Social media was a major source of blog traffic 10-15 years ago and now it's negligible (see Rand Fishkin's talks for more on this). Google has also been keepi

Social media was a major source of blog traffic 10-15 years ago and now it's negligible (see Rand Fishkin's talks for more on this). Google has also been keeping more and more traffic within its ecosystem, but it's still by far the largest remaining source for most independent sites. The landscape for independents to get even traffic, let alone comments is very, very different than it was. As fb and reddit grew, my site comments reduced by over 80% while traffic was flat. Readers who had been around for years continued but newer visitors stopped. For a while social media shares made up the difference, but over time social media traffic dropped to less than 5% of its original level. I started seeing less and less value in what I'd once thought was evergreen content. Then, I changed careers to software. It wasn't because of the drop in RSS readers, blog commenters, etc, but those changes did decrease my enthusiasm about blogging as a social activity.