January 13, 2026
RSS vs Algorithm: FIGHT!
The Case for Blogging in the Ruins
Bring back blogs, dump the feeds—commenters are split
TLDR: A well-shared essay says blogs—old-school personal websites—are the fix for today’s outrage-driven platforms. Commenters loved the idea but split over discovery: some want decentralized control, others say people only find writing through social apps, and a domain-name debate erupted over whether owning your URL is worth the hassle.
A fiery essay invokes Denis Diderot and begs us to rebuild the web with blogs instead of rage-bait feeds—and the comments immediately turned into a town hall with memes. The author’s point: blogs are infrastructure for thinking, like Diderot’s Encyclopédie, while today’s platforms are designed to keep you doomscrolling. That set the stage for a blowout.
One camp came in hot with “take back the web” energy. cdrnsf slammed the gavel: blogs over networks, protocols over platforms—translation: own your stuff, don’t rent it from a feed. Others nodded to findability: andyjohnson0 dropped the black-pill, “For a lot of people, social media is the internet,” warning that while search engines still love blogs, most people just follow what the app shows them.
Nostalgia hit, too. andyjohnson0’s VisiCalc tale had folks chuckling about the era when “the program was the computer.” But the real bloodsport was over domains. The essay cheers “buy yourname.com,” but bluebarbet flipped the table: managing a domain is a PITA with little payoff. Meanwhile, zem pitched the quieter win: the magic of a permanent link that an interested reader can find later.
Verdict? Everyone agrees blogs are smarter; the war is over how anyone finds them.
Key Points
- •Denis Diderot began publishing the Encyclopédie in 1751, a 28-volume project completed over more than two decades.
- •The Encyclopédie faced bans by the French government, condemnation by the Catholic Church, collaborator withdrawals, and publisher censorship.
- •Diderot’s goal was to build “infrastructure for thinking” by organizing knowledge to enable exploration and change how people think.
- •The article argues that modern platforms—aside from Wikipedia—optimize information for engagement and provocation rather than structured knowledge.
- •It proposes returning to blogging, highlighting blogs’ permanence, flexibility, and capacity to foster long-form, careful discourse with permanent URLs.