2025-11-26

Where is the blogosphere?

Decline or diffusion?

The blogosphere was a loosely connected group of bloggers that peaked in the early 2010s, with a core focus around economics. Infrastructure was maturing, ideas were flowing, and core blogosphere members became close friends offline. While the community still loosely exists today, it does not carry the same intellectual weight or draw the same level of talent as it used to.

The blogosphere attracted a certain archetype that was overwhelmingly interested in ideas and willing to argue about a variety of topics with random strangers on the internet. Because of the blogosphere's centrality and small size, a formal status kingdom among internet intellectuals naturally emerged and a network effect around the blogosphere developed.

Scott Sumner described the distinction between "blogosphere economics" and "academic economics" as:

"To me, the term 'blogosphere' sounds dumber than 'academic,' even if you didn't know the meaning of either term. Say them both out loud. I'd prefer "the ungated, free entry, merit-driven, competitive, methodologically eclectic, wisdom of crowds-based global hive mind," vs. "ivory tower, methodologically dogmatic, elitest, academic world where you either data mine to publish empirical papers or invent endless permutations of theoretical models."

The blogosphere was one of the primary intellectual counter-cultural movements that legitimized internet-based discussion and science. There is still a long way to go but there are clear signals that the tides are turning:

  • SlimeMoldTimeMold are mad scientists trying to solve obesity via a terrific series on how to run one-person studies.
  • Aella is a scientist and sex worker running one of the most comprehensive datasets in human history, contributing to our understanding of relationships and sex with novel data-driven insights.
  • Adam Mastroianni, a Harvard social psychology PhD, choosing to not work in academia, electing to run a Science House for researchers to live together and work on science, while also writing a Substack.

One by one, elite talent is being vampire attacked into the ungated, free entry, merit-driven, competitive, methodologically eclectic, wisdom of crowds-based global hive mind. But while internet science begins to gain legitimacy and solidify, the blogosphere that spawned them has been on the decline.

The blogosphere decline

Since its peak in the early 2010s, the blogosphere has largely faded away due to some combination of the following factors:

  • Social media: Twitter offered higher engagement, more career upside, and more universal status markers for a fraction of the effort. Why spend three days crafting the perfect 2,000-word blog post when you can pump out 280 characters every time you take a shit?
  • Stagnation in blogging market microstructure: besides Substack, which started in 2019 and provides infrastructure to deliver posts directly to inboxes along with a monetization layer, nothing else has changed. Existing blogosphere participants were already plugged into RSS feeds, meaning that there was little expansion of the scene.
  • Higher opportunity costs: The 2010s were a decade-long bull market, where people rationally chose to become a practitioner over a Straussian internet blogger.
  • "Real jobs"
  • Kids

Regardless of the causes, like many multidimensional emergent scenes, even a sense of stagnation can lead to cultural decay and exodus.

Where is the present day blogosphere?

Every few years, a blogging renaissance seems imminent, only for core contributors to defect to do something else.

The would-be bloggers of 2025 have far more outlets to flex the same intellectual muscles their predecessors once expressed through blogging. Capital is abundant, barriers to other mediums have collapsed, and the pathways for earning internet social capital are more egalitarian and multidimensional than ever.

Becoming legible to existing players, once largely achieved through blogging, can now be accomplished in far more lucrative and impactful ways:

  • Working at a research lab and writing deep dives in company Slacks
  • Building alternative institutions for science
  • Running anon accounts on Twitter
  • Running YouTube channels
  • Starting a hedge fund
  • Starting a podcast

In many ways, the blogosphere resembled the high school experience of hyper-optimized children: a concentrated, artificial, out of touch environment where status competition was the main event. The dispersal into other professions with positive externalities should be interpreted as graduation, not retirement.

This isn't to say that a rich blogging scene isn't useful or will never be seen again. Blogging residencies are connecting successful bloggers with newcomers. The beauty of the blogosphere is that it is emergent, egalitarian, and not capital-intensive: you only need a handful of core individuals and one hit post to spark an entire movement.

Maybe one day the next blogosphere will make it out of the new blogger Slack.

Popularity prediction hash: aa2ad20ce00d0a395586901bf2f784e96a115c3d89c114b4968c4f08de0b8d0e