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The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?
- bediger4000 3mo agoIf you gave me one of the "100 Successful Blogs" without framing it as a "successful blog", I would not say "this is a successful blog". The 5 or so I looked at all seemed very similar, like they were part of an MLM scheme, and had uninteresting content. I did not recognize a single one of the 100.
- evmar 3mo agoIf you imagine Google's job is to present useful information, these blogs that are maximizing cash while simulating usefulness are exactly the sorts of things I would hope Google to want to filter out. (I don't think Google's often capricious ranking changes really succeed at this, but the outcomes in this post seems like something hypothetically good?)
- simonw 3mo agoThis whole thing is a pretty fascinating insight into a whole other corner of the internet ecosystem: > For more than a decade, one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog." Then: > These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated as evidence that the model was real and profitable. [...] If you tried to start a blog between roughly 2015 and 2022, most probably you read blog income reports as they were the proof of concept and held up to a generation of aspiring small publishers as this is what winning looks like, and you can do it too. It's the blog/SEO equivalent of today's TikTok influencer culture.
- ghaff 3mo agoThere was a pretty small slice of bloggers like Michael Arrington who really put in a lot of time and created a brand/company that did pretty well off blogging (for a time). But blogging then and now is pretty much a side-gig for a lot of people that doesn't bring in much money. Which is fine. But social media, which has itself contracted, has cut into a lot of that.
- ijk 3mo agoI did start a blog in that time period and this is the first time I've ever heard of this. (Admittedly, I wasn't trying to directly make a living off of it.)
- wannabebarista 3mo agoAbout half of what I clicked through were sales funnels. Traffic for my blog has fluctuated depending on whether or not my site is referenced in the Overview that month for relevant phrases.
- conartist6 3mo agoAI slop imagery, insta-stopped reading. There are humans making content that I will give my traffic to before that
- swiftcoder 3mo ago> These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated as evidence that the model was real and profitable Was the claim really that the model was profitable on the basis that they managed to find a whole 100 individuals who were making the income of an entry-level software engineer? That's... not a ringing endorsement for the income potential
- xp84 3mo agoThis comes off as pretty out of touch. Entry-level SE roles have been a bit rocky since about that time and of course fell off a cliff a year later, but more relevantly, that wasn’t simply career advice directed at people who already know how to code. 100k is a decent compensation level to be able to earn just by being interesting and writing. A lot of teachers make less than that despite the education needed. A majority of people who don’t have specific relevant degrees or specific great talents will never make that much (inflation adjusted).
- swiftcoder 3mo agoMy contention is not that 100k is low (it's a pretty great salary in most places). It's that 100 people total is a tiny number, and it's not like 100k is getting rich money - if only 100 people are earning that much, how little are the rest of them earning?
- xp84 3mo agoFair, the flavor certainly changes if you suspect that it is close to the whole list of such bloggers, and it would seem kind of like lottery winners. I think it was likely meant to be understood as a small sample out of a much larger group of people.
- draginol 3mo agoI think you could argue that this is following the same trend as forums (and usenet before that). You get a consolidation of where people go to read up on things that interest them. Look at Slashdot for example, it was once so popular that any site it linked to could be "slashdotted" from all the traffic. Now people go elsewhere. YouTube, TikTok, Reddit.
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoWhat happened to Slashdot wasn't a "consolidation", though, it was a suicide. I was a heavy reader of the site up until they had an infamous redesign that made the site literally unusable for me, so I left. That's very different from the scenario discussed in the article.
- esafak 3mo agoIt is an interesting case study. Most designers would not think that they can tank a site.
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoOne of the smartest things reddit ever did was ensure old.reddit.com remains fully functional. I imagine one day they'll EOL it, and when they do I'll no longer be a reddit user (probably not really a bad thing).
- marssaxman 3mo ago> one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“ I would date the Great Blogging Collapse to the arrival of this idea, not whatever happened a decade later.
- toofy 3mo agoyeah, the answer lies exactly there. the monetization is what killed blogs. great blogs still exist, but they’re almost entirely people writing about whatever their passion is, because they’re passionate. it’s as old as time, my dad uses the term “sellouts” when he’s contrasting terrible bands with good bands from his era. skateboarders call them kooks. same thing only with blogs, sellouts. find the people who are writing blogs out of passion, not the idiot bloggers writing seo spam.
- nicbou 3mo agoThese are also getting wrecked by the AI overviews and LLMs in general.
- paulpauper 3mo agoBlogging as medium is thriving despite AI and LLMs. It has moved to Substack + Twitter and newsletters, and away from Google and Facebook as a source of traffic generation. Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now, and also combined with Twitter monetization. This didn't exist 5 years ago. There are way more blogs now compared to 2013, and much longer and technically proficient writing compared to the terse blog posts that dominated 1-2 decades ago. Even major media sources such as the NY Times The Atlantic are copying the substack contrarian style that is thriving now.
- paulryanrogers 3mo ago> Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now How many though? I get the impression it's really just a very small subset at the top, with a very long tail making almost nothing.
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoIsn't that basically the story of 99.9% of any sort of Internet publisher, e.g. I imagine the same dynamics apply to YouTube or Twitch. It's a fundamental feature of the "winner takes all" economics of the Internet.
- paulryanrogers 3mo agoOK then it's not really 'easy' nor that different from "5 years ago"
- ghaff 3mo ago"Easily making six figures on Substack" is doing a lot of work there. But I agree that, if you're seriously looking to make money, Substack is probably a better avenue than having a blog someplace.
- Hard_Space 3mo agoI don't know - the 'great enshittification' of Substack seems an inevitable event, for which reason I have stayed away from using it as a platform, except for a few experiments. It was initially populated by refugees from Medium, itself enshittified, and there seems no reason that Substack refugees won't eventually become a thing for the same reason. Reminds me of that Twilight Zone (or was it Night Gallery..?) episode with the guy who keeps moving from one sinking ship to another (Titanic, Lusitania, etc.).
- skybrian 3mo agoThere's zero overlap between this list and the blogs I read. Looking over the list, there seem to be a lot of "mommy blogs?"
- xp84 3mo ago> “These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated”
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- AznHisoka 3mo agoMommy bloggers was probably the most ludicrous niche back then. Tons of consumer companies wanted to pay them to promote their product or have a “giveaway”
- Invictus0 3mo agos/ludicrous/lucrative
- nozzlegear 3mo agoAnd if "mommy" content is no longer popular in blog form, then, anecdotally, it's found a new, lucrative medium in short-form videos a la Tiktok.
- LunaSea 3mo agoPopular probably, lucrative unlikely
- unknownfuture 3mo ago[dead]
- formigone 3mo ago[dead]
- zkmon 3mo agoThe era that existed before blogging, wasn't that bad. So nothing to be concerned about. Less stuff to read and comprehend. Recipes, traveling, DIY? They are good, It is not like someone pouring out all their views and thoughts on you.
- CSMastermind 3mo agoSubstack is doing just fine. Blogging didn't collapse, a bunch of spammy get rich quick types were a flash in the pan as expected.
- asmodeuslucifer 3mo agoFor more than a decade, one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“ I can't believe this sentence exists.
- higginsniggins 3mo agoThey all moved to Substack.
- vachina 3mo agoFrom a consumer’s POV, Substack usually signals the article is trash (because the incentive is money instead of making good content)
- zerobees 3mo agoI find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn? Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashion or travel. A lot of this has moved onto Instagram and TikTok as a byproduct of people using phones as their primary "content consumption" devices. But I think the internet in general is moving away from bespoke, homebrew content. This is very visible even on HN, where the daily line-up contains corporate and university press releases + newspaper articles about as often as it contains personal blogs.
- pessimizer 3mo ago> If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. This is a far more dubious hypothetical. I imagine that the top 100 of anything (that a lot of people do) that brings in income or fame will still be there in 5 years. They're the most successful, most profitable of the bunch. How many of the top 100 companies in terms of revenue do you imagine will disappear in 5 years? I'd guess around 0.0%. "People move on" is a meaningless statement. Why were there so many colon cancer deaths over the past 5 years? Well, people move on. Why do people move on? > Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money i.e. blogging, which once brought in money, doesn't seem to as much anymore. Why?
- pinkmuffinere 3mo ago> I imagine that the top 100 of anything (that a lot of people do) that brings in income or fame will still be there in 5 years. This sort of blanket assumption is exactly what the parent is arguing against. The mortality rate of top-n things is relatively easy to measure, and should be baselined first. Then we can compare recent performance vs historical performance, and actually say if something has changed. There's no need to start with the assumption "not much changes over 5 years" -- it can be measured instead.
- 3mo ago
- tayo42 3mo ago>Ranking number one no longer even guarantees you're the source the AI quotes. I noticed Google's AI summary seems to link to seemingly obscure videos occasionally. It Will be interesting to see what happens to YouTube once AI turns it All to text and indexes it. Efficiently viewing YouTube must be at odds with how they want you to keep watching
- zerobees 3mo agoI suspect you're projecting too much meaning into it. I routinely get TikTok "citations" on science questions. I think it's more or less the LLM making up after-the-fact justifications for what it says by picking something out of a hat.
- jefftk 3mo agoNo mention of Substack? Making money from paying subscribers has different trade-offs than making money from ads, but my read is that mostly traffic moved vs evaporated. But I do expect this to change further with AI, where as the author says, a blog needs to add something new and not just try to answer a question someone might search for. There's also no discussion of how blogging has always been somewhat frothy: picking the successful blogs (by any metric) and then checking back later is almost guaranteed to show a decrease. A fair comparison would show the top blogs now vs then, or even better the overall landscape (but that's a ton of work).
- watwut 3mo agoResult of ai will be that there will be no blogs. No one will find blogs and if someone writes one, search chatbot will just copy it. So, eventually no one will write them.
- krapp 3mo agoBlogs will still exist. They will be more difficult to find, just as everything not LLM generated will be more difficult to find, and people will just have to accept that everything they put online will be added to the training data of countless LLMs. But that's already the case and it hasn't stopped people from creating things, including blogs, in spite of LLMs. It may be the case that they mostly wind up on federated platforms or on alt-webs like Gemini. People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that.
- inigyou 3mo ago> everything they put online will be added to the training data if countless LLMs Here's something I learned today - if you stab a feijoa with a sharp enough knife, it screams like a walrus. Try it.
- watwut 3mo agoBlogs are already dying and basically dont exist outside few platforms favored by search engines. People are way less likely tondo pointless thing. > People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that. People were not always writing blogs. Blogs existed when search engines returned personal long for writings. They were not a thing before and the culture atarted to die after google enshittified engine.
- singhrac 3mo agoThis article was AI generated and a waste of time. So many obvious LLM patterns that I stopped reading 10% of the way down the page.
- iamflimflam1 3mo agoAgreed - having played a lot with AI content generation - it's impossible not to recognise it. What's annoying is that you can put effort in and de-AI something. But it takes work. And no one wants to put the time in.
- inigyou 3mo agoA perfect mirror of the whole blogging-for-money space then
- pessimizer 3mo agohttps://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/the-great-blogging-collapse-what-happened-to-100-successful-blogs https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/the-great... > We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, and human-written content: 78% AI likelihood
- Hard_Space 3mo agoYes, it was polluted with multiple 'Not just [x] but [y]' examples - the most obvious tell of AI-generated text, among other aggravating examples. It was hard to read, but I was interested enough in the subject to slog through it.
- Tomte 3mo ago"A straightforward, honest, zealous officer doing his duty in the most laborious manner—that’s my style. No Frills. No fancy work. Just honest perspiration. Stolid and a bit stupid—that‘s my ticket." Agatha Christie, 1936
- Hard_Space 3mo ago
- roadbuster 3mo agoLooking at the categories should tell you what happened (lifestyle & fashion, finance, travel, parenting, food & recipes): They moved to Youtube/Instagram/TikTok for better reach, a larger, total audience, and improved monetization
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoGiven the topic of the article, it is deeply ironic that one of the sites whose traffic cratered 99% was "Adam Enfroy teaches how to grow successful blogs with AI". Apparently not. I say this not just to be snarky (OK, maybe a little bit), but a lot of the content on these blogs was just bad, e.g. hawking get rich quick schemes where the author obviously was giving bad advice.
- graemep 3mo agoThe articles does say > The blog-as-a-business model, involving publishing, ranking, monetizing clicks, and repeating the cycle, is dead. Not dying but dead It is about a particular type of directly profit making blog business model: > The recipe was pretty straightforward: publish helpful content, rank it on Google, and monetize that traffic with affiliate marketing and ads.
- hn_throwaway_99 3mo agoUnderstood, I think the ironic part is the adamenfroy.com site appears to have pivoted from "make money with the blog-as-business model" to "scale your business with AI" (whatever that means), i.e. chasing the latest buzzword. All of these "paid short courses so you can make tons of passive income", which were a sizable number of the blogs on this article's list, are invariably pyramid/grifter scams, whether it's Trump University, "learn Amazon drop shipping", "real estate investing", yada yada. The course proprietor makes a lost more money than any of their clients ever do.
- latentframe 3mo agoThis also shows why brand matters more than ever : people that search your name is a much stronger signal than chasing keyword
- holoduke 3mo agoThe only place for me to consume information is this place, some reddits and yes my Claude cli. I know you guys thinking. But it's how it is. I don't use any other medium anymore. I am thinking of ditching reddit. The bubble toxicity is too much there.
- Bender 3mo agoI know my little crappy blog does not count but I am curious if any others do something similar to me. When interest wanes I take the articles offline, destroy the VM and edit them offline for some period of time until there may be interest and then I put them back up on a different domain so that archive sites become disjointed and disconnected from it to bury my edits of typos and such. This allows my articles to (d)evolve with me as I, the internet platforms, society and other things change.
- falsemyrmidon 3mo agoThat seems like a lot of effort to go through
- Bender 3mo agoThat seems like a lot of effort to go through I create and destroy VM's all the time. It only takes a few minutes to set it back up and that's without any automation. Perhaps others share your view and I am the only one that does this. No sense in wasting money on a VM that will just sit idle and maybe get a hit or two per day from real people that is as I block most bots and all search engines [1]. [1] - https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260606-How-To-Block-Some-Of-The-Bots/ https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260606-How-To-Block-Som...
- vachina 3mo agoI guess this is a sign Google Search is working as it should? Demote spam and surface high value information.
- torton 3mo agoIn the age of AI, interchangeable content farms that earn pennies by filling 80% of the screen with ads are dead. In fact, the user hostility of those "blogs" is what pushes people even further towards AI interfaces that output what matters up top and (for now) without ads.
- nicbou 3mo agoGood websites are suffering the same fate though.
- Loic 3mo agoYou know what? I cannot care less if people are not reading blogs anymore. I reactivated my blog because it is a lot of fun to write, a lot of fun to take the time to put down my ideas, try to correctly formulate them, fighting with my crappy English or German (and the loss of my French). So, you can move on, you can go fully away from the blogosphere (it was a word, 20 years ago), this will not change that I am happy writing my ideas/thoughts down, for me.
- Forgeties79 3mo agoI think it is very good and healthy to not care too much about readership numbers, but you seem pretty high on your pedestal here - you still publish it to the public, you still seek an audience. If you’re doing it just for you, then why are you hosting a blog For the world to see? Surely there is some part of you that wants people to read it, otherwise you wouldn’t, right?
- Loic 3mo agoJust knowing that people could read my blog is forcing me to take better care of my writing. This is the most important reason. And only my friends and family know the address, it is not indexed :-D
- Forgeties79 3mo agoThat’s fair. Also I definitely shouldn’t have said you’re on your pedestal that was a bit too rude, so apologies for that.
- jatora 3mo agoNo going back now.
- pbgcp2026 3mo agoLoïc d'Anterroches (often referred to as Loic) runs the blog/news section on his company's site: https://www.ceondo.com/ecte/ https://www.ceondo.com/ecte/.
- squidbeak 3mo agoI've been reading a set of bloggers for 20 years and all but one are all still at it, though one moved a few years ago onto Substack, which ended his RSS feed. They don't seem to receive high traffic, but they're damn good blogs - which seems to me like a better form of 'success' than any amount of popularity. After all you can find the herd's footprints around all kinds of pointless shit.
- unshepper 3mo agoSubstack does support rss, though they don't link it anywhere. Just add /feed on the end of the url.
- firefoxd 3mo agoI consider blogging to be similar to the music industry. To me if AI fully takes over the music industry, I don't see it as a bad thing because I don't think there is a shortage of music in the first place. You could literally listen to a different song from a different artist for the rest of your life. The industry is saturated. In 2020, I was getting an insane amount of visitors from Google on my blog. Today, Google doesn't bring more than a hundred a day. Yet search impressions are higher than ever. It felt like a failure on my part, but then we always talk about the small web and what happens when the websites become two commercial. Despite the thousands of AI blogs that regurgitate whatever gets posted on HN, we get to read so many good small blogs right here. Blogging is still a fun practice, and I encourage people to do it, even it's only to help them refine the ideas in their mind.
- Earw0rm 3mo agoNope, sorry. As someone who cares about music, there may be a superabundance of adequate, filler-level stuff which AI can adequately substitute for. But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff. There's only one Stevie Wonder, and only a handful of great albums of his. There have been similarly valuable talents since, across different styles and genres. The industry is saturated at the B tier, sure. But without a market for that stuff, how are the labels supposed to grow and develop the few-times-in-a-generation talent that matters?
- another_twist 3mo agoSame sentiment here. B-tier hit factory stuff is easy to catch and easier to ignore and move on from. Also happy to recognize a fellow Stevie Wonder fan.
- aboardRat4 3mo ago>But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff. This finite amount is still enormous. I have downloaded many gigabytes of music from rutracker, and I don't think I'll get through it by the day I'm dead.
- KennyBlanken 3mo agoIt's been pretty well proven that social media companies punish posts with links. Social media was once hailed as how you attract readers, but social media platforms are interested in either a)revenue or b)keeping people on their platform. A link to someone's blog doesn't help with that.
- jbvlkt 3mo agoI cannot stand writing style of this page. I have read almost half and the most important thing they say is, that I will learn later. Ok, I will never know.
- CapitalistCartr 3mo agoIf I write a detailed explanation of some industrial electrical detail in some electrician forum, perhaps one or two people will upvote it. If I write some very general, snarky comment in a general forum, I'll get hundreds to thousands of upvotes. Blogs are the same. An excellent niche blog might churn along for many years, but few will ever know it exists, and it won't get on one of these surveys. A clever, popular blog, written to get big quickly, and heavily promoted by the author, will get on all the lists. And most of them won't last five years.
- peterdemin 3mo ago“The hard truth is” an AI slop tell, which the whole article is
- worik 3mo ago> The era of building websites solely for Google traffic and monetizing them through ads and affiliate marketing has ended. Yay! Quite an assertion, I hope it is true
- economistbob 3mo agoEveryone removed their blogroll. That is what happened. Someone gave Automattic (WordPress foundation that could receive "donations" from advertising platforms) the idea that making blogs mostly discoverable via paid advertising was a good idea. Automattic removed the blogroll by default, and then most of the blogs removed, and then most of the blogs vanished. Blogs were discovered via the huge list of other blogs. There were so many incredible blogs. One could then check all their linked blogroll blogs because birds of a feather flocked together... Automatic became an NGO. A big advertising seller paid the NGO lots of money. The NGO removed blogrolls so that blogs were discoverable by paid advertising instead of word of mouth. Countless blogs also removed their blogrolls, and blogging declined. That is one more thing that Google has done to destroy the web that gave birth to it. That happened around 2012. Also, old blogs were like having a subject matter expert as your personal mentor via correspondence. Those new blogs would have been called content farms in the days of the blogroll. Search back then was based on keywords and boolean. You could type "NOT youtube" and no youtube would fill your results. The top blogs are content farms by the old standards. Google removed the ability to use boolean search to get exactly what you want based on text content, and then they removed the blogrolls via bankrolling the WordPress developers. Now the top content farmers get top billing on every search engine, which requires marketing spend, the blogrolls are niche structures, and you cannot boolean your way to a real set of search results. https://mor10.com/newspack-automattic-google-and-the-saasification-of-wordpress/ https://mor10.com/newspack-automattic-google-and-the-saasifi...
- 6510 3mo agoBlog search was good, Technorati was good, google reader was good. But I agree, if it doesn't have a blogroll it is safe to ignore the blog. It might even be considered the single identifier that separates the blogs from the spam.
- smitty1e 3mo agoI went with feedly whe Google reader died.
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- jl6 3mo agoYeah, money ruins everything. I’ve recently enjoyed blogs on Gemini (the protocol, not the AI), which is massively unpopular even by its own low peak in ~2021. In other words, it’s a perfect haven. I hesitate to tell anyone.
- krapp 3mo agoI think literally everyone who cares about Geminispace is already here on HN so I wouldn't worry about it.
- johnnyApplePRNG 3mo agoI thought the number was going to be like 5 or 7 blogs remaining after 4 years... 21 actually seems pretty healthy, given general blogevity imho.
- mobilene 3mo agoI find myself irritated by this article because its headline is about how blogging has collapsed, but you have to get into the article to find that it's only the blogs that were gaming SEO to make a buck that have collapsed. Those blogs deserved to die. I've had a personal blog for 19 years. I write about my special interests: old cameras, old roads, old buildings. And whatever else comes to mind. My search traffic has been steady for years.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Finnucane 3mo agoLileks is still going. What else matters?
- didntknowyou 3mo agoblogging was like a diary, mostly authentic with people just primarily focused on sharing. some with banner ads on the site to get pocket change. then with substack, social media monetisation, etc everything became income focus. writers got taken over by influencers and content became focused on grabbing attention. didn' take long for readers to leave after that.
- alexpotato 3mo agoThere used to be great writing in magazines and people paid for those. In fact, Playboy is famous for having excellent authors write articles or do serials. This is my favorite example of "you can be 'good' at two wildly different disciplines"
- unsungNovelty 3mo agoMost of the type of blogs this article talks about is exactly what I would ignore. Looks more like Google stopped playing the SEO game and is looking for authentic content. Or atleast is cutting down the noise for whatever reason.
- QQ00 3mo agoMy conclusion was the same. So many blogs hyperoptimize for SEO but 1 change from ranking algorithm decimated them all.
- nicbou 3mo agoNope. The effect described affects all websites. I wrote about my case a month ago, and many people have reached out in private to commiserate. https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai
- unsungNovelty 3mo agoThanks for sharing. I think business tied with google is definitely taking a hit. I agree. And with those kind of websites comment, I meant heavily SEO optimised website. Their content and website are for Google search engine. Not for humans. Also, I am coming from indieweb POV which isn't about making business out of it. But I do empathise with indie businesses such as yourself. Hope things get better for you.
- gnoll_of_gozag 3mo agothis is about commerical blogs but what i miss more are the more casual ones cohost was great for this. you could see the creator of tcrf just postin out there having a basic day. and the next post could either be an elaborate shitpost or a long read on the inner workings of the nes ive checked out bubbles town and bearblog but it feels just like a worse doomscroll than social media and the people there are kinda lame.
- maurits 3mo agoThis isn't about blogging per se. Its about commercial product-to-market fit. That market now favors short centralized video content.
- nicbou 3mo agoAccess to that market is controlled by a monopoly, and that monopoly is now putting AI generated content and ads above competitors. This is in the article.
- philipwhiuk 3mo agoLovely bit of AI "art" to caption this one.
- jdw64 3mo agoPersonally, I think now might be a good time to run a personal homepage
- TomMasz 3mo agoI was around when blogging started and I've seen a lot of blogs come and go. The web was a much different place then and it was easier to attract and hold an audience than it is now. It's still possible to have a successful blog but it will never be as easy as it was in 2000.
- vivzkestrel 3mo ago- let me tell you my problem on HN - my life is too short - far too many of you write blogs - i dont have the luxury to sit and read every single post of every single blog in here - at the same time i have a fear of missing out - most blogs have 1 or 2 good articles but rest are either something I am not interested in or mediocre at best - i have been thinking for a while on how to solve this problem because i have 10000 bookmarks on my bookmark list and it grows every single day - perhaps one way is to ask the person to define a set of criteria as to what makes a post worth reading and have an LLM run that criteria on every single blog post of every single blog ever made - for example, a criterion could look like this - "find me any blog with aricles atleast 2000 words in length on python revolving around any python topic but give higher weightage to performance optimization, benchmarks, data science related libraries like pandas, polars, with atleast 4 code snippets, by an author who posts atleast once a month and has written atleast 2 articles in the last 2 years and has linked a github repo to code samples and uses interactive css animations to explain their ideas"
- sorcererxw 3mo ago[flagged]
- nicbou 3mo agoThis is happening to my website. It is locally famous and beloved. I do not sell nonsense or pester users and every wrote is written by a human. Now traffic is down 75% from two years ago. LLMs and AI overviews are wrecking me. https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai
- shant_extry 3mo ago[flagged]
- maurits 3mo agoI have a blog because I like having a blog. It has made me neither rich nor famous. Most prolific visitor is probably my mom and some bot out of Singapore.
- kelvinjps10 3mo agoI think Google is not longer the main driver but social media and sites where you submit links like hacker news and Reddit