5 ms·

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. Inste

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.
  - jwhiles 4y ago
    In that case, I wonder if blogging stayed the same - and it just feels less important because there is so much more internet now. The pond grew and it stayed the same.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      A lot of it has changed. A lot has moved to other social media. Companies have pretty much moved away from hosting, much less encouraging, a lot of personal blogs on their sites. A food blog, say, is much more likely to be a professional full-time operation as opposed to a hobby. And so forth. There are still classic personal blogs out there. But they're less common. I still write a lot but mostly have other outlets than my personal blog.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Eh, a number of prolific bloggers ended up moving to walled gardens like facebook for audiences. The Oatmeal summed what occurred pretty well https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
  - JD557 4y ago
    I would say even earlier than 2008, at least if my memory is not betraying me. I guess it depends of your definition of blog, but I remember Fotolog being incredibly popular circa 2006 even when compared to mainstream social networks. While Wikipedia says it's a social network, I recall it was used mostly for blogging (not so much for social interaction). And IIRC, when Google acquired Blogger (2003) blogging was not exactly a obscure thing, although I don't think I knew anyone with a personal blog back then.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Yeah it was earlier than 2008. Corporate blogging, at least in many tech circles, was pretty big and companies were coming out with social media guidelines by the mid-2000s. Journalists and analysts often had personal brand blogs on their company sites. And, yes, there were personal blogs on sites like Blogger (or self-hosted). I'd actually say the 2003 date was fairly early on for truly mainstream blogging; I started in 2003 and I won't say I was on the leading edge but I was probably an early adopter.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hadlock 4y ago
  I think the process was: 1. blogging 2. paid blogging services 3. free blogging services (livejournal, xanga, later myspace) 4. wordpress as a next generation blogging service (invented by ex-livejournal employees) both free and paid 5. walled garden blogging platforms (Facebook had a "notes" feature for long format blogging) 6. product and data analyst managers realizing long format blogging wasn't accessible to mainstream and moving towards 2-3 sentence "posts" and later "microblogging" with twitter, vines, periscope etc Nowadays most blogs are commercial entities ("Websites") that cover a fairly narrow topics like EVs or Electric Scooters or Photography reviews but personal blogs and websites still exist they just don't fit into the microblogging narrative and aren't prioritized. People who want to be "influencers" are probably not going to start a blog as the immediate reach of a blog is measured in hundreds or low thousands of hits per month.
bachmeier 4y ago
> the mainstream public moved on I'd really like to see some good data on this, because it's not my experience. I probably read more blogs today than I did 10 years ago. I see tons of sharing of blog posts and website content on social media. It's true that the narrow sliver of people making a living as content creators may have moved on, but I just don't see that the "mainstream public" has.
- cableshaft 4y ago
  And if we're just talking certain subjects, like recipe blogs for example (and I'll give you paragraphs of my life experience above each recipe), those seem to be doing very well. I know I access those (and grumble about how much I have to scroll to get to the actual receipe) about 2-3 times a week when cooking, usually.
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  You're "an economist, professor, and sometimes consultant with a side interest in computation and finding ways to be more productive. Always interested in learning new things.". The mainstream public is watching the Tide Pod challenge on TikTok.
  - bachmeier 4y ago
    It doesn't seem plausible that the people watching the Tide Pod challenge today spent their free time reading blogs a decade ago.
    - lostfocus 4y ago
      It must be fascinating to find the people who are still watching the Tide Pod challenge today.
- rjh29 4y ago
  That's the filter bubble effect that the OP alluded to.
- ChocMontePy 4y ago
masterof0 4y ago
The final nail in the coffin is ChatGPT, the greatest spam generation tool ever made. I imagine bots, SEO gurus, and the like are having a great time now.
- squarefoot 4y ago
  Just wait when they'll be able to create from scratch credible AI video stars and influencers then put them one after another on social media. They will do it, no doubt about that: free advertising with no perks/bribes is just too tempting.
- jerf 4y ago
  If blogging is dead because of AI, videos are not far behind. I'm already curating away a couple channels a week on YouTube that are pure AI spam, either videos that just steal content from others and use AI to drive a collection of clips (which will only get more sophisticated) or put a TTS-driven monologue over something, where the Text being converted To Speech might as well be AI-driven. And the human videos are already so optimized for The Algorithm that a good deal of them might as well just cut out the middleman and be written by an AI, for the AI. ("This Breaks the Internet - Reacting to Reaction Videos Reacting To Reaction Videos". You can see the thumbnail already, can't you?) Yeah, they're behind for now, but all the infrastructure is there for this to explode the instant they're not. Video operations putting out dozens of crap videos a week with nonfunctional "hacks" and all sorts of similar things will be in an arms race to pivot to these things and there's no chance the video site's moderation will be able to keep up with this in the end.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    "Dead Internet Theory". Nobody has to delete the authentic content, they just have to outcompete it by many orders of magnitude. Then not only is the inauthentic content all over all the possible routes you might find content, people stop looking for it entirely.
  - masterof0 4y ago
    Videos are harder to fake and produce, I would say impossible, any of the OpenAI products are unable to be creative.

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.
- jwhiles 4y ago
  In that case, I wonder if blogging stayed the same - and it just feels less important because there is so much more internet now. The pond grew and it stayed the same.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    A lot of it has changed. A lot has moved to other social media. Companies have pretty much moved away from hosting, much less encouraging, a lot of personal blogs on their sites. A food blog, say, is much more likely to be a professional full-time operation as opposed to a hobby. And so forth. There are still classic personal blogs out there. But they're less common. I still write a lot but mostly have other outlets than my personal blog.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Eh, a number of prolific bloggers ended up moving to walled gardens like facebook for audiences. The Oatmeal summed what occurred pretty well https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
- JD557 4y ago
  I would say even earlier than 2008, at least if my memory is not betraying me. I guess it depends of your definition of blog, but I remember Fotolog being incredibly popular circa 2006 even when compared to mainstream social networks. While Wikipedia says it's a social network, I recall it was used mostly for blogging (not so much for social interaction). And IIRC, when Google acquired Blogger (2003) blogging was not exactly a obscure thing, although I don't think I knew anyone with a personal blog back then.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Yeah it was earlier than 2008. Corporate blogging, at least in many tech circles, was pretty big and companies were coming out with social media guidelines by the mid-2000s. Journalists and analysts often had personal brand blogs on their company sites. And, yes, there were personal blogs on sites like Blogger (or self-hosted). I'd actually say the 2003 date was fairly early on for truly mainstream blogging; I started in 2003 and I won't say I was on the leading edge but I was probably an early adopter.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hadlock 4y ago
I think the process was: 1. blogging 2. paid blogging services 3. free blogging services (livejournal, xanga, later myspace) 4. wordpress as a next generation blogging service (invented by ex-livejournal employees) both free and paid 5. walled garden blogging platforms (Facebook had a "notes" feature for long format blogging) 6. product and data analyst managers realizing long format blogging wasn't accessible to mainstream and moving towards 2-3 sentence "posts" and later "microblogging" with twitter, vines, periscope etc Nowadays most blogs are commercial entities ("Websites") that cover a fairly narrow topics like EVs or Electric Scooters or Photography reviews but personal blogs and websites still exist they just don't fit into the microblogging narrative and aren't prioritized. People who want to be "influencers" are probably not going to start a blog as the immediate reach of a blog is measured in hundreds or low thousands of hits per month.

bachmeier 4y ago

> the mainstream public moved on I'd really like to see some good data on this, because it's not my experience. I probably read more blogs today than I did 10 years ago. I see tons of sharing of blog posts and website content on social media. It's true that the narrow sliver of people making a living as content creators may have moved on, but I just don't see that the "mainstream public" has.

cableshaft 4y ago
And if we're just talking certain subjects, like recipe blogs for example (and I'll give you paragraphs of my life experience above each recipe), those seem to be doing very well. I know I access those (and grumble about how much I have to scroll to get to the actual receipe) about 2-3 times a week when cooking, usually.
iLoveOncall 4y ago
You're "an economist, professor, and sometimes consultant with a side interest in computation and finding ways to be more productive. Always interested in learning new things.". The mainstream public is watching the Tide Pod challenge on TikTok.
- bachmeier 4y ago
  It doesn't seem plausible that the people watching the Tide Pod challenge today spent their free time reading blogs a decade ago.
  - lostfocus 4y ago
    It must be fascinating to find the people who are still watching the Tide Pod challenge today.
rjh29 4y ago
That's the filter bubble effect that the OP alluded to.
ChocMontePy 4y ago

masterof0 4y ago

The final nail in the coffin is ChatGPT, the greatest spam generation tool ever made. I imagine bots, SEO gurus, and the like are having a great time now.

squarefoot 4y ago
Just wait when they'll be able to create from scratch credible AI video stars and influencers then put them one after another on social media. They will do it, no doubt about that: free advertising with no perks/bribes is just too tempting.
jerf 4y ago
If blogging is dead because of AI, videos are not far behind. I'm already curating away a couple channels a week on YouTube that are pure AI spam, either videos that just steal content from others and use AI to drive a collection of clips (which will only get more sophisticated) or put a TTS-driven monologue over something, where the Text being converted To Speech might as well be AI-driven. And the human videos are already so optimized for The Algorithm that a good deal of them might as well just cut out the middleman and be written by an AI, for the AI. ("This Breaks the Internet - Reacting to Reaction Videos Reacting To Reaction Videos". You can see the thumbnail already, can't you?) Yeah, they're behind for now, but all the infrastructure is there for this to explode the instant they're not. Video operations putting out dozens of crap videos a week with nonfunctional "hacks" and all sorts of similar things will be in an arms race to pivot to these things and there's no chance the video site's moderation will be able to keep up with this in the end.
- pjc50 4y ago
  "Dead Internet Theory". Nobody has to delete the authentic content, they just have to outcompete it by many orders of magnitude. Then not only is the inauthentic content all over all the possible routes you might find content, people stop looking for it entirely.
- masterof0 4y ago
  Videos are harder to fake and produce, I would say impossible, any of the OpenAI products are unable to be creative.