If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

It's not just the "major platforms."

I have a blog which I've maintained for a long time and continue to publish on. But for a lot of the material I write on a day to day basis, I can publish at online pubs/sites where I have editorial support, an established audience, and promotional machinery. I'm not limited--I can always publish by myself--but for many of the things I write about I might as well choose an existing publication.

They didn't go anywhere. Other ways to publish that information cropped up alongside them.

Twitter killed blogging. Not just the popularity of it, but the expectations of both the writer and reader. When Twitter launched, it was described as a "micro-blog", because that's what it is, really, before morphing into its own thing: a tweet.

We all know what a tweet is: A short polemic statement, usually emotional, biased or opinionated, but expressed as self-evident without any justification, explanation or thorough analysis, which simply wouldn't fit.

I was an avid blogger at the time Twitter started, thousands of daily readers, and relatively influential in my tech niche. I had every reason to continue. And yet after I started tweeting regularly, my blogging slowed and then stopped. That day had passed, and now my blog sits on my website like a monument to the 2000s. Many others were like this as well.

The reason is pretty simple: When you blog regularly, there's a certain itch to express an idea or an opinion that builds up and you want to scratch it by writing a post. But you'd ruminate on it for a while, so that it could be a decent sized post with rationale for your thought.

But tweeting could scratch that itch instantly - no need to save up enough of an idea to write a full blog post of a few paragraphs, you could just write, "Wow, foo sucks. Totally prefer bar instead." And the feeling was satisfied.

You'd think at the time that you'd save up some ideas and write a longer post later, and at first you did, but as time went by, later never seemed to come. And then, when it did, you'd be so used to culling your opinion down to the essential idea for a pithy tweet, fully expressing your thought became harder. Besides, the more open-ended a tweet was, the more opinionated, the more it would get reactions. It seemed that expressing fully formed ideas wasn't worth as much.

It was a vicious cycle, you'd blog less. And others who used to blog their ideas or leave comments wrote less as well, and that great feedback loop stalled as everything moved to tweets. Intelligent analysis was replaced by emotional exclamations and hard opinion. There's no room for nuance in a tweet.

And that's where we are now. With a president who's a master of tweeting unjustified, irrational opinion and lies and a society that responds in kind because doing otherwise takes too much time and effort.

Blogging is never coming back. Even this comment is probably too long for most HN readers to do anything more than just skim. And if they don't like a word or two, they'll downvote and move on, rather than write their thoughts out in a coherent manner.

You can just blog a comment. Read something that moves your mind longer than the first barfed out comment? Blog it. Write down your thought process, discuss with yourself, do something thoughtful witout the stress of a public discussion.

Social media in general -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. -- have made it easier than a blog to get your thoughts onto the internet, and the extremely social nature of those services and the instant feedback and conversation they encourage (the social part) is very compelling.

Even though the major blog platforms (Movable Type, WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot, etc.) had a social component in the form of comments, the big social media sites -- including Reddit -- took it up quite a few notches. People like the feedback and the conversation. Blogs can be much more of an island. Some like that, too.