The blogroll
Where discovery actually went, and the rule I had to give myself before the list was any use to anyone.
In January I found a blog I’ve since read all the way through, and the route was: a post I was reading linked to it, in the running prose, with a sentence about why.
It took me the rest of the day to work out why that felt strange. It’s not that recommendations have stopped reaching me. I get more of them than I can use. It’s that that one came from a person who had put their own name next to it.
Which is a slightly precious way to describe a hyperlink, and I’ve been chewing on it for a month, so here we are.
Where discovery went
Three things happened, none of them a conspiracy, and between them they closed the door.
Search became answers. If I look up how something works I now get a paragraph, which is genuinely often what I wanted, and I do not get a list of five people who have written about it and one of whom I might have started reading. The paragraph has digested them. It’s a better answer and a worse doorway.
Feeds became ranked. Whatever people post now goes through something that decides who sees it, tuned for a metric that isn’t “did this person find someone worth following for the next decade.” Even when it works, what it produces is the post rather than the writer, and you have to go looking to convert one into the other.
And links themselves got devalued from both ends. For years everybody was told outbound links leak something, and for years everybody wanted you to stay, so the whole web quietly stopped pointing anywhere except at itself.
So the only remaining path from “a person whose taste I trust” to “a person I’d never have found” is a person choosing to point, and the blogroll is the oldest and least sophisticated version of that.
Recommendation is a machine's job now. Doing it yourself, with your name on it, is a small refusal, and it costs about an hour.
Two reasons we stopped, one of which nobody says
The technical reason is boring and true. The blogroll lived in a sidebar, and the sidebar died in about 2012 when everything went mobile-first, because there was nowhere to put it on a phone. It didn’t get moved. It got dropped and nobody missed it for a decade.
The other reason is social, and I’ve not seen many people say it out loud.
A blogroll is a public list of who you rate. That’s the whole value of it and it’s also the whole problem, because leaving somebody off is a statement whether you meant it as one or not, and people notice. There’s an expectation of reciprocity that nobody agreed to and everybody feels. And once your list has any professional consequence, it stops being “who I read” and starts drifting toward “who it is good for me to be seen reading,” which produces a list that’s no use to anybody.
I think that’s the real reason it withered, honestly, more than the sidebar. Curating in public is uncomfortable and the discomfort compounds.
What I actually did
I exported my reader as OPML, which took one click, and opened it expecting a tidy list of people I read.
60-odd feeds. I’d been adding to it since about 2016 and subtracting from it essentially never.
A good third hadn’t published anything since 2022. Several of the domains were gone, one now sells something, and a couple redirect to a LinkedIn profile, which is its own small sad genre. Of the ones still going, there was a solid group I skim the titles of and never open, which I had not previously admitted to myself.
The list I could honestly stand behind was about 18 people.
The rule that made it useful
Only people I have actually read something by in the last 12 months.
That sounds obvious written down. It removed about half of what I’d have listed from memory, including two or three people whose names I’d have put up mostly because putting their names up says something flattering about me. Those are exactly the ones that make a blogroll worthless, because the reader can’t tell the difference between a recommendation and a signal, and if there are enough signals in there they stop trusting the recommendations.
Two other things I decided and would defend.
I’ve written a line next to each one, saying what they write about and why I keep reading. A bare list of domains is a list of homework. One sentence turns it into somebody telling you about a person, and it’s the difference between a page anybody clicks and a page nobody does.
And I’m not doing reciprocal links. If somebody lists me I’m delighted, genuinely, and it doesn’t get them onto mine, because the moment the list is an exchange it stops describing what I read. That’s going to feel rude at some point and I’ve decided in advance to eat it.
It’s not a solution to anything
Being realistic, because I don’t want to oversell a page of links.
18 links on a personal site is not a discovery mechanism. It’ll reach a few dozen people who were already here. It doesn’t scale, there’s no network effect, and it’ll be out of date within the year unless I put a reminder in the calendar, which I have, for July, and which I fully expect to snooze twice.
But the alternative isn’t a better system, it’s nothing. And it took an hour, and the hour was mostly enjoyable, because reading back through eight years of subscriptions turns out to be a decent record of what I was interested in and when. That was worth it on its own, in the same way that writing a uses page in 2020 was more useful to me than the page has ever been to anybody else.
Mine went up this week. If you’ve got a site, put one up, and put a sentence next to each name. That’s the whole ask. Somebody finds a writer they keep for ten years and neither of you ever finds out, which is a fairly good description of what the web was supposed to be for :)