171–180 of 191 posts
In the age of AI, interchangeable content farms that earn pennies by filling 80% of the screen with ads are dead. In fact, the user hostility of those "blogs" is what pushes people even further towards AI interfaces that output what matters up top and (for now) without ads.
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.
This isn't about blogging per se. Its about commercial product-to-market fit. That market now favors short centralized video content.
This is in the article.
> one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“ I would date the Great Blogging Collapse to the arrival of this idea, not whatever happened a decade later.
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 wr…
I think you could argue that this is following the same trend as forums (and usenet before that). You get a consolidation of where people go to read up on things that interest them. Look at Slashdot for example, it was once so popular that any site it linked to could be "slashdotted" from all the traffic. Now people go elsewhere. YouTube, TikTok, Reddit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wi…
Tl;dr: different races have different fertility peak ages.
I consider blogging to be similar to the music industry. To me if AI fully takes over the music industry, I don't see it as a bad thing because I don't think there is a shortage of music in the first place. You could literally listen to a different song from a different artist for the rest of your life. The industry is saturated. In 2020, I was getting an insane amount of visitors from Google on my blog. Today, Googl…
Nope, sorry. As someone who cares about music, there may be a superabundance of adequate, filler-level stuff which AI can adequately substitute for. But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff. There's only one Stevie Wonder, and only a handful of great albums of his. There have been similarly valuable talents since, across different styles and genres. The industry is satura…
This finite amount is still enormous. I have downloaded many gigabytes of music from rutracker, and I don't think I'll get through it by the day I'm dead.
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Audio is just easier to multitask with than reading.
Audio may feel easier to multitask with, but how much do you actually retain?
Like "crime and punishment".
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…
Well, when the question is "why did the blogs go away" the answer might be difficult to investigate by only considering a narrow slice of the potential audience for said blogs.