Sarah Lacy: What Happens When You Get What You Want: The Growing Blogosphere Angst

Sarah’s session at Gnomedex 8.0 reminds me of the story of the dog who catches the car and thinks, “now what?” She writes:

In the early days of the blogging revolution it was all about aggregating a mass niche into a powerful force that could rival the world’s biggest entertainment, news, and technology brands. We did it. Maybe not each one of us, but collectively. Look at Huffington Post or DailyKos or Drudge Report and the force they wield on politics. Look at how TechCrunch has out-new-economied cNet. And of course there’s Perez Hilton and the Gawker Empire– forces that have knocked tabloids back on their heels.

Of course, we all know it’s community and content that’s made this happen more than it is the code. But what happens when you get too much of a big thing? Does community scale? Or does it break down? Having proven they can grab as large of a megaphone as they want, some of the Internet famous are choosing to step back – burned out from the work, pressure and scrutiny. Making matters worse, many bloggers have been manipulated into being tools of the very powerbrokers they were trying to disrupt.

Is there a way to value sites off more than just size? Can new business models bring our priorities back in line and can tools like video commenting bring humanity to the anonymous snarky world of blog commenters?

photo credit: Mooganic

4 Comments

Keeping things manageable as our community continues to grow (now @ 4,000 members) is something that I think about very often. For one, you do need to scale up in terms of the people looking at things, so that the blog/community doesn’t become a nest for others to take advantage of (i.e. spammers, network marketers, etc.)

The spirit that the people behind the site infuse on it has a lot to do with the outcome: this is to say, you get out what you put in. If you focus obsessively on quantity, there’s a good chance that quality is going to suffer. People CARE about quality and can see beyond ego trips, so communities and blogs that recognize the importance of people and treating them as individuals have a great chance of doing well for a very long time.