Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.
I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.
And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.
Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.
That's been true of me. A paragraph or three that I would once have done as a blog now slip neatly and easily into social media of various sorts. Going to try to do something about that next year but this year ended up crazy for various reasons.
As one should. The rando who spams a discussion thread with an impenetrable wall of text is like that guy who uses their "question" at the end of an in-person panel discussion to ramble incoherently for three minutes. Yes, here we can scroll past it, but it's still presumptious and annoying. This is not primary content (that's at the top). Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point.
In a forum, the discussion IS primary content. That's the problem: Reddit has shifted away from being a discussion forum toward an endless-scroll content feed.
> Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point.
Kind of an odd turn of logic. If being a nobody devalues your anecdotes or tangents, then it equally devalues your point. If, conversely, your point can be valuable in and of itself, then your anecdotes and tangents can be valuable in and of themselves too.
> Yes, here we can scroll past it, but [...] This is not primary content (that's at the top).
Incidentally, you don't have to scroll past anything to reach the content at the top of the page. It's at the top of the page.
Persistent usernames enable history of community contribution and reception.
You also overlook the fact that many Reddit posts are not links to content. For example, they could be text-post questions posed to a community in order for the OP to receive guidance. This recent culture discouraging substantial discussion about things that are complex and can’t be abbreviated, makes the site less useful that way.
There are other ways to monetize, which doesn't depend on a lot of eyeballs. If you write high quality niche content and sell related products or services, then each eye ball can be worth a lot.
I've been thinking lately about still posting things to various places like here and Reddit but compiling them later on and posting them to my website (likely with a link to where I posted them originally). That seems like a good middle ground for me and would enable me to build up a decent resource for myself and others, if I'm up for cleaning up the texts to provide or remove context as necessary.
Much of this idea of mine is from a desire to archive and pull together more of the stuff I've put effort into that's spread all over the web.
I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not interested in promoting myself or my "brand" and I can't write about anything that someone else with much deeper expertise hasn't already written about.
If you feel the occasional urge to blog - maybe just be self indulgent about it? I get a strange sense of satisfaction from twiddling with the CSS on a rainy afternoon. Just my random 2p that nobody asked for :)
I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.
In fairness, I do think "side hustles" and the like have become much more normalized as the default. And even if the odds are poor, there are least enough anecdotes of Substack authors, influencers, and the like making enough money to perk many people's interest.