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

danielstanica.com

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

#91

Post by TFNA »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #83
alephnerd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 This needs to be repeated ad nauseum on HN. For most people (especially those not working in jobs which require heavy amounts of writing, analysis…

Why does it need to be repeated? It is clear enough that the blogging era was a bit of an atypical period, that much is true; but why, on a website called Hacker News, should I need to care about what most people choose to do with their lives? Yes, in reality it’s partly VC News, but the mandate is intellectual curiosity, which most people have had beaten out of them by the time they were fourteen. Some amount of dis…

Even most of my nerd friends are consuming less and less longform text. It has been years now since budding hackers can pick up their coding skills through YT videos and now TikTok, and suggesting they read through longform documentation or an OReilly book just makes one look out of touch. HN's audience is as susceptible to the trend the GP mentions as anyone else.

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

#92

Post by heavenlyblue »

Zak wrote: post #86
zerobees wrote: post #27

I 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 fashi…

The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text. Video outcompeting text as a mainstream medium for both information and entertainment is as old as television. Youtube would be a more reliable way to make money than a blog in 2026 even if it was primarily consumed on TVs or PCs.

Your post is a red herring, some platforms simply replaced bespoke blogging websites. How would I, without any special services, consume multiple blogs today? It's so much easier with instagram/social media.

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

#94

Post by economistbob »

Everyone 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-saasifi...

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

#95

Post by kjs3 »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #82
Forgeties79 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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?

Dunno man, sometimes I blog stuff I want to remember (how to do task X or Y, some arcane ffmpeg incantation, recipes, etc) and when I need it, it’s easier to find it in my public blog which is accessible from anywhere, vs. it being a file buried in some computer I have to sit in front of, or somewhere in a shared drive I have to authenticate to, etc. For some things there is value in them being publicly accessible ev…

I blog stuff I want to remember

I have a wiki for that, but I keep reading the Arbiters of the Internet around here claim wikis are even deader than personal blogs, so what do I know. :-)

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

#97

Post by krapp »

jl6 wrote: post #96

Yeah, 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.

I think literally everyone who cares about Geminispace is already here on HN so I wouldn't worry about it.

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

#98

Post by loloquwowndueo »

kjs3 wrote: post #95
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno man, sometimes I blog stuff I want to remember (how to do task X or Y, some arcane ffmpeg incantation, recipes, etc) and when I need it, it’s easier to find it in my public blog which is accessible from anywhere, vs. it being a file buried in some computer I have to sit in front of, or somewhere in a shared drive I have to authenticate to, etc. For some things there is value in them being publicly accessible ev…

I blog stuff I want to remember I have a wiki for that, but I keep reading the Arbiters of the Internet around here claim wikis are even deader than personal blogs, so what do I know. :-)

I mean sure but is your wiki public? If not, that’s one extra step to access your content. If it’s public then it’s basically a blog right?

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

#99

Post by AlienRobot »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #92
Zak wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text. Video outcompeting text as a mainstream medium for both information and entertainment is as old as television. Youtube would be a more reliable way to make money than a blog in 2026 even if it was primarily consumed on TVs or PCs.

Your post is a red herring, some platforms simply replaced bespoke blogging websites. How would I, without any special services, consume multiple blogs today? It's so much easier with instagram/social media.

RSS.

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

#100

Post by pona-a »

TFNA wrote: post #91
mananaysiempre wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it need to be repeated? It is clear enough that the blogging era was a bit of an atypical period, that much is true; but why, on a website called Hacker News, should I need to care about what most people choose to do with their lives? Yes, in reality it’s partly VC News, but the mandate is intellectual curiosity, which most people have had beaten out of them by the time they were fourteen. Some amount of dis…

Even most of my nerd friends are consuming less and less longform text. It has been years now since budding hackers can pick up their coding skills through YT videos and now TikTok, and suggesting they read through longform documentation or an OReilly book just makes one look out of touch. HN's audience is as susceptible to the trend the GP mentions as anyone else.

I'm currently learning electronics, as well as having just recently sat my Physics/Math finals. I can tell you with 100% certainty you CAN'T learn shit from /just/ video.

Actual learning requires you to think about what you just read, maybe re-read it multiple times, stop to try and solve a example problem, etc - all of which require you to stop/rewind which video inherently disfavors.

Besides, I think just like handwritten notes might have a slightly different neurological effect than typed ones, reading might just be a very different mental muscle more connected to comprehension; humans had oral language for much longer than any script, so maybe it came with some different connections to higher brain structures as well.

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