People like to say that “blogs are over.” Not true. Many blogs still do incredibly well, like Marginal Revolution, and new blog-like formats like Substack are doing great. What is true is that the Golden Age of Blogs is past. In the 2010s, blogs gave way to Twitter as modern society’s “instant response” forum. Blogs are still very useful and popular, but they aren’t “hot.”
This post is a reflection on my small role in the blogging world. In 2003, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok asked me to guest blog at Marginal Revolution. I did some writing in 2003 and 2004 but did not start my own blog, mainly because I was busy being an assistant professor. One day, I wrote a few comments on a new blog called orgtheory.net, run by management professors Brayden King and Teppo Felin. They invited me to join and that’s how I got started.
For the first five years or so, orgtheory was a team operation for sure. The orgtheory crew was exceptional, in addition to Bayden and Teppo, we had Omar Lizardo, Keiran Healey, Sean Safford, and Katherine Chen. They wrote frequently and they each had their own unique style. Not surprisingly, the blog was a success, garnering about 900,000 views in one year.
Personally, I found blogging to be easy. All writers require practice and I just made orgtheory my own creative outlet. Sometimes, I would work out my ideas on a very technical topic, but my specialty was the academic essay that teased sociologists. For example, I discovered that the academic literature consistently shows that standardized tests are actually useful and I wrote a blog post called, “An Inconvenient Truth About GRE Scores.” I also wrote about topics where I had passion. My blog series, Grad School Rulz, became my third book and my first e-book. I also wrote a lot about open borders.
I believe that the success of orgttheory wasn’t just about fun writing and smart people, but also luck and opportunity. The issue is that very few people have the drive to write effectively in a blog format. It’s just like podcasts or newsletters. It’s a grind and most people won’t work at it for years. So we had the field to ourselves. My memory is that the only real competitors in the sociology blog space were Tressie Cottom’s blog (and later Twitter feed), which drew a huge audience, and Scatterplot, which still exists but rarely posts.
Orgtheory began to lose audience once Twitter became the primary online forum for sociologists. The reasons are obvious. Blogs are about writing, Twitter is instant response. Also, the technology is much easier to use. Anyone willing to type with their thumbs could run a Twitter feed. This is not a bad thing. Time passes and things change.
Another issue is simply that the blog’s authors simply moved on to other things. To give you a sense of how busy these people are, two of us became journal editors, at least three became dept chairs, and all have remained very productive as teachers and scholars. Still, orgtheory became a ghost town. By 2021, only Katherine and I were left as regular posters. We said goodbye and moved on.
One reason I terminated my writing at orgtheory was that the commenting section died. It was very sad. I originally had enjoyed the wealth of comments on the blog, but ten years into it, the comments were all but gone. Even worse, the few remaining commenters were often repetitive and toxic. It was depressing.
So I shut orgtheory down and moved to Substack. Little by little, I am rebuilding my audience. I have gotten some nice comments and people I meet will often compliment me on something they read. Thank you, it really means a lot to me.
Bottom line: I am lucky to have all of you read Temple of Sociology and I strive to earn your future attention.
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No worries. You don't want fidgety, distractable, Twitter readers anyway. Oh, some of them may be thoughtful, and may have valuable insights. But the medium itself brings out the shallow, knee-jerk side we all have, and mainly suppress.
It's great to see Substack fill a role that Twitter can't fit and also help revitalize blogging. Glad to have many great thinkers on this platform like you and hope your community keeps growing!