The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs? • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by vivzkestrel » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:17 PM UTC

- let me tell you my problem on HN

- my life is too short

- far too many of you write blogs

- i dont have the luxury to sit and read every single post of every single blog in here

- at the same time i have a fear of missing out

- most blogs have 1 or 2 good articles but rest are either something I am not interested in or mediocre at best

- i have been thinking for a while on how to solve this problem because i have 10000 bookmarks on my bookmark list and it grows every single day

- perhaps one way is to ask the person to define a set of criteria as to what makes a post worth reading and have an LLM run that criteria on every single blog post of every single blog ever made

- for example, a criterion could look like this

- "find me any blog with aricles atleast 2000 words in length on python revolving around any python topic but give higher weightage to performance optimization, benchmarks, data science related libraries like pandas, polars, with atleast 4 code snippets, by an author who posts atleast once a month and has written atleast 2 articles in the last 2 years and has linked a github repo to code samples and uses interactive css animations to explain their ideas"

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

#162

Post by QQ00 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:25 PM UTC

unsungNovelty wrote: post #135

Most of the type of blogs this article talks about is exactly what I would ignore. Looks more like Google stopped playing the SEO game and is looking for authentic content. Or atleast is cutting down the noise for whatever reason.

My conclusion was the same. So many blogs hyperoptimize for SEO but 1 change from ranking algorithm decimated them all.

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

#163

Post by paulryanrogers » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #26

paulryanrogers wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now How many though? I get the impression it's really just a very small subset at the top, with a very long tail making almost nothing.

Isn't that basically the story of 99.9% of any sort of Internet publisher, e.g. I imagine the same dynamics apply to YouTube or Twitch. It's a fundamental feature of the "winner takes all" economics of the Internet.

OK then it's not really 'easy' nor that different from "5 years ago"

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

#164

Post by AlienRobot » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:44 PM UTC

heavenlyblue wrote: post #157

realityfactchex wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. It does not require a "service" to consume multiple blogs efficiently, just simply "software" (an app will do). The below RSS readers pretty much do their job and get out of the user's way. What's amazing is the sheer number of RSS readers that people choose to use; there are so many, people find ones that they personally like. On desktop: Vienna https://www.vienna-rss.com/ On iOS: R2SReader https://apps.app…

None of that matters since instagram has more users etc. Jesus, the question is "why blogs disappear" - they disappear because users don't care about the value proposition of your RSS app. Most of them are quite shit anyway - little commonality in terms of styling etc.

That's a completely different demand.

The question was "How would I, without any special services, consume multiple blogs today?"

You can do that with RSS.

Now you are saying it doesn't matter because everyone is on Instagram. So you aren't consuming "multiple blogs" in the first place, you're just consuming multiple Instagram accounts.

Keep in mind that nothing stops Instagram from providing RSS feeds for each user account.

You could literally just tell people to stop using Instagram and use Tumblr instead and the problem would solve itself. Tumblr hosts photos, photos albums, and videos, including blogs of several photographers. Tumblr has RSS feeds for each blog. You don't need to have a Tumblr account to follow blogs on Tumblr, you can just put them all into your RSS app and be done. You don't even need a separate RSS app. Vivaldi, a web browser, has an RSS client built-in.

Reddit has RSS feeds. Youtube has RSS feeds. Wordpress has RSS feeds (this is 50% of blogs, essentially). Mastodon has RSS feeds. Bluesky has RSS feeds.

There is nothing that we can do if people deliberately choose to go into a walled garden, but the open gardens still existand you have the full ability to use those instead.

Maybe if more people understood the value proposition of RSS's, they would have more reason to stop using Instagram and move.

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

#165

Post by Hard_Space » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

Tomte wrote: post #150

Hard_Space wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, LLMs certainly learned these tropes somewhere. I'm just surprised that different models and different pre-processing methods arrived at the same dominant cliches.

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

#166

Post by 6510 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 9:15 PM UTC

smitty1e wrote: post #122

6510 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog search was good, Technorati was good, google reader was good. But I agree, if it doesn't have a blogroll it is safe to ignore the blog. It might even be considered the single identifier that separates the blogs from the spam.

I went with feedly whe Google reader died.

I wrote my own but for most people feeds just ended with google reader.

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

#167

Post by brigandish » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 1:49 AM UTC

watwut wrote: post #137

jefftk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You sign to blog you know exist from elsewhere. And primary elsewhere was google search. The fact that now only substack blogs survived is result of the exact process I am talking about - search engine not returning smaller platforms and those blogs dying. AI is just another step in that process.

> You sign to blog you know exist from elsewhere. And primary elsewhere was google search.

I'm going to guess that means "the blogs you know, you primarily found from Google searches"?

Most of the substacks I follow are because I encountered the author's thoughts on X or forums like this one. I don't know if anyone else is like that but I'm also not sure why you're generalising, seemingly quite hastily.

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

#168

Post by smitty1e » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 2:35 AM UTC

6510 wrote: post #166

smitty1e wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went with feedly whe Google reader died.

I wrote my own but for most people feeds just ended with google reader.

Really? One more way in which I'm just not a representative sample, I suppose.

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

#169

Post by sorcererxw » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 7:32 AM UTC

vivzkestrel wrote: post #161

- let me tell you my problem on HN - my life is too short - far too many of you write blogs - i dont have the luxury to sit and read every single post of every single blog in here - at the same time i have a fear of missing out - most blogs have 1 or 2 good articles but rest are either something I am not interested in or mediocre at best - i have been thinking for a while on how to solve this problem because i have 1…

[flagged]

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

#170

Post by nicbou » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 9:05 AM UTC

This is happening to my website. It is locally famous and beloved. I do not sell nonsense or pester users and every wrote is written by a human. Now traffic is down 75% from two years ago. LLMs and AI overviews are wrecking me.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai