quoting of, and hyperlinking to, other writers. There’s the very deliberate effort to bring other voices into the mix (Aftab block quotes and tags “the psychiatrist Sally Satel in her review of Delano’s book Unshrunk”).

The whole thing, in other words, is an invitation to conversation. And if you go down to the comments, you see that spirit reciprocated.

Orestis Zavlis, a psychology doctoral student at University College London, chimes in to offer some respectful criticism of Aftab’s characterization of splitting from the perspective of research on precisely the topic of splitting that he and his colleagues have done.

Indeed, my collaborators at UCL are perhaps the only people on the planet who have thoughtfully theorised about splitting – to the point where they formalised the concept mathematically in order to understand it! And, when they tested the concept empirically (see here: https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2024-00165-001.html), they found no evidence that it operates as a defense. And, of course, this is absence of evidence (not clear evidence of absence), and we are continuing to test this… But my overall point here is precisely this: there is no convincing evidence for the current definition of splitting: at best, our evidence suggests that some people are more likely to make extreme evaluations of self and others in particularly stressful relational contexts, but there is no evidence that they do so defensively or that their doing so has anything to do with their “personality” (however “personality” is defined).

Cooper Davis, who is Laura Delano’s husband (!), comments:

I might contest some of the details here where they diverge from what I can see from my own vantage point. But this is a great adjunct to Emmett’s piece in The Lamp — which is indeed long, but is also very deliberately rendered and beautifully wrought, deserving of the time it takes to really read it through. Even if it depicts Yours Truly as even more of a buffoon than I have generally come to anticipate.

And so on. There are eight comments in total on the essay, most of them quite intelligent. It’s more evidence for my general hypothesis that Substack is a return, in many ways, to the spirit of the old blogosphere. What the whole thing is not, however, is something that really travels. If you search Substack, you can find a few people quoting and re-stacking the original post on Notes, and maybe some comments beneath those other users’s quotes or re-stacks, but there’s nothing cumulative about it, no real linkages from one person to another that build on each other and ultimately take on the shape of a conversation.

Compare that to the kind of cascade an essay like Rensin’s would have had a good chance of setting off back in the day:

• Aftab posts his thing to his blog.

• Satel sees herself tagged in Aftab’s post and feels compelled to jump into the fray. So does Jesse Meadows.

• Rensin responds to them on the group blog he co-authors with Sorbie.

• Freddie deBoer show up to majestically shit on everyone else’s perspective.

• Robert Wright invites Aftab and Rensin to do a bloggingheads conversation.

• Cooper Davis posts something to Mad in America, the group blog that gave Delano her first real platform, and a whole other node of the conversation is spawned in the anti-pscyhiatry/psychiatry skeptic blog ecosystem.

• Andrew Sullivan highlights the ongoing conversation, with an assist from Chris Bodenner or Conor Friedersdorf or Zack Beauchamp.

• Rachel Aviv, who profiled Delano for The New Yorker, is too high prestige to have a blog of her own, but she follow the discourse as a reader of Aftab’s blog, as do dozens of other journalists who cover the mental health field for big time publications. They’re influenced, in ways implicit and explicit, by the conversation.

• Orestis Zavlis comments on Aftab’s post, then Aftab writes another short post in which he highlights and responds to Zavlis’s comments, and also links to Zavlis’s blog, which gives Zavlis a boost in readership, which incentivizes him to write more.

• Arts & Letters Daily links to a bunch of different posts in its daily round-up.

• Etc. Etc. Etc.

Substack is great. I love Substack. But I miss this.

Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best and the rest have written quite eloquently, and I choose to believe sincerely, about their desire to orient the platform to serve writers, and I can feel this when I’m using it. The result, though, is that as a reader it feels much more like a series of mostly parallel, occasionally intersecting tubes whose main function is to connect the writers to their subscribers rather than a network oriented toward bringing writers into connection with each other (with ancillary benefits for the readers).

I don’t have an argument to make, really, for why that’s good or bad, but it’s clear that the structure doesn’t incentivize, doesn’t nudge into existence, the rolling conversation.

I’m not naive about why writers write what they write. We do it for the love of the game, certainly, but most of us also need to get paid, whether the essential currency is prestige, attention, career advancement, or … currency. The blogosphere worked as it did, in the ways that I so loved, because it evolved in a way that rewarded writers and aspiring writers for doing that kind of work. When the incentive structure changed, it stopped working.

For the conversation to return, we’ll need a new structure where the right mix of incentives, disincentives, technology, UX decisions, norms, etc. are in place to make it worth our while, as writers, to write to each other in the way bloggers used to write to each other. I don’t expect it to happen, but consider this my plea to the universe (and, what the hell, the Substack Team as well) that it will.

p.s. The funny thing is that I was this close to posting a very abbreviated version of this argument to Substack Notes when I realized that I was doing the precise thing I was lamenting, substituting a Twitter-style half-thought for a full-fledged post. It took a conscious effort of will to switch it over to here.

1. See, e.g., this 2009 exchange between Ross Douthat and Ta-Nehisi Coates on the normative/non-normative/ideal structure of the American family:

• Your family’s dysfunctional, Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Big Love and the Art of the Soap Opera, Ross Douthat

• Big Love and Soap Opera, Ta-Nehisi Coates

• Social Conservatism and the Coates Family, Ross Douthat

My memory is that there was a whole constellation of other blog posts, from other bloggers, that coalesced around these core posts from the two main actors, but I’m struggling to find links. So many of those smaller blogs have disappeared into the digital dustbin of history, and the main posts themselves (as you’ll notice if you click on the links above) are paywalled.

2. Here’s Aftab on my podcast, and here’s the profile of him I wrote for Psychotherapy Networker.

3. Rensin’s going to be on the forthcoming episode of my podcast, talking about the profile of Delano and various related matters.