Natural Born Bloggers
The article explores how blogging has evolved from a niche hobby into a mainstream form of personal and professional expression, examining the motivations and behaviors of natural-born bloggers who write consistently without external prompts. It highlights the passion, curiosity, and community-building aspects that drive these writers.
Background
The article tells the story of the Open Directory Project (DMOZ), a volunteer-run web directory founded in 1998 and bought by Netscape. Before Google's algorithm took over, DMOZ was the largest human-edited directory of the web, supplying search results for AOL, early Google, and others. The piece focuses on the eccentric volunteer editors who built and argued over its link taxonomy, treating DMOZ as a strange early-internet social experiment. DMOZ was shut down in 2017, killed by algorithmic search. Key figures: founder Rich Skrenta (later of Topix), early CEO Bryce Zabel, and pseudonymous editors like "mbeh" and "dmoogle." The article's deeper point: the same impulse that drove DMOZ volunteers now powers Reddit moderation, Wikipedia editing, Substack writing, and open-source curation — foreshadowing today's debates about unpaid platform labor.