The Last Good Day of the Bookish Internet
“It is worth remembering that the internet wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.”
— “The Internet Isn’t Meant To Be So Small” by Kelsey McKinney
Have you heard the rumor that the internet is dead? When I first heard this conspiracy theory, it sounded nonsensical. The internet is bigger than ever, and it’s incorporated into our lives in fundamental ways. How can it be dead, or dying? Aren’t we just heading into a more and more technologically dependent future, where we wear headsets with virtual reality capabilities every waking moment?
This is a complicated tangle of claims, like most conspiracy theories, but looking at some of the individual parts unsettled me. It claims that most of the internet is fake, automatically generated content — and if it’s not now, it soon will be. Content, especially viral content, repeats every year. Google searches have become clogged with sponsored results followed by nonsensical SEO sludge: articles that just repeat the right keywords without offering any real information.
ChatGPT and other large language models just make this concern feel more pressing. The internet is probably not mostly fake now, but is that only a matter of time?
This theory also suggests that the internet will soon go out of style. It will still exist, but it will be unheard of to spend all day scrolling. It will turn out, ultimately, to have been a fad.
The Day the Good Bookish Internet Died
While I think the dead internet theory is overblown, it does hit on something real. I’ve been internet obsessed since I was a kid sneaking onto the family computer in the kitchen to play Neopets. I’ve been on the bookish internet specifically for about 15 years. In the beginning, it was exciting: there was an explosion of book blogs, followed by the heyday of BookTube, and then Bookstagram took off. There was always something new to explore, and I wanted to try all of it.
While all of those still exist — plus the game-changing addition of BookTok — we also lost something along the way. Where in the 2010s, book blogs were a sprawling playground of ideas, each with their own style and focus, they’re now harder to find and less well-known. Those niche book blogs are hardly talked about anymore, even in bookish circles online.
I enjoy BookTok (and BookTube and Bookstagram), but it’s undeniable that book blogs offer something they can’t. I wrote a whole post about this: Why Book Blogs Still Matter In an Age of BookTok, but suffice to say that there are things blogs do for both creators and readers that visual mediums can’t. Sometimes, text is the best way to discuss a book!
Blogs in general are part of what John Scalzi calls the “artisan, hand-crafted web.” They allow for a multitude of viewpoints, unencumbered by an algorithm deciding who gains access to your content. They allow you to mix formats, so you can have videos, lists, and even podcasts all in the same place. They’re easy to search, unlike trying to find that one TikTok where they talked about that certain book. They’re sturdier: you can more easily back them up than most apps.
That’s why it’s unfortunate that they’ve largely fallen by the wayside.
It didn’t have to be like this. Before a handful of social media platforms became the behemoths they are today, we had a choice. We could have had a decentralized internet, a network of content creators who didn’t have to rely on a few corporations for their audience. You could have had control over exactly what content you wanted to see more of, instead of surrendering to the algorithm. We didn’t know how good we had it, on the last good day of the bookish internet.
If you’re an online nerd of roughly millennial age, you probably already know the event that locked the internet onto the path it’s on now. It was the death of something many of us mourn to this day: Google Reader.
The Lost Promise of RSS
Google Reader was an RSS feed aggregator that existed from 2005 to 2013. You might be wondering, “What’s an RSS feed aggregator? What’s RSS?” — and that’s the whole problem. RSS is a different way to internet. Short for “Rich Site Summary,” it allows you to subscribe to different blogs, websites, and even YouTube channels and social media accounts and get them all in a central feed — such as Google Reader. You can follow hundreds of sites across all kinds of platforms and read them in full all in one place.
Google Reader was the most well-known example of an RSS feed aggregator, but let’s be honest: it never became mainstream. There’s a reason it was shuttered. The reason I’m calling the day it ended the day the good bookish internet died is because it was the death knell for RSS ever becoming truly popular. From that point on, it was doomed to only being a niche technology used by a small audience.
I’m far from the only one who still thinks about Google Reader. Its death is marked as the end of blogging, and the end of the good internet. There are memes claiming shuttering Google Reader led to the proliferation of modern fascism. RSS was supposed to allow people to “retain control over their online personae while enjoying the benefits of massive scale and scope.” That dream is so different from the world we live in now, where the internet is “five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”
I first started using Google Reader as a way to keep track of all the webcomics I was reading. Before that, I had bookmark folders according to which weekdays each updated — it was a mess. Then, I began to follow queer book blogs. On my own blog, The Lesbrary, I like to link out to the interesting things happening in queer book coverage. Soon, I accumulated dozens, then hundreds of RSS feeds I was following.
I’ve never stopped using RSS feeds; I just migrated over to Feedly. I can’t imagine navigating the internet without them. I can follow queer bookish content so much more efficiently than any other option available. I love that it allows me to keep up with creators who make intermittent, but high quality content. If they post every six months, it will still show up immediately in my reader. It’s so unlike something like my YouTube subscription page, which is clogged with short form content, making it hard to see the actual videos I want to watch, or Twitter and TikTok, which desperately want me to consume any content other than the creators I follow.
RSS is not just entertainment, but also a great tool for research. I keep on top of queer book trends by following not only a ridiculous amount of book blogs but also Google Alerts: if you talk about sapphic books anywhere public on the internet, it probably came across my Feedly.
But if RSS is so useful, why did it never take off? Personally, I think it was a failure of branding. “RSS” or “Rich Site Summary” is not a very intuitive name, and oftentimes users would be directed to a wall of code. RSS isn’t hard to use — you just paste the URL into your feed reader to follow a site — but it looked confusing and intimidating for the average internet user. I sincerely believe that if it had been rebranded as something more user friendly, the internet would be a very different place today.
The Rise of the Algorithm
Instead of that bright future, the rise of social media like Facebook and Twitter seemed to negate the need for the syndication RSS offered. At the time, it seemed like a pretty easy upgrade: I can follow creators (almost) all in one place, and get lots more commentary and community in addition. Fast forward to 2023, and it’s almost impossible to just see the people you follow on a social media platform. On Facebook, for instance, a post from a page is only pushed to a small number of followers — unless they pay to boost it.
I follow bookish content creators on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Tumblr, and even Facebook. But I have no expectations of seeing everything they post. Where once I used to scroll Tumblr until I caught up with where I left off last time, I now never feel like I’ve “caught up” on content — except on Feedly. Social media has shifted to keep you scrolling endlessly.
I don’t mean to say that no good bookish content is being made online now — yikes, that would be an interesting assertion for me as an employee of Book Riot to make. There are so many interesting things happening on BookTok, on book-themed podcasts, and yes, even on book blogs! The problem isn’t that the content has gotten worse, but the curation of that content has.
RSS feeds allow you to select content directly, unmediated by the algorithms that often suppress BIPOC, leftist, and queer content (including queer book content) — the kind of algorithm that encourages algospeak like “le$bean”. I just saw days ago that TikTok stopped allowing users to tag #QueerBooks.
Creators on platforms like TikTok are subject to the corporations’ whims, which in turn are all about maximizing profit. Cory Doctorow coined the term the “enshittification” of the internet, specifically discussing TikTok’s enshittification. The process goes like this: get a ton of users by offering a great experience (like Amazon selling books at or below cost); then court advertisers/clients, even if it means a worse customer experience; then drain both customers and clients of every last dollar. That’s why searching Google or Amazon for a product now takes you a long list of sponsored results, where they used to be efficient and accurate.
Of course, we’re all subject to capitalism, but enshittification is a much bigger risk on social media platforms. Besides, on my book blog, I own my domain. If I don’t like WordPress anymore, I can back up my content and take it somewhere else. There are a lot fewer options when you have a BookTok account, especially because you will lose all your followers even if you move to the one or two other potential platforms. Besides, you probably won’t go: enshittification is about getting to the “precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.”
There is another likely reason RSS never took off: it’s hard to monetize. I pay a yearly subscription to Feedly so I can follow more than 100 feeds, and that’s it. There are no ads. Just the content I signed up for.
The Return of Syndication?
Oddly, syndication is making a bit of a comeback, even if it’s not in the form of RSS. As SEO dies (with the enshittification of Google) and it becomes harder and harder to reach an audience on social media, newsletters are the unexpected new (old) heroes of online content. You can reach your audience directly. You own the list of subscribers, so you’re not tied to any one platform — it’s pretty easy to pick up and go somewhere else seamlessly. Email subscribers are more likely to actually read your content than followers on a social media platform.
That’s why Book Riot started this newsletter, as you might expect. Because there are still blogs out there; it’s just harder for them to find their audiences these days. Newsletters can help.
But I just need to say it: email? EMAIL? That’s our bright new future of content?? What’s next, carrier pigeons? It feels like a condemnation of the state of the internet that emails are our best bet. After all, your email — if it’s anything like mine — is packed full of junk emails and annoying chores. It’s not the ideal way to access entertainment.
Newsletters seem to be the rebirth of RSS, with email inboxes as the reader — except that it’s a worse experience. I can only hope that as newsletters become more popular, RSS will be reinvented again. (And yes, this newsletter has an RSS feed!)
In the meantime, while Google Reader is dead, RSS isn’t, and it’s not too late to get on board! I use Feedly, but I’ve heard good things about Reeder as well. Give it a shot. Follow your favorite book blogs, BookTube channels, and even BookTok or Book Twitter accounts. (Or, I guess, content unrelated to books. I don’t know your life.) And while you’re at it, try starting your own book blog! We can still bring back the artisan, hand-crafted web. But we have to do it together.
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