How to Find Blogs by Real People

For years I mostly read books. I found blogs and single articles by chance: I either came across something on social media, or I found an interesting article while searching for something on Google. Lately that has stopped working. A large share of the text that reaches me now was written by a machine. Good writing by real people is getting harder to find.

The first thing to understand is that the internet is not one place. It has layers. And a part of the population has moved to a different layer than the one where most of us look.

The public web

The public web is what most people think of as the whole internet. Google, public pages, the feed on social media. Everything that can be searched and is open to anyone.

This layer has changed. It is flooded with content written by a machine. People call it the dead internet: a place where much of the text, the images and the answers are no longer made by people. I have written about this before.

You may also come across the name dark forest, a place that seems to hold no life, although the life is there, only quiet, hidden from predators such as trackers, bots, trolls, advertising, algorithms, manipulators of our emotions and clickbait creators. The dark forest metaphor comes from the science fiction writer Liu Cixin; Yancey Strickler applied it to the internet in 2019. The designer and anthropologist Maggie Appleton later applied it to the age of artificial intelligence: a public web so flooded with generated content that real people hide in closed spaces.

The cozy web, the IndieWeb and RSS

Where did they go? Partly into the so-called cozy web: spaces with a gate, such as private chats and closed communities. The term comes from Venkatesh Rao. And partly into the quiet part of the public web: small personal blogs that stay open to everyone, only no algorithm pushes them at you. Those you follow through RSS, and some of them are wired to each other through the IndieWeb, a community of personal sites that built open standards such as Webmention and microformats.

In the cozy web and on those blogs people still write for people. The problem is that you very rarely reach them through Google or any other algorithm. You have to get there another way. One way is a list kept by a person, not an algorithm. That is why I made the Human filter.

On some sites the layers can also be felt visually, pages that hide from the predators of the dark forest often look different from a modern styled website. I show what this looks like on my own blog on a separate page, cozy web. Still, I know what those who apply AI and algorithms are capable of, and I will not be surprised if even the specific style of community sites and personal blogs starts being imitated.

How to reach that layer

The tools that make it possible have existed for years. They are old and simple. For a long time they meant nothing to me either, until I needed them. I started paying attention to them about a year ago, when I decided to develop my blog further in terms of its features. That is how I came to RSS. What is it?

RSS and the reader

Most established blogs have, besides their normal page, a second address, the so-called RSS feed. It is usually the same content, but in a form made for readers: computer or mobile applications that will show you text only from the authors you want to read.

An RSS reader is such an application. You put the feed addresses of blogs into it, and it goes through them itself and brings you all the new articles in one place. It works like an inbox, but for blogs. You go nowhere, the content comes to you, and you decide, not an algorithm.

One file for the whole list (OPML)

If you wanted to follow a group of blogs, you would have to add all their addresses one by one. For that there is OPML: a single file that holds a list of feed addresses. You import it into your reader once and you have everything in it.

Newsletters

The newsletter is the easiest for a wide audience. The author sends their texts to your inbox themselves. You manage nothing, you just subscribe.

How I read other blogs

On my own site I made a page called the Human filter. On it I share authors, blogs and articles that I have read and consider good, always with a link to the original and the name of the author. No algorithm, just one person and what he has actually read.

The page also comes with an RSS feed and a single OPML file. That file holds the feeds of every author I recommend on the Human filter. Anyone who imports it into their reader begins, in one step, to follow every author I recommend.

In my own reader I have only what I put into the Human filter. So I read exactly the authors I write about.

The first step

To begin, very little is needed. Download a free RSS reader, import my OPML file from the Human filter, and in a few clicks you have good writing by real people. Or subscribe to the newsletter of someone you like to read.

Real people have not disappeared from the internet. They have only moved to a layer you have to enter another way.