Premature Blogging Death Notice
onemanandhisblog.com
onemanandhisblog.com
Why do we need an "audience"? Many of the most honest and interesting contemporaneous writing in human history was written as private memoirs or journals, and blogging originated out of journaling. There's never been a need for an audience to derive value from writing, and that hasn't changed, we've just accepted the bargain social media has tempted us with to "make us famous" off of feeding their user-generated content machine. Being famous was never the goal of starting a blog, and it shouldn't surprise anyone that many many people continue to blog without any desire to be made famous.
It's not a requirement, especially for those like you. But most people write with the hope that people read their writing. We can debate the importance of this but can't deny the motivation of why people write.
If you don't care about an audience, why spend the effort to maintain an online presence that requires time and money?
1. The cost is minimal ($5/mo)
2. The time is roughly the same as not putting it online, as the time consuming activity is the writing itself.
3. Putting it online makes it easier for me to access my own writings from anywhere when I need to jog my memory.
I've literally pulled out my phone and went to one of my blog posts to share an embedded photo of something with someone in person while telling the story I shared on the post in a social gathering, much the same way others will use google on their phone to do similar.
4. Putting it online makes it possible for others to access it. I don't /need/ an audience, but I also think that "sharing is caring" and that sharing my thoughts, experiences, and knowledge online allows for the Internet to grow as a repository of human knowledge in some small way further enhancing the world.
On the one hand, it's unreasonable to expect that you will have thousands of visitors every day to your blog. Some may get that, but most never will.
On the other hand, it's nice to get visitors that can pass the Voight-Kampff test. Googlebot, Bingbot, Yandexbot and that lot are cool and all, but it's somewhat discouraging when they are your only readership. I get writing for yourself is a thing, but then you might as well not put it online. The greatest part of the blogosphere is the exchange of ideas, the dialogue.
There is a serious discoverability problem in personal websites in general. Search engines and algorithmic content aggregators are part of the problem, but I think an understated part is that we've stopped linking to other websites.
It's like people think they need to trap the visitor on their site by having no exits and only promoting their own stuff. Feeling trapped is not a good feeling. What is a good feeling is discovering something cool, the experience of exploration feels good. We should treat our visitors to that.
Blog rolls, link lists, whatever you want to call it, they help your readers find more cool websites. That helps the blogosphere/indieweb/personal website-space in general. It also helps search engines find those websites and understand their importance better.
Linking is free, it's not a marriage proposal either. You can just link to something that you liked, because you liked it.
It used to be that it was good advice to avoid linking out because it could very easily affect ranking negatively, or at least give competitors (either real or imaginary) an advantage.
... and the advice was also that if you did link you should add sone attribute to tell Google you didn't endorse the site. This was a good idea for comment fields but I think it became more of a general gospel in SEO circles.
Personally I don't care about Google anymore. I link to whatever I want. Wish more people would do the same instead of "building an audience".
I still (fitfully) maintain a personal blog that's also an index to my podcasts but most of my professional blogging/writing these days goes to a variety of established sites.
Some people hope to actually make a living with their writing. Some are..look at all the people with 1000s of subs on Substack.
How can insights be useful to others if no one sees them. That is the whole point of having an audience.
Your point ignores what the poster says and then doubles down on "audience". People setting out purely to "make money" often focus heavily on "building an audience" rather than "crafting content for an audience". There is a very subtle difference which results in them burning out before they hit critical mass, or strong competition from people who are ostensibly just writing for fun.
The point of writing down your insights, even with only a minimal audience, is that you capture and refine them. They may be worth much more to an individual in a consulting reference than as Substack subs. The context always matters though, but not everyone can have 1000s of subs on Substack or whatever replaces it.
The issue is not just burnout. It's that an emphasis on pageviews can (though doesn't necessarily) lead to crafting content that attracts clicks and engagement rather than content that actually benefits a potential audience (and yourself).
It's not binary of course. Headline writers have been crafting titles that entice readers to read the rest of the text before there were clicks. But it's certainly more prevalent on the web.
So going back to that certainly would not (by itself) mean the death of blogging.
I’ve been doing it since the last century. In fact, my personal site[0] is stale as hell, and still has the original table-based layout that was considered “cutting edge,” back then.
I’ve never really given a damn whether or not anyone reads my stuff.
This is where I tend to dump my thoughts, these days[1].
It was not a reverse-chronological list of posts that we see in typical blogs today. Instead it was a loose collection of webpages with thoughts that I cared to jot down and share with others. Yes, it used table-based layout too! And then later I overzealously overengineered it with ASP-based dynamic pages.
I have now lost that original ASP code. But I still have some of its content and maintain it in blog format[1]. I take quick notes and share quick tidbits here. It now uses CSS and is statically generated with a simple Common Lisp program.
I agree about the audience factor. It's kind of funny to receive emailed tips from readers who describe themselves as an obvious target audience, and therefore the following changes should be made to the blog... :-)
And some of those posts then start bringing in organic traffic. Who would have thought that so many people have trouble with vmmem on Windows? Or that so many people want to bridge networks with a Synology device?
And I've lost count how many times I searched on my own blog for a solution to a problem I had :))
Sure, blogging still exists... but blogging was the "thing" for a while, and now it's not the "thing." Even with any sort of revival, everyone already knows what it is, so it will never hit a peak with the same energy. No one's going to explain what blogging is during prime time on CNN.
Blogging is dead. Just like punk and disco are dead. They peaked and were co-opted by corporate interests to make profit (and that peaked too). "Real" blogging still exists, but relatively speaking, no one cares (and that's ok).
I think the main irritation from the side that's tired of premature "X is dead" posts is that one feels that voicing such things hastens its true death. "X isn't dead" posts are to counterbalance.
I don't know what the prevalent interpretation of "is dead" is, but I would consider it to be when something can't easily be found in existence. I don't think things are dead simply because they're no longer on CNN.
If we're to keep the metaphor, blogging is no longer in its prime years. It's more like in its middle-age, and being middle-aged is not being dead.
Ah, that's the key issue.
As long as whoever is doing it is continuing, it's still alive. The key lesson of the Internet, learned from the punks, is reified in Rule 34: You're Not The Only One. There are an infinite number of long tails.
Can you make infinitely scalable money at it? If that's the only thing that concerns you, no. Go away. Every community is better off without you.
If you love it, can you make some money at it? Maybe, but you're likely to love it less if it becomes your livelihood.
Other than that, yes, the original R34 version applies somewhere in the abyss.
Because the blogging ecosystem now is nothing like what it was 10-15 years ago. It's significantly more difficult to find and maintain an audience.
The main ways a reader can find your blog:
1. aggregator or news site like HN links to it
2. arrives via search engine
3. is a regular reader via subscription or syndication
4. social media
#3 and #4 have changed profoundly since blogging's heyday. Social media sites work hard to keep you in their walled garden, and RSS readers just aren't used as much as they once were.
As the article points out, newsletters are alive and well because email is a clever workaround for the issues noted above.
if people are not compelled enough by your content to want to share it, your blogging 'career' is DOA
IIRC that was more or less the genesis for Something Awful and The Best Page in the Universe, but it does kind of feel like now there's only like a dozen sites I ever go on now. Reddit has more or less subsumed forums, Medium (and a few competitors) has more or less subsumed blogging, YouTube has more or less subsumed any other video host, etc.
I do think that overall it's better; even if there's less diversity in sites, these sites do make it easier for the non-technical person to share their opinions, so you could argue there's an increased diversity of thought, and I do think people view the late 90's internet with rose-colored glasses, but I still kind of miss it.
"Died off" simply means the author doesn't use it. RSS and Firefox are widely reported as dead, and surely buried somewhere near the BSDs.
When you change the people around you to be more like you, those who differ no longer exist. So any voice that disagrees can not be human like you. This is the power of social media. Not a reaper of stale software and stuffy practices, but a surgical scythe on the user's sympathy for others.
It's only true insofar as the timeline being examined starts at the peak of the consumer camera frenzy. But well before a large chunk of consumers had point-and-shoot cameras, amateur photography was very much a thing. And still is.
Blogging existed well before social networks, going by its earlier name of "weblog" or even "home page". There was a frenzy where many people started blogging on tools like blogger, blogspot, wordpress, etc; and then many eventually switched to forms of self expression that had more gratifying feedback loops. But the characteristics of the original demographic of bloggers haven't changed and many quality blogs still exist (with new ones springing up) where there is a motivation to communicate in long(er) form and focus on substance, not so much community building or gratification.
I am not an native English-speaker, so forgive my spelling error :)
I write for remembering I have freedom of speech in my Country ([3]) , for notes for me and my coworker (a "knowledgebase").
Last but not least I have integrated google translate in hope to be kindly people with other languages.
So I hope blogging is not dead, I still write and I will write for the next 20 years at least.
[1]: http://gioorgi.com
The death is in communication and engagement (not the growth hacker kind, the human kind) amongst writers and readers. I don’t think most people are looking for a huge audience, but even a small number of people who regularly read and give the author some kind of feedback is a big incentive.
These days there is so so much noise, comment sections are dead due to SEO/spam, and it’s easy to feel like you’re just shouting into the ether without any hope of human connect across any amount of space or time.
Also, there are a lot of static site generators now. Jekyll, Hugo and Pelican are some of the ones that comes to my mind now. They are making blogging more accessible IMO.
Ironically enough, I started blogging a couple of years ago because of social media. I found that social media is not a place for having/sharing concise and thought through ideas or conversations. It is a place to share instantaneous thoughts which are mostly emotionally charged and therefore could be emotionally taxing or unproductive.
But having a blog let's me share my thoughts in a better way instead of a tweet for example. And the audience seems to be much better than in a social media too.
It is like in a way yelling my thoughts from the top of a mountain. There is a chance that someone could hear it, but that is not why you are there, yelling, in the first place.
...Also to occupy my lil corner in the world wide web too!
* decentralized
* robust
* standards based (HTML, RSS)
* allows freedom to innovate
* some robust OSS options available with different tradeoffs
* built-in distribution mechanism (URL, sharing on social platforms, SEO)
But there are a lot of strengths.
I've seen a few bloggers doing 'sponsored posts' where they ask companies if they'd like an article discussing the company's product(s).
(There is a dark side to that too. Some posts don't declare they're sponsored and are secretly astroturfing/shilling products, so keep that in mind).
There is also affiliate marketing which has been a staple for many bloggers even since the early days. Check out Commission Junction.
ADDED: To be clear, I don't find anything wrong with some incidental affiliate links for things you like or doing reviews/write-ups of items you're given for free--so long as your reviews are honest and the fact that you received the item for free is disclosed. And nothing wrong with Patreon links either. My objection is to plastering ads all over the place and coloring your writing.
Talk to the folks who write books (I have). Money is nice, but it is secondary to a whole host of other benefits:
* expertise gained
* credentialing
* an accomplishment they can point to
* reachWish I could upvote this 10x.
Folks, if you are thinking about writing a book and have done anything else difficult (marathon, big peak, startup, having kids, thesis, etc), you can do it! It's a matter of discipline and time.
Now, whether the book will be a big seller or not... The answer is probably not. But, as I mention above, you'll learn a lot and as @ghaff mentions, it will be professionally impressive.
Of course most people are going to flock to the easy route. That doesn't mean that old route ceases to function. The frequency of the old use may go down. And maybe it will go to zero - at which point one could argue death. But it's not really dead until it's no longer possible. And while social media might suck a lot of air out of the room, no one has taken it all yet.
Yeah, it's dead.
And the other missing piece, IMO, something which makes blogging cool again. :)