Why I stopped reading the Trending page
So I've stopped reading the Trending page on the Discover feed.
I don't have anything against the Trending page as a concept. A month ago I leapfrogged off some meta that was trending and made a meme post that gained a lot of traction.1
I didn't think the post would get as many views and toasts as it did, and I didn't make it with the intention of blowing up. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't satisfying as hell to watch it climb up the ranks and land on the Trending page like some Billboard Hot 100 single.
That sort of engagement wasn't what I joined Bear Blog for though. As a matter of fact, I came here to escape the numbers game.
If there's anything to be learned from the 2024 US election, it's that centralized social media sucks. I've ditched everything but reddit2 in favor of platforms on the indie/open web. I've also been undertaking regular detoxes from social media and news.
Amidst my shifting preferences and perspectives on the internet, I've come to appreciate Bear Blog as a platform and source of online content. Its minimalist but still customizable; blogs can have vibrant visual designs without the bloat of unnecessary functions and features, and content is served in deceivingly simple formats of Markdown, CSS, and HTML.
The main prerogative here isn't to drive clicks, but rather provide users with their own online space to express themselves and connect with other people. There are no bridges or plugins to external social media sites. Such a modest mission statement feels refreshingly genuine on the modern web.
There are tons of static site hosts out there. Bear Blog doesn't just host blogs; it also serves an additional purpose of bringing people together. This requires some sort of common forum. A place where media, generated by individual people, is aggregated on a social basis...
Any platform on the open web is a better alternative than a Big Tech counterpart. But social media is social media. The easiest way to organize social media is by time and levels of engagement; Bear Blog is no exception to this rule.
Hence, the Discover feed.
Recently I've found that the Discover feed has become a silo of the same handful of bloggers, topics, and type of posts. I don't have anything against any of the popular bloggers here, how they write, or what they write about. Neither do I find fault in wanting to participate in infrastructure associated with traditional social media.3
One of the most popular bloggers on this site, Ava, writes a lot about technology and the modern web, and how people have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water when trying to cut down on their time spent online, or likewise only focus on the negatives when critiquing social media.
The internet is probably the most consequential technological development since the printing press, and social media has become such a huge part of the modern web because it is, at its core, really fun.
Hell, I met my wife online. We became best friends and fell in love while two thousand miles and six hours apart.4 Tearful upsets, romantic confessions, and moments of joy were all rendered digitally through software. That software then converted our emotions into little packets of binary data, which were sent off on a journey spanning countless servers and interfaces before being delivered to our personal computers and repackaged as love letters, text messages, and late night video calls.
As a teenager I struggled with gender identity, sexuality, and mental health issues. Spending time online in places like Tumblr helped give me a sense of community and identity that I desperately needed. Without friends of my own at school and a difficult home life, being able to congregate with like-minded peers made me feel less alone.
I first turned to the internet to express myself at a young age, posting artwork on deviantART and writing stories on Fanfiction.net, and continued investing time into my creative passions well into adulthood. The internet provides a million resources for artists, including amazing communities built around open source software like Krita. Not to mention that I wouldn't be half the writer I am today without having spent over a decade reading and writing fanfiction on Archive of Our Own.
In short, the internet has served me well.
I guess all of that has influenced my decision to stop putting much weight into the Trending page here on Bear Blog. The internet is more than what's hot, and Bear Blog as a community is more than its top ten or twenty posts.
Starting a blog from the ground up is no easy task, and it can often feel like shouting into the void. To go through that process and continue to make content anyway means you've got an inner drive to post about something important to you, whether it's a daily feed of albums to listen to, a short story about a girl born in the aftermath of World War 2, or an idyllic quote from Oscar Wilde on being a deadbeat drifter (which I quite liked, as a self-proclaimed fuck up myself).
I found all of those posts on the Recent page. It's a pretty cool feeling to find stuff like that, partly by random chance (time) as well as intention (engagement).
The same sort of variables are at play as they are on the Trending page, but it's a do-it-yourself sort of procedure. Maybe instead of calling it the Recent page, I'll start calling it the Finding page.
Anyway, I've decided I'm going to keep this up and begin posting weekly "round ups" of blog posts I come across, starting this week.
It's like—hey, man. I see you. Keep doing what you're doing. It's nice to acknowledge people and validate their interests and efforts.
I'll post a link here once the first list goes live. Here is the first list!
Take care.
✘ Posted on — 02/08/25
✘ Last modified — 6 months, 1 week ago
✘ Link — https://blog.xavierhm.com/why-i-stopped-reading-the-trending-page
Footnotes
It is the most popular post on my blog, beating out even my About page in views.↩
I'm only present on a niche political sub that exists solely to facilitate a discussion thread of regulars.↩
Techies probably have a better term for what I'm trying to describe here, lol.↩
That wouldn't have been possible even a decade earlier; I often think of the early 2010s web as an awkward transitional phase.↩