I started my blog, thinking liberal.co.uk, in 2011, when political blogs were quite popular. I used Facebook and Twitter to find interested readers. That was quite popular then. My blog had quite a reasonable impact – people mentioned it to me at party conferences. I interacted with people on both Facebook and Twitter. That was a brief moment of glory – it has since faded into something followed by a few friends and a small band of others whom I have picked up on the way. I don’t know how many, as the statistics seem to be dominated by bots and fakes; even the rather limited mailing list seems to have quite a few dodgy items.
Facebook and Twitter are now well down the path of enshittification, a process first described by Cory Doctorow in 2022. An online service starts by favouring the interests of customers and people to the point of lunacy: everything is free and under your control. Gradually the process of monetisation takes over until customers (and staff) are left with a very weak product, but little alternative because these have been squashed through network effects. Facebook made it harder and harder to use for the distribution of political thought. It was attracting too much controversy (mainly because of its use to promote conspiracy theories and fake news), and the simplest solution was to block all of it, not just the bad stuff. My feed is now full of things I never asked for, driven by sponsorship or an algorithm. Posts from a few friends show up from time to time (to which I need to respond if I am to have any chance of seeing them regularly) – but blink and you miss it. The feed refreshes and the post vanishes. You can find things by searching for the poster, but it’s hard work. For a while I could mitigate some of the problems by creating a Facebook page for my blog, which if people “liked”, they were much more likely to pick up posts on their feed. When I most recently visited this page, however, I was shocked. It was full of junk content put there by algorithm. I had expected to see a sequence of the posts I had made. It has been completely enshittified. To make it work I would need to buy promotion.
Twitter, meanwhile, made it harder for me to post links to my blog long before Elon Musk decided to trash it. Tools that allowed an automatic post ceased to work. I have long since ceased to post, though my account still exists, as some of the notifications are interesting, though even this has tailed off.
Then along came Substack – a blog distribution system. This has proved very popular amongst political bloggers, and so I thought I would give it a try. I’m not entirely sure how it works, or how far along the path of enshittification it has travelled – though the journey has clearly started. One particular feature, though, I will not use: paid subscriptions. I write the blog for my personal pleasure, and because I find that writing helps clarify thought. It is irregular, and I have long since abandoned any idea that it can be seriously influential. I don’t need the money. I suspect that subscriptions are an important part of the Substack business model, though, so this may not be sustainable in the long term. We’ll see.
My plan is to publish all my future posts here. The WordPress website will keep going – this at least is pretty much under my control, and acts as a record of my writing. Email subscription there seems to be costless and easy, so I will keep going with it; Substack will simply been an alternative channel. I may drop the Facebook page – though it does seem to be pretty costless to keep going. I will also keep posting on my main Facebook feed, as I know a few of my friends are picking it up. I will probably stop the silly AI pictures (unless people say they like them). I put these on to improve the chances of the Facebook algorithms favouring them – and to avoid the copyright issues arising from using real pictures.
So let’s see what happens!
You should be able to find my Substack page and subscribe here.