What happened to blogs

The author's SEO diagnosis is correct: the bulk of HN traffic is blogs, but they are almost never on the first page of Google results for the relevant terms. Still, they're there. They're also propping up LLM training datasets - high-quality content regurgitated without attribution whenever you ask ChatGPT a niche question.

But then, this is more or less a product of our behaviors and preferences. We bemoan the loss of blogs, but what have we done to support or promote old-school content creators? And how often do we reward memes and clickbait?

Why do so many data sci/ML engineers use medium? It’s the biggest piece of shit blog platform on the face of the earth.

Blogs cost a large deal of time and effort. The reward used to be a decent amount of traction. These views, engagement created motivation and also would inspire others to hop on.

Since things were new, attention was more distributed, even if some blogs recieved a lot of views. It wasn't so overwhelming like today, where the top recieved virtually everything.

Because of this attention economy, now there's so many other things to do. Both for the blog writer and potential readers. With the little time people have, they'd rather be reading pgs blog like some random smuck like myself. This isn't only for blogs, it's also true of movies, people would rather watch the big ones than small or mid movies.

To write a blog, to spend so much time and effort. To pour one's soul out and have ZERO reads is brutal. Yet, a tiktok of someone farting will gain infinitely more attention than the blog article. Its not very motivatial to continue in this climate.

2. Platforms. Because of SEO, Google, and the corporate takeover of the internet, the quality of available blogging platforms for most people have declined. Blogger died, Wordpress's new interface is horrible (although the self-hosted one is good for blogging).

3. Social media. Social media exists because technology has isolated us and it provides a superficial substitute to socialization that blogs did not provide. The lack of genuine human connections amongst most people has been exacerbated due to technology and the internet and social media, as horrible as it is, has become the only possible replacement

4. The internet no longer exists to share ideas. Although it can and is used for that purpose, the pathological nature of human interaction and loneliness as discussed in #3 means that most content creation these days is actually about creating platforms for people to talk about themselves. In other words, people on the internet only want to talk about themselves, rather than share ideas which is more in line with blogs.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

The question is how do you find interesting blog in 4000 of blogs?

Some blogs are not tagged, but they are also easily found by searching 'personal site' or 'personal website' or 'personal blog'.

The blogs exist, but google has no monetary incentive to show them to you, when it can show you content farms with ads.

Google is (IMHO rightfully) giving the former a good position because it's a useful resource. However I don't think that the latter ranks at all for how-to-fix-specific-issue queries. At least, I never find other people's blogs when I look up my issues.

Google straight up stopped indexing and surfacing small personal websites. Marginalia searches highlight just how much is missing. An entire segment of the online world is as good as cut off. The most notable absentees are all the forums and the answers they contain. It's just reddit now.

I guess the only way to know about a quality blog now is being an old timer who knows the blog address from memory and grew along the blog writer. Plus fingers crossed that the blog writer didn't abandon it or realized raw, unfiltered content doesn't put a bread on the table but "10 Ways to Boost Your Productivity" does.

An example of old timer, in Romanian. Content is so good that corporate VPN refuses to allow access due to "sensitive or offensive content". Yeah, not your usual "How to Retire Early in Six Steps": https://www.piticigratis.com/

One of the latest posts is about the "pride" march in Bucharest which somehow became a pro-Palestine exhibition. Not only supporting terrorism but completely irrationally, supporting a bunch of people who would behead and defenestrate the very "proud" people so heartwarmingly supporting them.

Of the consistent crowd that frequents Hacker News, I'm sure at least a few know about such blogs. I wouldn't mind finding about them even in national languages other than English. For German, French and Italian I can mostly read them directly, for the others' there's Google Translate.

> Remember when blogs were raw, unfiltered windows into someone’s mind?

what actually comes to mind are the blogs that were, in essence, public diaries written by entirely ordinary people. These weren't topic-focused tech blogs about running a startup or hacking with Python, but were, well, diaries; and some of them were fascinating insights into how people lived their lives, warts and all. Blogger hosted a lot of these blogs at one time (and likely still does, since somehow this is a project Google has yet to ship to its graveyard), and the header of the base template most people used had a button you could click on to send you on to another random blog.

Unlike the topical blogs, these diary blogs essentially no longer exist. I suspect that one major reason for their demise -- other than the fact that the world has moved on, as it does -- is the transition of the bulk of people's computing from desktops/laptops to phones. It's just too difficult to put out long-form text of any sort on a mobile device.

They don’t have to be. I’ve started compiling blogs I like into a huge RSS feed. It’s like a Twitter feed but theres no algorithm trying to bait me into engagement. If I’m no longer interested, I just unsubscribe.

The people you are telling to write like a human are not blogging. This is known as barking up the wrong tree.

blog != blog

https://bearblog.dev/discover

Blogs "died" because decentralization is inefficient, even though decentralization has some nice properties. (And blogs aren't dead, they still exist. Just with very little traffic and engagement, relatively speaking)

Blog was, is, the easiest way to showcase your skills and capabilities.

I'm unable to count how many times total strangers suddenly contacted me and proposes collaboration, projects, job, etc

That's why after 23 years, I'm still blogging.