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

danielstanica.com

111–120 of 191 posts

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

#111

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…

Audio is just easier to multitask with than reading.

Audio may feel easier to multitask with, but how much do you actually retain?

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

#112
post #63
post #31

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: pi…

Result 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.

Millions of people have signed up to receive blog posts by email with Substack. HCR alone has 3M subscribers. While AI replaces "here's common knowledge repackaged" blogs, people still care what the authors they trust think.

Now maybe sometime soon AI replaces that too, but I think by that point we're talking about "automation of the majority of human intellectual labor" and are well beyond blogs in particular.

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

#113
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I 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..?) episo…

The main reason I used Medium was that, for a period, I had personal stuff in a company newsletter and cross-posted stuff on Medium seemed more official than a personal blog. Haven't used it in years.

I do have a Substack account but have zero interest in monetizing and, after a fair bit of back and forth, I just put all my stuff on a Blogger account I've had for years.

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

#114
I 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.

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

#115
post #51

You 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 happ…

What is your blog? I love reading blogs that exist just for the sake of it.

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

#116
post #106
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hand…

The only thing you’re saying with “certainty” is that you personally cannot learn only from video. Anything else is pure hubris.

I’ll say this with certainty, video is terrible reference material.

Talk me through something the first time, sure, but if I need to look something up (yes, I know asking an LLM is available) I want a comprehensive subject guide, mostly in text, searchable by actual keywords.

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

#119
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What 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.

I don't think that was it. Slashdot would only run stories from their 'content partners' like ZDNet and the Register, so they were always 2 days behind Reddit/HN/Twitter/etc. (When RMS was 'cancelled', that would have been a huge deal there in the old days, they had one post days later.) Also Digg wasn't just a graphical redesign, they changed how the site worked. I don't think Slashdot ever did that.

RMS wasn't "cancelled" (a reminder that "canceling" and "canceled" is a snarl word.)

His decades of incredibly shitty behavior came to be more public knowledge as both men and women in CS realized the behavior they'd witnessed wasn't some outlier once a few women who were well-known came forward and disclosed his behavior.

What brought it all to bear was him repeatedly, on a technical mailing lists, defending sex with underage girls, which in turn led people to actually go looking through material on his own site where he pontificated that sex with anyone over 14 should be legal, or even younger. These are his exact own words:

"I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.)"

"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."

Add onto that decades of stories of creepy, manipulating, harassing behavior toward girls/women as well as incredibly sexist comments about women's technical abilities...among a lot of other really anti-social behavior, like an apparent refusal to bathe...while expecting anyone who hosts him to read a 40 page long missive about exactly how treat him.

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

#120

I'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.

Substack does support rss, though they don't link it anywhere. Just add /feed on the end of the url.
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