1. Homepages had a timeless quality

    On the early web, there were thousands and thousands more personal homepages than weblogs.

    Homepages had a timeless quality, an index of interesting or useful or relevant things about a topic or about a person. You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)

    Chronological content was in the minority.

  2. When Movable Type ate the blogosphere

    Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it.

    When you produce your whole site by hand, from HEAD to /BODY, you begin in a world of infinite possibility. You can tailor your content exactly how you like it, and organize it in any way you please. Every design decision you make represents roughly equal work because, heck, you’ve gotta do it by hand either way. Whether it’s reverse chronological entries or a tidy table of contents. You might as well do what you want.

    But once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost.

    Movable Type didn’t just kill off blog customization.

    It (and its competitors) actively killed other forms of web production.

  3. Reverse chronology bias

    Once you’ve had a taste of effortless updates, it’s awfully hard to back to manual everything.

    So they didn’t.

    And neither did thousands of their peers. It just simply wasn’t worth it. The inertia was too strong.

    The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died.

    And the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before.

    There are no more quirky homepages.

    There are no more amateur research librarians.

    All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience.

    That’s not cool at all.

    1. ​Navigation by shibboleth​

    I'm as guilty as anyone else. At the time of this writing, the site you're reading this on is organized reverse-chronologically by default. Maybe it won't be by the time of your reading.