Blogs as Social Media

Reading blogs can be a refreshing alternative to social media. For years, technical blogs have been my go-to source of both learning and entertainment - a slower, more meaningful way to engage with content. While 18% of people read blogs daily (source), the average person spends about 145 minutes on social media every day (source). Imagine replacing even some of that time on social media with reading blogs - something that has benefited me me greatly. Modern social media is exhausting. Attention-grabbing algorithms season our brains with chemicals to keep us locked in. Often the content is something intentionally inflammatory as a way of gaming the system. It’s all just too much. Creating your own feed of blogs from people you have discovered on your own is a calming respite from the standard social medias. This post isn’t about how modern social media is the devil, just a look into an alternative.

I think blogs are an important aspect of the community, and it is something I want to help flourish as part of Underthreaded. Our first action to the community is curating a blog list in the form of an OMPL file and readme on our GitHub and through our store for free. You can import the OPML into most feed reading apps and services, so feel free to explore it. Perhaps as a better alternative, you can sift through the readme to find particular blogs you are interested in. We haven’t perfected the list yet and probably never will, but we continue striving for excellence.

We highly recommend getting into using a feed reader as a way to both access high quality online content, and to avoid the optimised doom scrolling portals on other social media. Although if you enjoy the latter, we can’t and won’t stop you.

If you’re curious how we curate the list, or want tips for finding your own sources, I’ll go over some aspects of blogs we find important.

Blog discovery

There are two main ways that you come across a blog post.

Blogs for solving a specific problem.

I can’t count how many times I’ve been trying to do something a little out of the range a StackOverflow question might cover and found a blog post that is similar enough to what I’m doing to be able to adapt it to my use case. You learn a lot on the job by reading how someone solved a similar problem and gaining contextual understanding. One might argue these help you work on your engineering depth, as you’ll be working on a specific problem, probably associated with your work, and you learn more about that problem and therefore your work as a result.

Blogs that come through on your feeds

Many find blogs through Hacker News, Reddit, any other social media, through a feed reader or even through word of mouth. These places thrive on the discussions that these posts generate. You might find it from a title which intrigues or interests you. These tend not to support depth too much, as if you’re not actively working on it, the real complexity doesn’t always stick so well. As long as you’re not heavily filtering down your feed, you can really help your breadth

It’s elating to see a title in you feed that hits the right level of relevance to your current interests, or even if it reminds you of something you’ve done in the past. It’s great if you come across a relevant blog while trying to solve a specific problem, but you don’t really read it. Or at least I don’t. It’s very easy to have the horse blinders on and charge ahead to solve your problem. Because that’s where you’ll get that sweet serotonin hit.

In reading posts from your feed you benefit from a slightly different type of learning, this learning is more subtle than “doing” and maybe less potent but no less important. Even if you don’t necessarily act on the blog post, you build links in your brain which are useful, even if it’s just knowing a particular problem can be solved with ${tool} or that a particular problem exists at all. This breadth of knowledge helps when you come across a similar problem, following the links in your head can give you a starting point. You don’t need to reproduce the solution from memory (I sure don’t). Memorizing specific solutions, I’d argue, is less powerful than learning enough fundamentals. To be able to recreate or re-derive a solution based on the intuition you’ve built from your continuous learning is a huge payoff.

Aside: Digging through old blogs

How often have you found a blog and skimmed all their posts to look for interesting reads? I expect it’s not a common activity, but it’s potentially a vastly rewarding one. This is maybe due to lack of tooling to streamline the discovery process. Perhaps it’s hard to justify spending time doing it when you could use a search engine to search all blog posts in existence simultaneously for exactly the terms you’re looking for. I think exploring related topics by looking through relevant sites can often let you reorient your thinking about a problem or a tool, and give you fresh avenues to pursue in your problem-solving process.

This may be as simple as looking through a blog dealing with the build tool you’re trying to configure to your specification. You might find a post which mentions a term you’ve never heard before which sounds relevant to what you want to do. You can then investigate the term and find someone has named what you’re trying to do.

Or you could just dig through a blog without a problem in mind, and broaden your understanding of the topics the blog focuses on.

What makes for a good blog post

Judging a good blog post is always very contextual and personal. We’ll just go over our thoughts on this matter quickly, to help you get a better sense of how we’ll curate our blog list. For us the best blog posts come from someone writing either from deep experience or from deep personal interest. Obviously we don’t want to read LLM generated slop, but what really makes them good?

Well researched

This is easily the most important thing for a blog post. You need to be able to trust who you are reading and be able to see where the facts are coming from. The goal of a blog post is to share information, so if that information is wrong, then it is not a good post.

Time

I think the second most important ability of blog posts is that they can either be timeless or a snapshot of a time. Have you ever come across an old social media post and struggled to make sense of it without context? Without the context, many old posts have a very short shelf life, and with the ever increasing speed of Social Media, it only gets shorter and shorter. A good blog post gives that context and explains what was actually happening at the time or can be understood at any time.

Exciting technology

This doesn’t mean new or old tech specifically. For example, we think Postgres is a super exciting piece of software, despite being older than Underthreaded’s founders, it is so feature rich, you find new potential uses for it wherever you look. I think it’s great fun when I find “old tech” which solves my problems. New tech does too, but with older tools you get to feel a bit of the history.

You often read these days of old tech being superseded and all their issues addressed. I’ve certainly tried tech which didn’t work like I hoped, but I tend to blame myself or lack of good documentation or examples online, rather than the tool itself. cmake is the big example which comes to mind, although this was a few years back and things may or may not be better now. I always wonder if I explored enough to have valid complaints, and if are there people somewhere using it in some fantastic way I hadn’t considered or dug up through research. Real experts showing how to use these tools can significantly shape your perception, especially amidst outdated, poorly written, or LLM/SEO spam content online. This is a nice simple example of what I mean for make.

With us devs, there’s always people using old tech to do interesting things, as much are there are people doing fun things with new tech. Why would you waste the little time you have outside work on tech you don’t find cool? Then it’s simply a case of finding the people writing about topics which interest you.

New tech is exciting, too, and regardless of its age, if it’s new to the reader, we can call it new. Posts like this one can be great for advocacy and awareness.

Reproducibility

A blog can be entertaining, but if it doesn’t show you anything you can actually use/apply for yourself after reading it, then its inherent value is limited. This is why blogs about free or open-source software are often more valuable than those promoting paid services. It is normally very easy to use/apply the free software for yourself if you wanted to, and so reading about it is likely to be more worth it.

A peak behind the curtain

Anecdotal posts are great for those without a large network or friendship group of developers. These are great ways to learn how things work in other organisations or industries, or just to learn about tools and techniques people are using that you hadn’t heard of before. Even those which take something we take for granted and tell us about what’s really going on under the hood. One of my favourites here is this awesome rundown of profiling tools in this post.

Software archaeology

Learning the history of how things used to be is fascinating, and we have a post that will go into more detail on this coming up so stay tuned! For those of us who haven’t grown up during the invention of personal computing, or experienced the various tech booms first hand, reading about that era is fascinating. Making links between different unrelated software from the non-technical interactions between developers and companies is fascinating to me. I’d love to put together a list of posts and videos of this sort one day. A great conference talk in this realm is this one on Mono and the history of Xamarin an interesting dive into the history of one part of the C# ecosystem.

A good length

The length of a blog post is a difficult balancing act: too short and it may not give enough information, too long and it may be too much to read the whole thing. I find that scrolling through social media breeds unfulfillment and leads to more scrolling, while a good blog post will motivate you to start doing something yourself. There should be no fluff, like a YouTube video stretching out content to improve watch time. You can also easily pick and choose sections to read if the post is well titled, so you can scan for what you want if needed.

Social media replacement

You may have noticed that almost all of these points for what makes good blog posts good are what social media lacks. Social media thrives on speed and reaction, often driven by attention-grabbing tactics that prioritize engagement over truth. Blogs, by contrast, offer a slower, more thoughtful approach - a mental detox for those tired of the endless scroll. I believe this kind of slower pace is better for people’s mental health as explained in greater detail given in our post here.

What makes for a good blog

Now we’ve talked about the posts we like. You could just say a good blog is made up of good posts. But there is a little more complexity to it. It’s always going to be a combination of factors.

Things like how often the posts are released, and how consistent the duration between posts. A good sign in a blog is when it’s been updated for a long period of time, though it feels harsh to penalise new bloggers. The content of the blog is its main draw, and the main characteristic we can look at - assuming it hits your quality threshold - is the variety of the content. The person writing the posts is another unchangeable aspect of the blog. I have several blogs that I follow on topics I wouldn’t normally, simply because the writer is someone I can trust and can consistently give interesting insights and fun bits of information. Again, this veers towards experience. As a relatively fresh blog, I hope we can prove ourselves as a blog worth reading.

Conclusion

We think blogs can be a perfect replacement for social media if done correctly for you, be it through a feed reader or however you choose. Whether it’s for mental health, better research or just enjoyment, I believe that blog posts easily beat social media. Following specific bloggers can even scratch that itch of needing some subjectivity and seeing some character in what you’re reading. Sure, social media will remain and has its uses, but I believe that replacing even some of that time with reading blogs would benefit most people. Reading a post from someone on their socials, gives a better picture of what they’re doing, where a blog shows who they are. Anyone can see someone’s Twitter feed and see that they got a coffee or that they read the news, but a blog shows what they’re interested in and gives a picture of how they feel and act. You could ask why blogs need character, but then why not just read academic papers? If you’re interested and don’t know where to start, again, check out our blog list. We hope everyone can find some good posts that resonate with them no matter how they go about it. Good luck.