Blogging’s Bright Future
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
I'm having trouble finding a concrete argument in the article about what, if private content creation is indeed dead, is actually left to blog about. According to the article, a large part of where blogging moved on to seems to be mere social link aggregation and propagation.
Meanwhile, we're reading this on a blog. In fact, here on HN, we're reading blog posts all the time. It seems to me we consume a lot of essays which, shockingly, have not in fact been written by media companies.
I think what's changed about blogging has nothing to do with all that. Instead, it's all largely down to the fact that we moved from automated content aggregation to a human-powered filter. The death of the RSS reader itself was probably in equal parts due to an unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio, context switching costs associated with using the app itself, and social media platforms swooping in as an all-in-one replacement. Google abandoning the platform might also have played a role, though it's difficult to discern cause and effect in this case. HN has replaced Google Reader for me, and I'm sure Twitter and Facebook have done the same for other people. But we're still consuming blog content at the end of the day.
I thought I addressed that by saying:
"According to the article, a large part of where blogging moved on to seems to be mere social link aggregation and propagation."
Update: I just realized you're the author of the article; I'm sorry you feel misrepresented, that wasn't my intention. I think my main problem is reconciling sensationalist statements like 'blogs as streams of regular essays are mostly over' with points that follow later on the basis of 'the meaty content remains relevant'. You might argue that I put the emphasis on something other than what was intended; maybe the central claim was 'link blogs are over', but in that case there would be very little need to have that particular discussion at all.
Cheers
what is the mix of sourcing for blogs/article one consumes each day?
"Instead of blogging, people are posting to Tumblr, tweeting, pinning things to their board, posting to Reddit, Snapchatting, updating Facebook statuses, Instagramming, and publishing on Medium…"
From my perspective, what was really interesting and novel about the "blogosphere(s)" was the dimension that I'll call textual collaboration.
The ideal of the blog resonates with ideals like "civic engagement," "the public sphere," and other such somewhat high-minded stuff—in a way that seems rather neutered by those other media.
From that list, Medium and reddit seem closest. But when I use Medium, I feel like what I am doing is providing free content to a startup. I don't feel like I am just sharing text with friends and strangers.
On reddit, I do often feel like I am simply sharing words with others in a collaborative and open way, because there is less of a focus on the author as an individual "brand;" there are fewer swanky photos of Moleskines and espressos; there is more vivid discussion and real conversation.
Blogging, I think, was (and to some degree is) a balance act between public and private. Also a balance between publishing and drafting. A balance between permanence and ephemerality. A balance between monologue and dialogue. And so on.
From my perspective, given that I focus on "textual collaboration," it's quite interesting to look at, e.g., GitHub. Yes, people are mostly working on code together, but it's done in an interesting and quite fresh way.
Wikis, too. That never really took off, did it? Could it?
in the balance of public and private, production and consumption, monologue and conversations...
how can we design for better signal-to-noise ratio? like a good sound engineer putting the right amount of compression and reverb to sit in the mix as intended.
According to Hunter Walk, Stratechery has 2,000 subscribers. At $100 a pop, that's a $200K salary, not counting any consulting, paid speaking, etc. Blogging might not be the buzzword that it once was, but Ben's story shows there's still opportunity. The big difference now is that it's probably more of the lifestyle business variety rather than the previous world where people saw it at venture scale.