>> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership.
Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog.
I also recall a distinction between homepages (IE where useful static information collected in one place) and blogs (personal stories not with the goal of teaching). Homepages could have lots of traffic but little real interaction (like FB today). Blogs would have lots of detailed interaction but but very little viewership.
Definitely true for me in the 2000s. My social network formed a bunch of circles with very little overlap. A blog, like the ones I and some of my friends used to have, would serve as a bridge, thanks to the sidebar linking to other people the blog author reads/recommends. Back in the day, I used to be active in a local gamedev scene, so my sidebar was mostly full of links to blogs of other hobbyist/aspiring game developers, who would in turn link back to me. If you were interested in gamedev, you could easily go from blog to blog and enumerate almost everyone in the group, but at each step you also had an opportunity to branch out to a given author's other interests.
It was a nice way of discovering new things, and a more personal one. You jumped around topics and social networks simultaneously; at every step it wasn't just a new theme, but a new person, an acqauintance of an acquaintance, someone with a name (or more likely then, a nickname) you would remember and refer back to in conversations. Even though we mostly didn't know one another except from blogs and IRC, the Internet felt much more like a village back then. Now, it feels like a strip mall.
Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog.
I also recall a distinction between homepages (IE where useful static information collected in one place) and blogs (personal stories not with the goal of teaching). Homepages could have lots of traffic but little real interaction (like FB today). Blogs would have lots of detailed interaction but but very little viewership.