The Ethics of Blogging

2025-05-08 (Mod: 2025-07-08)  |   6 minutes

Creating online communities is easy; but doing it ethically is not.

Over the last few decades, we’ve developed many hacks and tricks - a playbook, if you like - for tempting communities of like-minded humans to gather into online echo chambers, where they can be manipulated in demographically unified buckets. So before I go too far, I need to ask myself an important question: Is blogging inherently evil? Or is it possible to thread this needle without crossing over to the dark side?

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The tactics I’m talking about are most obviously at work in the sphere of politically polarizing media. You take an extreme, un-nuanced stand on a delicate issue that people have strong feelings about, and then shout your viewpoint in public. But you don’t hold the full conversation there. Your market square shouting should be an hors d’oeuvre, just an amuse bouche of the full meal to be had if they follow you back to myfiefdom.com. Those who disagree will ignore you, or maybe even call you out in the public space where you’ve planted your soapbox, but those who like the cut of your intellectually simplistic jib will follow you home.

And that’s where you turn up the crazy, preaching your special brand of hellfire and retribution to an audience you’ve carefully curated, so you already know they will gobble it up, jubilant to have found someone talking their truth back to them. Someone who isn’t always harping at them to grow and learn and become more compassionate, soulful human beings. Someone who isn’t constantly shaming them for holding the simple homespun opinions their parents raised them on.

Those are the broad strokes of the playbook. We blame “the algorithms” for creating our modern dystopia, but in truth, algorithms only amplify the effect. Humans are the ones who exploit it. Humans build the myfiefdom.coms - maybe as a web site, or maybe just a user group in a darker corner of that public market. And once the herd has been assembled, humans are the ones who pump it full of content steroids, beefing up the herd and getting it ready for the payoff, which will come in the form of courses, books, conferences, lecture tours, and, of course, merch.

So far, I’ve been talking about this in terms of politically charged opinions, because that is the harshest light I can shine, making the problem easy to see and discuss, but it happens under softer lighting as well. Human beings are tribal, and we’re constantly seeking our tribal brothers and sisters to commune with. Whether it’s our musical tastes, our religion, our cuisine, or even just our penchant for silliness, who doesn’t love finding a community that shares those passions? Can anyone resist joining a space where we can not only let our freak flags fly, but where we can do so amidst a carnival of other freaky flags, all fluttering together in glorious harmony? What could be more intoxicating than to finally find a place where you belong? It’s like finding home.

Now, these myfiefdom.coms come in many shapes, colors, and sizes, but not all external communities are disingenuously mercenary and exploitative, like the ones I’ve described above. Many might be better characterized as myclubhouse.coms - earnest communities of freaks just flying their flags with no ulterior motive. In fact, some of them are even quite noble.

But the myfiefdom types are on the rise. I see them showing up everywhere these days - even on Trust Cafe, a social media site trying very hard not to repeat the mistakes of other social media. Sadly, just like on FB and Twitter, I see people posting their provocative teasers in public, while showing no interest in having the ensuing conversation there too. They spend no time building up the social capital of the forum itself, treating it instead as just another one of their milking cows, each to be harvested of whatever it can give, for as long as it can give, and then be discarded. They don’t bother to learn the culture of the site, they don’t develop relationships with fellow users, they contribute nothing except to hang a steady gauntlet of hooks and lures in the stream, designed to pull all the fish back into the shadows where they can be clubbed, gutted, bagged and frozen.

All this leads me to my current ethical dilemma. I’ve run a blog for almost 30 years, but I’ve recently reinvented it as a sort of firehose of ideas and creative projects, powered by ADHD. And now that it’s up and running again, I naturally want to tell people about it. I want to find my tribe. But in the process of doing so - of offering representative content and inviting people to check it out - how do I demonstrate that it’s a myclubhouse situation and not a myfiefdom?

Furthermore, I really value the experiment TC is conducting, and for as long as it can resist the gravity that tends to collapse social media platforms into a warehouse full of marketing silos, I’d like to continue supporting their mission. I certainly don’t want to undermine it, or siphon off its still fragile audience.

So here’s what I’ve come up with. Yes, I’m going to post some of my blog articles on TC, but only infrequently, and when I do, I’m going to follow some rules:

1. I will not be posting every article - only ones that I think will be of genuine interest to an existing community there. No fishing expeditions. No freezer bags being filled in the shadows.

2. I will always usually post the entire article, not just a teaser. Readers will not rarely have to come back to my clubhouse to get the full story. (This is harder with longer posts that require nuance, which doesn’t suit the quick-scan nature of social media feeds.)

3. If a post sparks conversation on TC, I will engage in that conversation on TC, just as enthusiastically as I do the conversations that happen on my site.

4. I will continue to participate in TC outside of my posts as well, helping to build the capital of a market square that I think is worth supporting.

So that’s my plan, but rather than just execute it and hope I nailed it from the jump, I’d like to hear from others. Am I overthinking this? Does anybody else even care about the myfiefdom problem? And ultimately, what duty of care do responsible net citizens bear for enhancing and protecting our communal spaces?