Carol N

Blogs have shaped our philosophical worldviews, found us careers and friends, and changed our lives. There’s a good chance that a great blog of yore is the reason you’re reading this right now. But many great bloggers have stopped blogging. The pile-on dynamics of the internet discourage unfiltered thoughts, and algorithmic feeds amplify ragebait and slop. Fear of scrutiny leads people to confine things to private Google docs and group chats. And good blogs are often victims of their own success — someone with a lot of good thoughts is at risk of becoming an adult with a demanding job and not that much free time. It’s not all bad. Substack has led to a renaissance of email newsletters, and our friends at Inkhaven host a bootcamp for bloggers. These are awesome, but they structurally encourage posting every day. We’d rather read the marginal post from an accomplished but erstwhile blogger, than one from a daily Substacker — even if the latter is a better writer! So we’re launching the Blog Revival Project, to crowdfund $1,000+ bounties for good bloggers. Sign up and pledge money towards reviving your favorite defunct blog! Or (though we kind of designed the website around a resurrection theme) feel free to nominate someone who hasn’t blogged in the past but who you think really should. We’re seeding this with $8,000 of our own pledges and a $10,000 quadratic match pool. Quadratic funding is the theoretically optimal way to fund public goods; many small pledges beat one big one. And we’re offering a bonus to our first 100 patrons: they’ll each get $25 to allocate to whatever bloggers they want. Join us at revive.blog. — Carol and Austin, from Manifund FAQ Will $1,000 really get Sam Altman or Holden Karnofsky to blog again? Probably not, but money is the unit of caring and we want to express our caringness concretely. We’re hoping that at least some bloggers will enjoy the challenge we pose, and buy themselves a nice meal with the proceeds. Also, social p