Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

danielstanica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 191 posts

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

#81

Post by TFNA »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #52
esafak wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an interesting case study. Most designers would not think that they can tank a site.

One of the smartest things reddit ever did was ensure old.reddit.com remains fully functional. I imagine one day they'll EOL it, and when they do I'll no longer be a reddit user (probably not really a bad thing).

Even if Old Reddit still exists, the vast majority of users are on New Reddit or the app on their phones. Those are designed to keep people endlessly scrolling, not sticking around in any one place and building community. Also, the phone as default device has reduced comments to 140-character quips, and one looks like a real weirdo now if one writes a solid paragraph or two like in the old days.

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

#82

Post by loloquwowndueo »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #65
Loic wrote: post #51

You know what? I cannot care less if people are not reading blogs anymore. I reactivated my blog because it is a lot of fun to write, a lot of fun to take the time to put down my ideas, try to correctly formulate them, fighting with my crappy English or German (and the loss of my French). So, you can move on, you can go fully away from the blogosphere (it was a word, 20 years ago), this will not change that I am happ…

I think it is very good and healthy to not care too much about readership numbers, but you seem pretty high on your pedestal here - you still publish it to the public, you still seek an audience. If you’re doing it just for you, then why are you hosting a blog For the world to see? Surely there is some part of you that wants people to read it, otherwise you wouldn’t, right?

Dunno man, sometimes I blog stuff I want to remember (how to do task X or Y, some arcane ffmpeg incantation, recipes, etc) and when I need it, it’s easier to find it in my public blog which is accessible from anywhere, vs. it being a file buried in some computer I have to sit in front of, or somewhere in a shared drive I have to authenticate to, etc.

For some things there is value in them being publicly accessible even if nobody but me cares or uses them.

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

#83

Post by mananaysiempre »

alephnerd wrote: post #62
zerobees wrote: post #27

I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn? Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashi…

> 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 disdain for what most people end up doing by default, for what’s normal, etc., is absolutely instrumental to not having that happen to you.

(For what little it’s worth, and in the spirit of aforementioned curiosity: nausea gives you ad nauseam; with some caveats, a Latin noun in the singular governed by the preposition ad gets the ending -m while retaining the final vowel of its stem.)

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

#84

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

graemep wrote: post #61
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #36

Given the topic of the article, it is deeply ironic that one of the sites whose traffic cratered 99% was "Adam Enfroy teaches how to grow successful blogs with AI". Apparently not. I say this not just to be snarky (OK, maybe a little bit), but a lot of the content on these blogs was just bad, e.g. hawking get rich quick schemes where the author obviously was giving bad advice.

The articles does say > The blog-as-a-business model, involving publishing, ranking, monetizing clicks, and repeating the cycle, is dead. Not dying but dead It is about a particular type of directly profit making blog business model: > The recipe was pretty straightforward: publish helpful content, rank it on Google, and monetize that traffic with affiliate marketing and ads.

Understood, I think the ironic part is the adamenfroy.com site appears to have pivoted from "make money with the blog-as-business model" to "scale your business with AI" (whatever that means), i.e. chasing the latest buzzword.

All of these "paid short courses so you can make tons of passive income", which were a sizable number of the blogs on this article's list, are invariably pyramid/grifter scams, whether it's Trump University, "learn Amazon drop shipping", "real estate investing", yada yada. The course proprietor makes a lost more money than any of their clients ever do.

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

#85

Post by TFNA »

paulpauper wrote: post #10

Blogging as medium is thriving despite AI and LLMs. It has moved to Substack + Twitter and newsletters, and away from Google and Facebook as a source of traffic generation. Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now, and also combined with Twitter monetization. This didn't exist 5 years ago. There are way more blogs now compared to 2013, and much longer and technically proficient writing compared to the…

Substack blogging is very different from old-school blogging. The Substack culture puts much more emphasis on writing daily in order to maintain engagement, and to closely target those daily posts to a market that will open its wallets. And not necessarily because that market is being well informed but because it finds cultural validation in the writer's views. The result is that a lot of successful Substack bloggers are essentially repeating the same basic talking points again and again, never saying anything really new or substantial.

Ever talk to a YouTuber who started out hoping to share detailed info on the things they were personally passionate about, but then felt pressure to tailor their stuff to the algorithm and water it down in order to maintain any audience at all? Substack is the same economy.

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

#86

Post by Zak »

zerobees wrote: post #27

I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn? Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashi…

The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text.

Video outcompeting text as a mainstream medium for both information and entertainment is as old as television. Youtube would be a more reliable way to make money than a blog in 2026 even if it was primarily consumed on TVs or PCs.

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

#87

Post by coldtea »

zerobees wrote: post #27

I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn? Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashi…

>I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn?

It's still interesting to see that "top 100" hugely succesful blogs can go so much down, even if it's "natural churn".

Then there's the fact that blogs in the "Top 100" are big business (money wise), often established for a decade or more, and have enough subscribers/viewers to spare. So unlikely to just be "dead" in n+5, just declining (which this tracks).

>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.

So? That's an explanation for the drop. The post tracks the drop itself.

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

#88

Post by bediger4000 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #69
alephnerd wrote: post #62

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…

Audio is just easier to multitask with than reading.

This appears to be true for a plurality, or maybe just barely a majority of people.

I don't find audio so easily multi-tasks, unless we're using different definitions. My example: I find it very difficult to do something described in an audio or video format - rewire a light switch, say. I find it way easier to have text with a diagram. I can stop and check the text at any time. I find it easier to go back to previous sentences, than to rewind an audio or video.

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

#89

Post by coldtea »

Zak wrote: post #86
zerobees wrote: post #27

I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn? Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashi…

The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text. Video outcompeting text as a mainstream medium for both information and entertainment is as old as television. Youtube would be a more reliable way to make money than a blog in 2026 even if it was primarily consumed on TVs or PCs.

>The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text.

Not as "fine working" as a book or a magazine or even a PC - not with 10 other districtions available in the form of different apps (and sending notifications), and not with that small of a screen.

Is that really controversial?

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

#90

Post by coldtea »

alephnerd wrote: post #62
zerobees wrote: post #27

I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn? Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashi…

> 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…

>TikTok, IG reels, YouTube shorts, longer form YouTube content, podcasts, television, etc all feel "easier" and more "natural" for the vast majority of people.

That's not exactly neutral though, but part of a larger theme of regression from literacy to a visual and oral culture (and a dopamine seeking junky one).

Post reply on HN