Robin Sloan on platforms and the web:

And I suppose I think a standard for art is that it doesn’t just play a game, but invents one. On an internet crowded with creators eager to obey each platform’s demands, follow their Best Practices (which harden into mandatory genres: quick-setting concrete), there is, I believe, an incandescence to stubborn specificity.

... There’s one platform for which none of this is true, and that’s the web platform, because it offers the grain of a medium — book, movie, album — rather than the seduction of a casino.

Astute and eloquent as always.

Blogs and websites certainly have their own ecology and cookie-cutter shapes you can fit neatly into. And yet, at the same time, they don't. It's that fine control, the distance from metrics and algorithm juicing, the conductor with their back turned to the audience — all of this makes the act of web craft much more fulfilling in the end.