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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?

#141

Post by faangguyindia »

pona-a wrote: post #100
TFNA wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hand…

Illusion of learning is more important than actually learning stuff to many.

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

#142

Post by jillesvangurp »

jefftk wrote: 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…

Substack, Medium, Tumblr, etc. absorbed a lot of the blogging crowd. And of course we have hordes of people throwing AI slop at each other on Linkedin. Tumblr and Medium are of course a bit past their prime at this point. That's what happens to VC funded companies after they fail to take over the world. Might happen to Substack as well.

Add to that Bluesky, Mastodon, X, Threads, etc. and you have a very fragmented space of people exchanging content at each other.

It's not so much that blogging is dead but that it got overtaken by other platforms that aren't necessarily much better. And the fragmentation hurts distribution. And commercialization, injects a lot of bad incentives into the whole space that rewards people that are mostly just very loud and uninteresting.

A lot of the blogging tools still work fine. It's not that hard to accumulate lists of interesting RSS feeds. Mastodon actually has RSS feeds, BTW. It can double as a blogging platform.

It's just that it all competes for attention and some people are a bit too loud. At this point, the signal to noise ratio is pretty terrible for an unfiltered list of blogs these days. That was fine when people moderated themselves. But now that they don't, it's hard to filter out all the noise. And the commercial algorithms don't help much as they tend to favor click bait rather than substance.

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

#143

Post by xp84 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #80
xp84 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comes off as pretty out of touch. Entry-level SE roles have been a bit rocky since about that time and of course fell off a cliff a year later, but more relevantly, that wasn’t simply career advice directed at people who already know how to code. 100k is a decent compensation level to be able to earn just by being interesting and writing. A lot of teachers make less than that despite the education needed. A majo…

My contention is not that 100k is low (it's a pretty great salary in most places). It's that 100 people total is a tiny number, and it's not like 100k is getting rich money - if only 100 people are earning that much, how little are the rest of them earning?

Fair, the flavor certainly changes if you suspect that it is close to the whole list of such bloggers, and it would seem kind of like lottery winners. I think it was likely meant to be understood as a small sample out of a much larger group of people.

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

#144

Post by krapp »

watwut wrote: post #138
krapp wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blogs will still exist. They will be more difficult to find, just as everything not LLM generated will be more difficult to find, and people will just have to accept that everything they put online will be added to the training data of countless LLMs. But that's already the case and it hasn't stopped people from creating things, including blogs, in spite of LLMs. It may be the case that they mostly wind up on federat…

Blogs are already dying and basically dont exist outside few platforms favored by search engines. People are way less likely tondo pointless thing. > People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that. People were not always writing blogs. Blogs existed when search engines returned personal long for writings. They were not a thing before and the culture atarted to die after g…

>People were not always writing blogs. Blogs existed when search engines returned personal long for writings. They were not a thing before and the culture atarted to die after google enshittified engine.

People weren't always writing blogs because the term and associated platforms hadn't always existed but people were always writing, often about themselves, and BBSs and personal websites served the purpose that blogs later would online.

Blogs and search engines happened to arrive on the web at almost the same time and evolved in parallel. The vast majority of early blogs were written without any visibility on search engines much less any viewers. It's difficult to imagine in the modern day but people used to do things because they wanted to, not to maximize commercial interest or fame. Search engines helped the popularity of blogs, but weren't the catalyst so much as the existence of services like Blogger and Livejournal. What killed blogs wasn't google but social media. But people kept writing on social media in much the same way that they did on blogs. The medium changed but the desire for self expression didn't. We just call blogs feeds now but it's more or less the same thing.

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

#148

Post by embedding-shape »

faangguyindia wrote: post #141
pona-a wrote: 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…

Illusion of learning is more important than actually learning stuff to many.

I prefer to separate it as "casual learning/curiosity" and "intentional learning" rather than something so crass. I'd admit to being an enjoyer of both, I have no dreams or illusions about me becoming civil engineer or city planner just because I like watching those sort of videos, even though they're informative as well as mostly just entertainment with unreliable narrators.

As long as you're conscious about what mode you're in (which to be fair, many probably aren't), I think it's fine.

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

#149

Post by embedding-shape »

cwmoore wrote: post #116
hluska wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think parent is trying to make the point that yes, for you video is a terrible reference material. For me too, but some people do keep links to videos and look up things that way, as surprising and counter-intuitive (to us) that may be.

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

#150

Post by Tomte »

Hard_Space wrote: post #102
singhrac wrote: post #34

This article was AI generated and a waste of time. So many obvious LLM patterns that I stopped reading 10% of the way down the page.

Yes, it was polluted with multiple 'Not just [x] but [y]' examples - the most obvious tell of AI-generated text, among other aggravating examples. It was hard to read, but I was interested enough in the subject to slog through it.

"A straightforward, honest, zealous officer doing his duty in the most laborious manner—that’s my style. No Frills. No fancy work. Just honest perspiration. Stolid and a bit stupid—that‘s my ticket."

Agatha Christie, 1936

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