Moving this exchange from the June 2026 blogroll thread over here so it doesn’t get buried forever.
In response to this post by @candycanearter07:
As someone who does prefer more indicative post titles, I wonder if recontextualization may be playing a role here as well. Is the complaint about generic posts showing up from a blog that the reader deliberately subscribed to, or is it that those posts are showing up in an aggregator? The original complaint begins “I’ve been scrolling the Bubbles new feed,” so I think that’s our clue.
Not every blogger is necessarily expecting all their posts to get automatically broadcast to an aggregator, let alone writing with that broadened audience in mind. Meanwhile, if someone is browsing a site that encourages you to vote on what you see, a generic journaling post might look out of place. So in light of that, I’m inclined to point out that Bubbles is recontextualizing people’s posts as part of a competition that not all of them necessarily asked for.
See also this reply from @AetherAnne on how these kinds of aggregators can discourage providing an RSS feed. I would think that many indie web advocates would consider this a detrimental effect on the community.
Elsewhere I encountered this perspective as well:
Hot take: I think things like bubbles.town are bad for the indieweb, smallweb, boringweb, blogosphere or whatever you want to call it.
That ranking mechanism is just a drop in replacement for any other sorting/scoring algorithm.
I am seeing many posts very obviously doing “optimizations” like publishing replies to the top posts, using similar titles or talking about the same topics…
This is introducing the toxic incentive to try to rise to the top of the list and I hate it.
Personally I appreciate reply posts, but the overall point stands about how Bubbles has reframed blogging explicitly as a competition.
Note I think these concerns are worth bringing up because I’m continuing to see Bubbles being recommended and endorsed again and again and again and again, to the point that I’m contemplating whether it’s worth organizing my thoughts into a separate post.