The Verge’s Decoder turns the table on its host, Nilay Patel, to talk about blogs. I often appre­ci­ate Patel’s take on the mod­ern web. And while I run a few web­sites, I appre­ci­ate his joke that The Verge is “the last web­site on earth.” There was a cer­tain kind of web­site back in the day that you’d vis­it direct­ly to see what they were say­ing. Their reporters were fun­ny and snarky and opin­ion­at­ed and even when I dis­agreed with their take, I was usu­al­ly glad I had tak­en the time to read it. There’s a few indi­vid­ual blog­gers like that left, folks like Jason Kot­tke and John Gru­ber, but few sites still like The Verge, in my opin­ion. So much of the con­ver­sa­tion today hap­pens on social media, where it’s frac­tured (Mastodon? Face­book? Threads? Bluesky?) and ephemeral.

About a year ago, The Verge went for a more old-school blog­ging mod­el, based on appeal­ing to peo­ple vis­it­ing the site direct­ly rather than Google algo­rithms. I’m glad they did that. 

There’s also good stuff in her about brands: “But you know what? All the celebri­ties still want to be on the cov­er of mag­a­zines. They want the val­i­da­tion that the big brand, the insti­tu­tion, can pro­vide. And there’s a rea­son for that because the brand stands for more than just an indi­vid­ual opin­ion — or at least at its best it does.” I think that’s true for my work with Friends Jour­nal. Any­one can write some­thing and post it any­where, yet there still seems to be a yearn­ing for a place that’s still a common-ground water­ing hole, a conversation-starter.

Nilay Patel tells Decoder guest host Hank Green why blogs are still great 

Com­plex­ly co-founder and YouTu­ber Hank Green takes over Decoder to inter­view Nilay Patel.

The Verge