I have a habit: almost every day, I stop by blog aggregators to see what independent bloggers have posted lately. Sometimes I click into one site on a whim, then follow a link in its blogroll to another, and then another after that. I keep clicking, drifting, and reading like that for quite a while.
That habit comes from two places.
For one thing, I spent years building websites myself. I tried all kinds of systems, met a lot of people, and I still miss those days of tinkering with code and organizing resources. When I browse around now, I sometimes catch a familiar name and immediately think back to that time. And when I click through only to find a 404 page, it is hard not to feel a small pang at how much has changed. In the end, I did not give up having an independent blog because of the cost, and not because I got tired of it either. The real reason is not something I can easily explain. All I can say is that reality won.
The second reason is simpler: independent blogs feel like private plots of land. I like reading those unpolished fragments of everyday life, hearing those half-whispered thoughts colored by real emotion, and watching people document the sort of fiddling and experimenting that might seem pointless to anyone else. That kind of writing is difficult to come across on social platforms.
On today’s major platforms, writers chase whatever topic is currently hot, then algorithms push that content toward users based on traffic logic. The whole thing reminds me of an old image: salt water poured on the ground to lure a sheep-drawn carriage. There is a story that Emperor Wu of Jin did not always know where he would spend the night, so he rode in a sheep cart through the palace and stayed wherever the sheep stopped. The palace women, hoping to attract his attention, sprinkled salt water on the ground and placed bamboo leaves by their doors so the sheep would pause there.
That is what much of the internet feels like now. So much of the writing is noisy, and so many of the voices carry only impatience and agitation. Of course, quiet and sincere self-expression has not disappeared completely. It still exists. It is just that this kind of writing rarely gets delivered by the platforms, and usually remains tucked away in some corner, waiting to be stumbled upon.