Dries Buytaert

Happy New Year! 2017 was a busy and eventful year – both professionally and personally. In many ways, 2017 was the most challenging and best year to date. I'm excited about 2018 and optimistic about what it has in store.

I wanted to thank you all for reading my blog in 2017. Entering 2018, I plan on setting a New Years' resolution of using social media less, and blogging more.

I've been blogging for over 12 years and have been using social media for about 10. Both are black holes for content, however, I feel that blog content at least has a chance to "survive". My blog posts have made a bigger impact than my social media posts. It's not just me. I've seen many bloggers get sucked into social media. Many of them stopped blogging altogether, and they've lost their impact.

Blogging also helps me clarify my thoughts and deepen my thinking. The consistent practice of blogging has helped me grow. Social media doesn't encourage the same kind of deep thinking or thoughtfulness, and as a result, hasn't provided me the same personal growth.

This too, seems to be a universal phenomena. President Donald Trump has infamously relied on Twitter to communicate everything from policy decisions to mockery of opponents. He went so far to call the nuclear-armed Kim Jong Un short and fat on Twitter. This level of recklessness would be harder to accomplish in a long-form blog post on Whitehouse.gov.

Last but not least, the large, centralized social media companies don't sit well with me anymore. It's undeniable that these companies have provided a forum for people to connect and share information, and in many ways they've had a huge impact on human rights and civil liberties. However convenient or impactful they may be, their scale, influence and lack of transparency is of growing concern. In the summer of 2015, I predicted that their data privacy issues and lack of transparency were going to come to a head in the next five to ten years. It didn't take that long – Facebook's unsavory involvement in shaping public opinion started to turn the tide against them in 2017.

We can't have a handful of large platform companies control what people read. When too few organizations control the media and flow of information, we must be concerned. If we allow that to happen, we risk losing what has made the web the most important network in history – a decentralized platform that enables anyone to have a voice.

The web we build today will be the foundation for generations to come and it needs to remain decentralized. It's true that a decentralized web is harder to build and more difficult to use. Frankly, it will be difficult for the open web to win without better data portability, more regulatory oversight, better integrations, and more innovation and collaboration.

At the end of the day, I want to be part of the change that I wish to see in the world. To support this vision, I want to build my audience here, on my blog, on the edge of the internet, rather than on centralized platforms that are outside of my control. So going into 2018, expect me to blog more, and use social media less.