The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

No 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).

What’s the slash dot of the current era or blogging?

I’m skeptical that it’s out there and robust because I think hn would be the obvious answer and yet it’s not as if small bloggers are dominating the charts here.

I am skeptical that there is any single author where I would be interested in the majority of their output. Perhaps I’m the outlier and other people find authors where they want to consume ~all.

Regardless it seems to me that all of these sole proprietor subscription models are contingent on being generally interested in that person‘s average output whereas the past was faceted meta-aggregation over all producers which I think made it work.

Looking 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

yeah, 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.

Well, it's kinda surprising that Digg actually followed the Slashdot playbook (Slashdot fucked up first) - Digg should have at least learned something from Slashdot's mistake.

Both stories are pretty fascinating examples of how corporate dynamics can ruin a product. In Slashdot's case it was a clear example of "well, we hired a bunch of designers, so obviously we need to do a UI redesign!", but the designers had no idea how users actually used the site. They added a ton of whitespace and IIRC collapsible content to make the site more "modern", but in doing so it made it impossible to quickly scan the comments for high value/insightful responses. In Digg's case it had all the hallmarks of VC meddling ("we've got to monetize!") While people often comment about how buggy Digg V4 was when it released, the bigger issue was the content was just laughably bad - it was changed to like page after page of the dumbest corporate spam. Anyone using the site for 5 minutes would have known it was fucked, so I'm guessing there was just so much internal pressure to "get shit out the door" that they just wanted to release something rather than admit what they built was a turd.