“This is the single most immutable rule of media, folks. Publishing is community. And if you don’t know who your community is, you’re screwed.”
There’s not a lot we all agree on these days, but one of those things is that Internet publishing is broken.
John Battelle explores what went wrong and has an interesting suggestion for how to fix it — including the observation that “We got it f*cking right the first time.”
He points to a number of elements of early Internet publishing such as open links and analytics that have since deteriorated and cites them as reasons things have gone off the rails.