I love bearblog
One of the iron laws of people being creative on the internet is that it’s only a matter of time until the haters arrive.
Yesterday on Twitter, I saw post after post mocking the increasing popularity of bearblog, the “bear”-bones blogging platform that simply gives people a blank slate and lets them go at it. One post derided certain bearbloggers as “Mini Navals” -- essentially, amateurish wannabes in their early 20s regurgitating the wisdom of Naval without any life experience. Another mocked the entire activity of writing short essays and taking screenshots of them. "Put white text on a dark blue background. The essay does not even need to be good. Follow the trend..."
To the contrary - I'm loving the trend. Who cares if a few posts are cliché or badly written or a little amateurish. Sure, there’s some middling stuff on bearblog. But I’ve encountered dozens of essays that are genuinely superb. My favorite writer is Prakhesar, a Canadian who’s turned his life around in the last couple years and has taken to bearblog to tell the world about it.
In this age of spammy ads and cookie banners, the internet has become an overgrown forest. Amidst it all, bearblog stands tall as a quiet, "old-internet" venue -- a corner of the web well worth preserving.