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Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

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31–40 of 72 posts

Re: Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

#31

I second the sentiment expressed. I used to blog often and cross post on Medium and Twitter. At peak, every third post I wrote went viral. But then I stopped because I had no return from it. I recently started writing on my blog again: https://shivekkhurana.com The main reason was to get back into the habit of writing, and by extension thinking. ChatGPT has weakened my thinking capacity.

What kind of return were you expecting? Exposure? Ad revenue? VIsibility? Those are not good reasons to maintain a blog… not today anyway.

Re: Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

#32

I do hope indie blogging makes a comeback. When the only objective of the post is for the author to ‘scream into the void’, it’s refreshing in this day and age.

As someone who’s been writing online for almost three decades, I don’t think blogs ever went away—they just became a smaller percentage of the overall Internet.

Re: Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

#33
I don’t relate to this that much. Of course the AI crawlers have come in hard, but at least https://taoofmac.com still gets a very large amount of human visitors (either organicallly or return visits, plus RSS).

I think the real issue is that people now consume much more than they contribute or comment (even if I did get rid of comments years ago due to automated spam, I do get one or two e-mails a week plus a bit of feedback on social networks). And, of course, people have unrealistic expectations about publishing online making you more visible/reachable (there is just too much out there).

Re: Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

#34
post #25

There are two issues: - Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed. - Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there. - Static site blogs also don't usually let people "subscribe" by emai…

The counterpoint is that not having the ability to comment means that the author avoids the anxiety of not having anyone comment on their blog. Or worse still, having to filter out the negative comments. No comments are normal if no one can comment. Personally I've learnt that anxiety removal leads to a healthy life.

I removed comments not due to anxiety but to the drudgery of having to deal with ever more creative ways of spamming.

Re: Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

#35

I gave up on reaching anyone. Now I blog for myself alone. My blog serves only 1 real purpose, which is to build and host my resume, but I enjoy writing anyways.

Recently I was complaining to a friend that this does not work like this any more. 10 years ago, yes but at least in my experience the personal touch seems to have lost value.

I to still do blog because it's good to write. Who knows, someone might benefit from it.

Re: Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

#36
post #7

I too have been throwing messages in bottles into a silent sea for a pretty long time, but I think I'm okay with that. It doesn't help if you also have difficulty adhering to quintessential blog SEO best practices. 1. Consistent theme - A diverse set of interests and a lethal dose of ADD make this virtually impossible 2. Consistent updates - My articles tend to be rather unusual, and I'll often combine them with cust…

Wow, thanks for link to Paged Out. Any ideas how to discover any more tech focused zines? We have a zine culture in UK but afaik it’s more culture / music focused (v happy to be wrong here)

Re: Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

#37
Having a lot to deal with is same as having nothing. Having 10,000 applicants for a job is same as not having any, if a human need to process all of them.

Human attention and processing breaks down. Filters will be used, to cut the volume down to human levels. Automation becomes an indispensable layer between human-to-human interactions. Humans become cells served by the filtered feeds from automation, with no direct to other humans.

Re: Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

#38
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterpoint is that not having the ability to comment means that the author avoids the anxiety of not having anyone comment on their blog. Or worse still, having to filter out the negative comments. No comments are normal if no one can comment. Personally I've learnt that anxiety removal leads to a healthy life.

I removed comments not due to anxiety but to the drudgery of having to deal with ever more creative ways of spamming.

There are also tools like giscus[1] which allow comments on static pages but only for folks logged in on third party services - such as github in the case of giscus.

[1]: https://giscus.app/

Re: Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

#39
post #9

Speaking about blogging, for those who run on WordPress at least, do you get lots of bot traffic from China and Singapore recently? They usually appear in pair. ( https://support.google.com/analytics/thread/378622882/google... ) I have two niche blogs( civilwhiz.com and mes100.com). Those bot traffics increase my visitor count in Google analytics by more than 100%. It's super annoying when the analytics are distorted…

I've been getting Singapore traffic like crazy

Same. Not Wordpress, but Cloudflare tells me my main traffic (by far) is from Singapore and the US, and in numbers that are clearly bots.

Re: Blogging in 2025: Screaming into the Void

#40
Like many here, I too blog for the mental exercise of composing, the human desire to express, and a faith that posting to the public web is some how intrinsically worthy. On the first point I've found I get a lot of benefit from the posts I never even publish as I'll keep chewing over subjects which I'm mentally composing a post about and gain a lot of personal clarity in the process.

One thing I've wondered though (and am mentally composing a post about) is whether there's more good in ai digesting ones writing that we might first feel.

Here's a thought experiment: Would you feel good if someone read your blog and learned something from it? Probably yes. Would you feel good if they passed along something they learned to others, likely in their own words? Probably yes. What if they couldn't recall, or didn't choose to reference where they saw it? Probably still yes, although (speaking personally) my ego would probably prefer they did credit. What if the reader who passed the learning along was the ai?

In a sense we're still contributing to the public discourse and culture when we write, just mediated by models. If a model gives someone a slightly different answer in part because of something you wrote, you've still had an impact on the ultimate human reader.

Just to lay my cards on the table I'm no AI booster, nor doomer. In general I think it's over hyped and may well have a net negative effect if steered by those current at the wheel and consumed without due care, but it has its place where it can be useful.

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