9 ms·

Blogging is not dying anytime soon

92 points by imartin2k 4y ago

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Many things can happen in the future. People enjoy discussing things online and blogs are definitely one way you can do that. Experts disagree as to whether AI can accurately create blogs that are believable. How would you know anyway? It is an interesting time to be alive. ... in all seriousness, this is going to suck.
tomalaci 4y ago
It would be great to have Google Search product that only searches for blogs as they usually have more in-depth knowledge than what you can find in other mediums (other than books or actual courses but they usually suffer from having too much water or including things that aren't that relevant for my search). I am not sure if there is such already but it would definitely be more useful nowadays when Google Search top results are just SEO-spam or ads. EDIT: I just got a genuine "oh wait..." moment. There indeed was a Google Blog Search product and, of course, it was killed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Blog_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Blog_Search )
- unlikelymordant 4y ago
  How could you reliably filter out seo spam blogs though?
  - cacois 4y ago
    Asking the real questions. If some magic could make a search engine that ignored all SEO spam, life would be better. I find it hard to believe google themselves are having such a hard time with the obvious cloned copies of other sites/content that now own most page 1 results. But they seem to be.
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      If Google just blacklisted the top 50 or whatever SEO spam programming pages it would probably remove 99% of the spam on programming queries. I have tried with the Firefox addon and it gets better quick. It is almost always the same sites. And building up page rank takes time so it is a winning battle ... but hey! Google drives no hands!
      - FlyingSnake 4y ago
        What magical FFox addon you're talking about?
        rightbyte 4y ago
        I think it is called uBlacklist (not the same guy as uBlock). I don't have my computer with me so can't check.
  - tomalaci 4y ago
    Incentivize SEO for fine granularity (punish blogs that spam too many common keywords) and provide more filtering tools to users. Former is likely already done for many popular platforms along with many other tricks so you would want to have experienced people for that part. For filtering tools a good one would be adding a way to have filter lists against spammers and generally just more options to how you want to refine your search. I get that Google Search allows you to type some special keywords but I'd rather it be more user-friendly.
  - nodemaker 4y ago
    The more something looks like GPT the lower it should be ranked. GPT can make that assessment for you in fact.
    - MattDemers 4y ago
      Then it just becomes a cat-and-mouse game for someone to make a tool that "de-GPTs the copy" and then so on and so on.
    - aliqot 4y ago
      I'm not trusting an AI to vet my information stream.
      - nodemaker 4y ago
        “AI” is already vetting your information stream.
        aliqot 4y ago
        maybe for the collective-you. It's too bad there isn't a content-engine driven by one of these when you can describe an emotional outcome and it provide the content to get you there. However, if it could do that, it'd already have solved factoring and we're in deep trouble anyway.
- marbu 4y ago
  You can try Marginalia Search for this use case: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
  - aliqot 4y ago
    what is it about the name or URL that weirds me out? I can't tell if it is "marginal" in the name, or the .nu
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Dunno, maybe you were a scribe in a previous life and died in a freak marginalia-doodling accident.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  Man alive, I just got a Technorati flashback. Remember Technorati tags? If you were at all vaguely technical, you HAD to add Technorati tags to your blog, so the Technorati search would find and classify your blog. The Future Was Then!
FlyingSnake 4y ago
"Always bet on text" Text is eternal and has a nice Lindy effect going for it. However this article doesn't address the core problem indie bloggers are facing, discoverability. It reads like a self fulfilling prophesy and dismissed the inroads made by video. Many programmers these days simply jump to YouTube to solve a problem and videos solve these problems satisfactorily. To make blogging great again, we need to solve this issue of discoverability. Otherwise we're all screaming in the wind.
- ravagat 4y ago
  Well said! One thing I think a lot of people get confused with is prioritizing discoverability. People forget that the internet is large and continues to get larger today. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram which largely "solved" discoverability are now available. What should be practiced more is the "POSSE" rule or "Post On your own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere". This is already what a lot of people do but fail to capitalise due to convenience
- tomalaci 4y ago
  Maybe many beginners might be jumping to videos. I'd like to think that most of the experienced developers like text more as they can quickly scroll past the bits that are irrelevant to them and look for the parts that are interesting. It is harder to do so for a video as you typically have no idea at which point the person will tell you about the concept you were looking for (unless you get some timestamp list but even then you may need to wade through some fluff/water before you get to the juicy bits).
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Ye videos are really bad as a manual for programming. Usually you just want the code pointing you in the right direction and if the writer was nice the header file is included in the snippet. For e.g. repairing cars it is really great.
    - gonzo41 4y ago
      I find with programming video's the information density is really low. The best channels is where there's no introduction or it's in chapters and easily skipeped.
nodemaker 4y ago
Haha 100 percent agree! If anything video content is becoming more pseudo intellectual and clickbait everyday in my opinion. My video consumption is way lower than it used to be. To a certain extent these video platforms create big personalities of normal people and its hard to trust them at that point (although Joe rogan still manages to sound authentic somehow) That being said, I do think GPT has the potential to ruin blogging but we will see. As soon as I smell even a little bit of GPT in a blog I am probably gonna bail immediately.
mateusfreira 4y ago
I could not agree more, blogging is fun to write and read, much less structured authors can go as far as they want to make the posts interactive. I still think blog is one of the best tools to share thoughts, and more important to own your content.
henrik_w 4y ago
There is https://refined.blog/ https://refined.blog/ for finding personal blogs about software engineering. Can be sorted by Hacker News upvotes too.
josefresco 4y ago
Related: https://startafuckingblog.com https://startafuckingblog.com
Sebb767 4y ago
I think this is also a bit of a miscommunication. If you take "blogging is dead" as "[literally] nobody blogs anymore", it's clearly wrong, no discussion. Instead, if you take it as "blogging is no longer hyped and no longer mainstream", you're much closer to the truth (in my opinion). Blogging is dead in the same way that dedicated cameras are dead: People still use them for specific use cases and there's a large enthusiast community for them, but the mainstream public moved on. Of course, especially with blogging, there's also a massive filter bubble effect going on; on HN, most people would likely agree with the OP, but a teenager (at least in my country) would staunchly disagree.
- layer8 4y ago
  The “mainstream public” on the internet in the early 2000s, at the height of blogging, was quite different from today’s internet mainstream, mainly thanks to smartphones. Aside from “microblogging” in the form of twitter threads, and other alternative formats like YouTube, the broadening of the internet mainstream over the past 10 years is probably the more significant change.
- 7speter 4y ago
  Did the mainstream public ever really care about cameras the enthusiasts care about? Were dslrs ever something the masses really wanted? I remember simple point and shoots were a big deal.
- jwhiles 4y ago
  Was blogging every really mainstream?
  - Fricken 4y ago
    When the internet was but a trickle, blogging was maintrickle
  - darkwater 4y ago
    In Internet? Totally. Blogging intended as "reading blog", from 2008 to 2015 (roughly, I don't have hard numbers) was pretty mainstream in the Internet population of that time. Maybe now it's not mainstream anymore just because the Internet population increased (again) a lot, and the newjoiners are not into reading blogs but rather watching photos or (short) videos.
eatonphil 4y ago
I enjoy it when my writing is read. And HN, Lobsters, and Reddit give me an outlet for tech writing. But there's no similar outlet for other writing like if I want to write about cooking or product management or parks in NYC. Most non-tech subreddits have super strict self promotion rules that means you can't ever share your own posts. Not that reddit is so friendly in general anyway. I have a small personal audience and sometimes they read these other posts. But it's not as much fun in these cases. So I've been trying to think about how to write about other topics and my only conclusion is that you have to target bigger existing magazines or sites. But there feels like a huge barrier to entry for contributing to these sites. They're very intimidating. I've reached out to a few smaller outlets and never gotten a response. So that's kind of demotivating. So yeah it's easy and enjoyable to blog but in terms of getting anyone to see what you produce... I agree with others here that videos and YouTube seem to be one of the best spots for producing stuff that people actually see, on more diverse topics than just tech.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
People need to adjust their expectations and goals. Is your goal to make content that goes viral that you can monetize and make lots of money with? Consider video. Are you trying to get your word out? Blogs are great and will never die.
- asdff 4y ago
  Blogs are also great for just writing up what you've done to solve some problem you've encountered, for your own use when you run into the same problem again in years time perhaps
stevoski 4y ago
Blogging, as it was in the first decade of the 2000's died long ago. Yes, there are still blogs, and still people blogging. And many companies have something they call "blogs". But once we're done with there hairsplitting, this is not blogging as it was. That died circa 2012.
- Delphiza 4y ago
  I don't know why you are being downvoted. 2005-2010 was the heyday of blogging as I knew it. Maybe you "had to have been there", which would put you in your fourties, at least.
CM30 4y ago
I think this is the key point: > But still, people who read have always been in the minority. And I think that’s what most people who think that “video is the future” don’t get. Sure, people are getting lazier and they want you to feed them content. > But think about it. Do you really want to serve those types of people?! The number of people online reading blogs when they were the 'most popular' form of content creation was far lower than the number watching videos or using social media sites or what not. Statistically there are probably more people writing blogs now, and more people reading them. They've just become less of a percentage of the overall internet audience than they were back before YouTube and Twitch and TikTok and podcasts became big things online. So while it may seem like those people abandoned blogging, you have to ask yourself whether they would have ever cared for it to begin with.
mkka 4y ago
One conversation I've noticed going on recently re Twitter and social media is the power of owned media, like podcast, email, and blogs, over walled gardens. Blogs, maybe "personal websites", are a home base. Maybe not the whole solution but a foundation.
- asdff 4y ago
  It used to be common for personal websites to be your home base. You'd have maybe the on topic posts of the blog (e.g. a scientist blogging in their field), the off topic posts (e.g. your hiking trip), and then a fileshare of collegues, friends, or family photos perhaps, and then maybe special interest stuff like the base depth of your favorite ski slope, or the local surf report for the day. Basically, it would be a combination of LinkedIn, facebook, twitter, and instagram, all under a domain you control with a feature set and design dictated by you alone, maybe paying a few dollars a month or a year seeing limited traffic, maybe "free" if you run it on the desktop you already have plugged into the corner of the room.
andyjohnson0 4y ago
I find blogs substantially more useful than I did a decade ago. A lot of the noise [1] has moved to social media. What is left is, on the whole, more useful. Simple as that for me. [1] Noise: cat/dog pics, look what I had for lunch, random half-based political opinions, etc.
rcarr 4y ago
Some good resources for finding blogs: https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ https://bearblog.dev/discover/ https://bearblog.dev/discover/ https://blogroll.org/ https://blogroll.org/ https://www.gyford.com/phil/blogroll/ https://www.gyford.com/phil/blogroll/ https://interconnected.org/home/blogroll https://interconnected.org/home/blogroll
- qudat 4y ago
  https://prose.sh/read https://prose.sh/read https://lists.sh/read https://lists.sh/read
- saperyton 4y ago
  Thinking About Things: https://thinking-about-things.com https://thinking-about-things.com
fortran77 4y ago
I read more blogs than ever, mostly on Substack
Existenceblinks 4y ago
I barely read blogs because they seem to try to expand or over elaborate for sake of sounding sophistication, and set tone as they try to play with audience. I'm not fun at party so I mostly read "documentation" kind of text because the objective is to provide concise and no BS to get you understand the system. If the thing doesn't have official documentation or poor documentation I would read your blog about that .. but if that's the case the thing kinda sucks.
- asdff 4y ago
  There's two sorts of blogs. There's the one you describe which imo are trying to build an audience and gain reach. Then there are the more straightforward blogs, where the author doesn't care about reach or viewership, and just wants to write up a technical process they painstakingly went through so either others can save themselves some grief, or they can look at what they did when they revisit the same problem years from now. Those types of blogs are indispensable. Its like documentation that someone actually went through and wrote in margin notes, like Snape's potion book.
Delphiza 4y ago
High-quality blog content, written by people who have a deep understanding of a subject that they want to proudly share with their peers is pretty much dead. I built my professional career on blogging from 2004 to 2012, and attribute my 'public brand' to what I did then. What I currently see is that blog content is generated by corporate PR writers who write very good-looking content that covers a topic yet mostly meaningless. But it does, importantly, gets clicks and engagement from prospective customers. It is far cheaper and easier to get English grads to churn out content based on basic content and brand themes that to get engineers to write content that they believe in. Eventually those dedicated writers will, in turn, be replaced by AIs (see copy.ai). Also, remember that in the early 2000s, technical people had few options to show their skills other than a personal blog. It was replaced by Stack Overflow (one of the original intentions of the platform), github repositorys and other things that are now available to show off. Sadly, the days of technical people or other specialsts (say artisnal brewers) creating written content that a lot of people see, is largely behind us. Blogging of old is drowned out not just by video (as OP suggests, and where corporate writers struggle) but by armies of robotic (whether people or AI) corporate content generators.
Decabytes 4y ago
While I agree that blogging isn't dead, I think that blogging serves another purpose as well. It's a great way to solidify understandings about certain topics. I have a substack on programming and technology, and when I'm working on something I know I will write about, I definitely understand it better. I think it fulfills the same purpose as learning through teaching. And it's also just extremely fulfilling. Writing about a niche part of a field you are interested in and wished had more spotlight is satisfying, even if no one reads what you wrote. Or at least that's how I feel about it.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
It's not dying, but I don't hear kids talking about blogs they read. That's not due to increased laziness or decline in intelligence, people don't surf the web anymore. They can't, it's too vast, it's virtually impossible to find a blog that doesn't belong to some larger platform like Medium. It seems like most bloggers today that go on longer than 5 years are either written by amateur journalists or tech centric people.
glasss 4y ago
I call everything online a blog now, so from my perspective yea it's not going anywhere.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
> This was coming from someone who has sold millions of books and is still selling hundreds of thousands of books a year. There we have the answer. Monetizing blogs is dead. And it's probably even true. Are there many people around who directly make money with their personal articles? Isn't it today mostly a space which is usually just one part of a bigger network of content? Or as a support/advertisement for some product?
marcus_holmes 4y ago
I think there's different types of blogging: - blogging as speech. Not trying to "build an audience" or monetise, just a place where you can write publicly. Rachelbythebay is probably the best example of this. - blogging as business. What the author is talking about - build an audience, sell some ads, make some money. Writing as a commercial activity. - blogging as content marketing. Probably 90% of blogs - not directly monetised, but SEO fodder for a business. The first isn't dead, but is obscure. The last is mostly braindead (there are some really good posts in amongst the SEO crap, but mostly it's SEO crap). The middle one is hard to do right - there are soooo many "travel bloggers" out there trying to make this work, and so few who actually do make it work.

92 points by imartin2k 4y ago

Many things can happen in the future. People enjoy discussing things online and blogs are definitely one way you can do that. Experts disagree as to whether AI can accurately create blogs that are believable. How would you know anyway? It is an interesting time to be alive. ... in all seriousness, this is going to suck.

tomalaci 4y ago

It would be great to have Google Search product that only searches for blogs as they usually have more in-depth knowledge than what you can find in other mediums (other than books or actual courses but they usually suffer from having too much water or including things that aren't that relevant for my search). I am not sure if there is such already but it would definitely be more useful nowadays when Google Search top results are just SEO-spam or ads. EDIT: I just got a genuine "oh wait..." moment. There indeed was a Google Blog Search product and, of course, it was killed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Blog_Search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Blog_Search )

unlikelymordant 4y ago
How could you reliably filter out seo spam blogs though?
- cacois 4y ago
  Asking the real questions. If some magic could make a search engine that ignored all SEO spam, life would be better. I find it hard to believe google themselves are having such a hard time with the obvious cloned copies of other sites/content that now own most page 1 results. But they seem to be.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    If Google just blacklisted the top 50 or whatever SEO spam programming pages it would probably remove 99% of the spam on programming queries. I have tried with the Firefox addon and it gets better quick. It is almost always the same sites. And building up page rank takes time so it is a winning battle ... but hey! Google drives no hands!
    - FlyingSnake 4y ago
      What magical FFox addon you're talking about?
      - rightbyte 4y ago
        I think it is called uBlacklist (not the same guy as uBlock). I don't have my computer with me so can't check.
- tomalaci 4y ago
  Incentivize SEO for fine granularity (punish blogs that spam too many common keywords) and provide more filtering tools to users. Former is likely already done for many popular platforms along with many other tricks so you would want to have experienced people for that part. For filtering tools a good one would be adding a way to have filter lists against spammers and generally just more options to how you want to refine your search. I get that Google Search allows you to type some special keywords but I'd rather it be more user-friendly.
- nodemaker 4y ago
  The more something looks like GPT the lower it should be ranked. GPT can make that assessment for you in fact.
  - MattDemers 4y ago
    Then it just becomes a cat-and-mouse game for someone to make a tool that "de-GPTs the copy" and then so on and so on.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    I'm not trusting an AI to vet my information stream.
    - nodemaker 4y ago
      “AI” is already vetting your information stream.
      - aliqot 4y ago
        maybe for the collective-you. It's too bad there isn't a content-engine driven by one of these when you can describe an emotional outcome and it provide the content to get you there. However, if it could do that, it'd already have solved factoring and we're in deep trouble anyway.
marbu 4y ago
You can try Marginalia Search for this use case: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/
- aliqot 4y ago
  what is it about the name or URL that weirds me out? I can't tell if it is "marginal" in the name, or the .nu
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Dunno, maybe you were a scribe in a previous life and died in a freak marginalia-doodling accident.
deltarholamda 4y ago
Man alive, I just got a Technorati flashback. Remember Technorati tags? If you were at all vaguely technical, you HAD to add Technorati tags to your blog, so the Technorati search would find and classify your blog. The Future Was Then!

FlyingSnake 4y ago

"Always bet on text" Text is eternal and has a nice Lindy effect going for it. However this article doesn't address the core problem indie bloggers are facing, discoverability. It reads like a self fulfilling prophesy and dismissed the inroads made by video. Many programmers these days simply jump to YouTube to solve a problem and videos solve these problems satisfactorily. To make blogging great again, we need to solve this issue of discoverability. Otherwise we're all screaming in the wind.

ravagat 4y ago
Well said! One thing I think a lot of people get confused with is prioritizing discoverability. People forget that the internet is large and continues to get larger today. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram which largely "solved" discoverability are now available. What should be practiced more is the "POSSE" rule or "Post On your own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere". This is already what a lot of people do but fail to capitalise due to convenience
tomalaci 4y ago
Maybe many beginners might be jumping to videos. I'd like to think that most of the experienced developers like text more as they can quickly scroll past the bits that are irrelevant to them and look for the parts that are interesting. It is harder to do so for a video as you typically have no idea at which point the person will tell you about the concept you were looking for (unless you get some timestamp list but even then you may need to wade through some fluff/water before you get to the juicy bits).
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Ye videos are really bad as a manual for programming. Usually you just want the code pointing you in the right direction and if the writer was nice the header file is included in the snippet. For e.g. repairing cars it is really great.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    I find with programming video's the information density is really low. The best channels is where there's no introduction or it's in chapters and easily skipeped.

nodemaker 4y ago

Haha 100 percent agree! If anything video content is becoming more pseudo intellectual and clickbait everyday in my opinion. My video consumption is way lower than it used to be. To a certain extent these video platforms create big personalities of normal people and its hard to trust them at that point (although Joe rogan still manages to sound authentic somehow) That being said, I do think GPT has the potential to ruin blogging but we will see. As soon as I smell even a little bit of GPT in a blog I am probably gonna bail immediately.

mateusfreira 4y ago

I could not agree more, blogging is fun to write and read, much less structured authors can go as far as they want to make the posts interactive. I still think blog is one of the best tools to share thoughts, and more important to own your content.

henrik_w 4y ago

There is https://refined.blog/ https://refined.blog/ for finding personal blogs about software engineering. Can be sorted by Hacker News upvotes too.

josefresco 4y ago

Related: https://startafuckingblog.com https://startafuckingblog.com

Sebb767 4y ago

I think this is also a bit of a miscommunication. If you take "blogging is dead" as "[literally] nobody blogs anymore", it's clearly wrong, no discussion. Instead, if you take it as "blogging is no longer hyped and no longer mainstream", you're much closer to the truth (in my opinion). Blogging is dead in the same way that dedicated cameras are dead: People still use them for specific use cases and there's a large enthusiast community for them, but the mainstream public moved on. Of course, especially with blogging, there's also a massive filter bubble effect going on; on HN, most people would likely agree with the OP, but a teenager (at least in my country) would staunchly disagree.

layer8 4y ago
The “mainstream public” on the internet in the early 2000s, at the height of blogging, was quite different from today’s internet mainstream, mainly thanks to smartphones. Aside from “microblogging” in the form of twitter threads, and other alternative formats like YouTube, the broadening of the internet mainstream over the past 10 years is probably the more significant change.
7speter 4y ago
Did the mainstream public ever really care about cameras the enthusiasts care about? Were dslrs ever something the masses really wanted? I remember simple point and shoots were a big deal.
jwhiles 4y ago
Was blogging every really mainstream?
- Fricken 4y ago
  When the internet was but a trickle, blogging was maintrickle
- darkwater 4y ago
  In Internet? Totally. Blogging intended as "reading blog", from 2008 to 2015 (roughly, I don't have hard numbers) was pretty mainstream in the Internet population of that time. Maybe now it's not mainstream anymore just because the Internet population increased (again) a lot, and the newjoiners are not into reading blogs but rather watching photos or (short) videos.

eatonphil 4y ago

I enjoy it when my writing is read. And HN, Lobsters, and Reddit give me an outlet for tech writing. But there's no similar outlet for other writing like if I want to write about cooking or product management or parks in NYC. Most non-tech subreddits have super strict self promotion rules that means you can't ever share your own posts. Not that reddit is so friendly in general anyway. I have a small personal audience and sometimes they read these other posts. But it's not as much fun in these cases. So I've been trying to think about how to write about other topics and my only conclusion is that you have to target bigger existing magazines or sites. But there feels like a huge barrier to entry for contributing to these sites. They're very intimidating. I've reached out to a few smaller outlets and never gotten a response. So that's kind of demotivating. So yeah it's easy and enjoyable to blog but in terms of getting anyone to see what you produce... I agree with others here that videos and YouTube seem to be one of the best spots for producing stuff that people actually see, on more diverse topics than just tech.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

People need to adjust their expectations and goals. Is your goal to make content that goes viral that you can monetize and make lots of money with? Consider video. Are you trying to get your word out? Blogs are great and will never die.

asdff 4y ago
Blogs are also great for just writing up what you've done to solve some problem you've encountered, for your own use when you run into the same problem again in years time perhaps

stevoski 4y ago

Blogging, as it was in the first decade of the 2000's died long ago. Yes, there are still blogs, and still people blogging. And many companies have something they call "blogs". But once we're done with there hairsplitting, this is not blogging as it was. That died circa 2012.

Delphiza 4y ago
I don't know why you are being downvoted. 2005-2010 was the heyday of blogging as I knew it. Maybe you "had to have been there", which would put you in your fourties, at least.

CM30 4y ago

I think this is the key point: > But still, people who read have always been in the minority. And I think that’s what most people who think that “video is the future” don’t get. Sure, people are getting lazier and they want you to feed them content. > But think about it. Do you really want to serve those types of people?! The number of people online reading blogs when they were the 'most popular' form of content creation was far lower than the number watching videos or using social media sites or what not. Statistically there are probably more people writing blogs now, and more people reading them. They've just become less of a percentage of the overall internet audience than they were back before YouTube and Twitch and TikTok and podcasts became big things online. So while it may seem like those people abandoned blogging, you have to ask yourself whether they would have ever cared for it to begin with.

mkka 4y ago

One conversation I've noticed going on recently re Twitter and social media is the power of owned media, like podcast, email, and blogs, over walled gardens. Blogs, maybe "personal websites", are a home base. Maybe not the whole solution but a foundation.

asdff 4y ago
It used to be common for personal websites to be your home base. You'd have maybe the on topic posts of the blog (e.g. a scientist blogging in their field), the off topic posts (e.g. your hiking trip), and then a fileshare of collegues, friends, or family photos perhaps, and then maybe special interest stuff like the base depth of your favorite ski slope, or the local surf report for the day. Basically, it would be a combination of LinkedIn, facebook, twitter, and instagram, all under a domain you control with a feature set and design dictated by you alone, maybe paying a few dollars a month or a year seeing limited traffic, maybe "free" if you run it on the desktop you already have plugged into the corner of the room.

andyjohnson0 4y ago

I find blogs substantially more useful than I did a decade ago. A lot of the noise [1] has moved to social media. What is left is, on the whole, more useful. Simple as that for me. [1] Noise: cat/dog pics, look what I had for lunch, random half-based political opinions, etc.

rcarr 4y ago

Some good resources for finding blogs: https://ooh.directory/ https://ooh.directory/ https://bearblog.dev/discover/ https://bearblog.dev/discover/ https://blogroll.org/ https://blogroll.org/ https://www.gyford.com/phil/blogroll/ https://www.gyford.com/phil/blogroll/ https://interconnected.org/home/blogroll https://interconnected.org/home/blogroll

qudat 4y ago
https://prose.sh/read https://prose.sh/read https://lists.sh/read https://lists.sh/read
saperyton 4y ago
Thinking About Things: https://thinking-about-things.com https://thinking-about-things.com

fortran77 4y ago

I read more blogs than ever, mostly on Substack

Existenceblinks 4y ago

I barely read blogs because they seem to try to expand or over elaborate for sake of sounding sophistication, and set tone as they try to play with audience. I'm not fun at party so I mostly read "documentation" kind of text because the objective is to provide concise and no BS to get you understand the system. If the thing doesn't have official documentation or poor documentation I would read your blog about that .. but if that's the case the thing kinda sucks.

asdff 4y ago
There's two sorts of blogs. There's the one you describe which imo are trying to build an audience and gain reach. Then there are the more straightforward blogs, where the author doesn't care about reach or viewership, and just wants to write up a technical process they painstakingly went through so either others can save themselves some grief, or they can look at what they did when they revisit the same problem years from now. Those types of blogs are indispensable. Its like documentation that someone actually went through and wrote in margin notes, like Snape's potion book.

Delphiza 4y ago

High-quality blog content, written by people who have a deep understanding of a subject that they want to proudly share with their peers is pretty much dead. I built my professional career on blogging from 2004 to 2012, and attribute my 'public brand' to what I did then. What I currently see is that blog content is generated by corporate PR writers who write very good-looking content that covers a topic yet mostly meaningless. But it does, importantly, gets clicks and engagement from prospective customers. It is far cheaper and easier to get English grads to churn out content based on basic content and brand themes that to get engineers to write content that they believe in. Eventually those dedicated writers will, in turn, be replaced by AIs (see copy.ai). Also, remember that in the early 2000s, technical people had few options to show their skills other than a personal blog. It was replaced by Stack Overflow (one of the original intentions of the platform), github repositorys and other things that are now available to show off. Sadly, the days of technical people or other specialsts (say artisnal brewers) creating written content that a lot of people see, is largely behind us. Blogging of old is drowned out not just by video (as OP suggests, and where corporate writers struggle) but by armies of robotic (whether people or AI) corporate content generators.

Decabytes 4y ago

While I agree that blogging isn't dead, I think that blogging serves another purpose as well. It's a great way to solidify understandings about certain topics. I have a substack on programming and technology, and when I'm working on something I know I will write about, I definitely understand it better. I think it fulfills the same purpose as learning through teaching. And it's also just extremely fulfilling. Writing about a niche part of a field you are interested in and wished had more spotlight is satisfying, even if no one reads what you wrote. Or at least that's how I feel about it.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

It's not dying, but I don't hear kids talking about blogs they read. That's not due to increased laziness or decline in intelligence, people don't surf the web anymore. They can't, it's too vast, it's virtually impossible to find a blog that doesn't belong to some larger platform like Medium. It seems like most bloggers today that go on longer than 5 years are either written by amateur journalists or tech centric people.

glasss 4y ago

I call everything online a blog now, so from my perspective yea it's not going anywhere.

PurpleRamen 4y ago

> This was coming from someone who has sold millions of books and is still selling hundreds of thousands of books a year. There we have the answer. Monetizing blogs is dead. And it's probably even true. Are there many people around who directly make money with their personal articles? Isn't it today mostly a space which is usually just one part of a bigger network of content? Or as a support/advertisement for some product?

marcus_holmes 4y ago

I think there's different types of blogging: - blogging as speech. Not trying to "build an audience" or monetise, just a place where you can write publicly. Rachelbythebay is probably the best example of this. - blogging as business. What the author is talking about - build an audience, sell some ads, make some money. Writing as a commercial activity. - blogging as content marketing. Probably 90% of blogs - not directly monetised, but SEO fodder for a business. The first isn't dead, but is obscure. The last is mostly braindead (there are some really good posts in amongst the SEO crap, but mostly it's SEO crap). The middle one is hard to do right - there are soooo many "travel bloggers" out there trying to make this work, and so few who actually do make it work.