Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

The logic was, if you cannot communicate, you cannot explain why your job, or what you're doing is important. If it has value. If you have value. You cannot hope to explain requirements to others. Or explain the logic or reasons, the "why" of a technical path.

You're likely correct that a lot of people think this unimportant. To them I'd say, they're severely limiting their career, if they don't think communicating is important.

There was a time when searching for anything online, say best running shoes or how to install a WordPress plugin, gave you a healthy mix of personal websites, hobby blogs, and commercial sites.

Then Google rolled out EEAT or whatever and the spotlight shifted almost entirely to big commercial websites. These companies hire professional writers for every niche. People with degrees, credentials, and polished resumes that an individual blogger simply cannot compete with. Naturally, Google’s algorithm began pushing those sites to the top over individual bloggers assuming better information and content due to more impressive writer's resume.

So now, if you search for the same things like running shoes, WordPress tutorials, anything remotely informational, the top results are all from big commerical websites and strangely total "unrelated" garbage after the 3rd page.

Sometimes it reaches an absurd point like search results showing Forbes or similar outlets giving you medical or legal advice right in the first page if not the first suggestion.

Google seems to forget that these articles often come with an inherent bias, a subtle (or not so subtle) push to sell something, regardless of how qualified the writer is.

The social media part is true, though in a way that is more user-benefitting than many bloggers (such as myself) appreciate or will acknowledge. And HN is one such "social media" site that invariably helped "kill" blogs, so there's an irony that this is being discussed here.

Before HN / Reddit (others will put Twitter / Bluesky / whatever else in here), I had a list of "must read" blogs that I would monitor to, essentially, keep up. My feed reader alerted me to their entries, I would pay attention to "must read" blog lists, and so on.

That process yields a lot of chaff for the wheat you yield. An enormous amount. Especially after many bloggers started thinking that they need to have daily content (bloggers like Atwood proselytized that the key to being successful was overwhelming quantity), however facile and useless, to hit some quota. I would rather have a feed that was quiet but then once a week a banger hits amongst dozens of authors, but instead it was just an enormous amount of filler.

Eventually I just stopped monitoring it. With sites like HN, and various Reddit subs, my (proven) hypothesis is that the good content will rise on social media, and the chaff will sit in obscurity. Kind of like torrent seeders, this relies upon the few who are willing to dig through the chaff, /new, etc, however I'm okay missing content if only the well thought out, high effort content rises to the top.