If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

I think news aggregators are more responsible for a changed blogging culture than Google with its search results and Reader killing.

I think the primary discovery mechanism should be blogrolls but few blogs have that today. My website does not have one either. Why? Because I don't follow my feed reader that deeply anymore. Instead I rely on Hacker News and other aggregators. The advantage of aggregators are that a human filter further reduces the noise.

A secondary mechanism should be links in articles. This requires articles to be comments on other articles. However, commenting mostly happens on the aggregators these days. When did you see a blog post which was a response to another blog post?

A healthy blogging culture requires a web of relationships between bloggers. Unfortunately, these relationships are mostly replaced by more efficient aggregator platforms.

In some sense blogging is dead: I see no discussions between bloggers anymore. On the other hand blogging is still alive: Lots of people write blogs but the intended audience is usually an anonymous community of aggregator commentators.

In short: Discussions do not happen in the blogosphere anymore but on aggregators and thus the relations between blogs have nearly disappeared.

Update: After writing this comment, I felt bad about not having a blogroll. Fixed that: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/blogs_en.html

Twitter is the best because it's about the individual , not the groupthink. Most aggregators fail hard because groupthink destroys them, but on twitter you can follow individuals and ignore everyone else. You are not forced to follow trends (like in most aggregators, even here) , and you can even follow people banished from most aggregators (e.g. Trump)

Blog never went away. There are plenty of it, and very good one.

Just like there is still good music today.

The problem is discovering it.

Before internet became a medium for mass sharing pictures of inspiration quotes and kitten, blogs had a change to stand out.

Now, theyr are completly dwarfed by other usages, and most users don't find it a popular format anyway. Search engine rarely put them in top of search results either, because they rarely quickly answer and direct question or provide the popular untertainment du jour.

So if you want to help bring blog back, you gotta find a way to make them more visible, and get people interested in them.

Good luck with that. Videos store instantly became more popular than libraries IRL, and I don't see a reason why suddenly blogs would win against Youtube. Same with equivalent to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

They haven't gone anywhere. And the small ones are just as hard to find as before.

Furthermore, most people choose to "blog" on the major platforms, probably because it's easier and they don't care about ownership of content or monetisation or anything.

Sad imo, but it's just a reflection of how the majority thinks.

Very curious to hear – how do people actually discover blogs?

A friend and I have a blog based upon our experiences scaling product/engineering at a startup (we've been fortunate enough to see several growth stages over ~8 years). But it's challenging to get in front of readers who might be interested, outside of places like HN or Reddit.

When I look at the blogs that I read regularly myself, it tends to be a small subset of names that I've collected over the years from Hacker News, Quora, and friends sharing articles. I'd like to find more but don't really know the best place to start. I'm sure that there's tons of content that I would really enjoy but discovery is difficult.