I think this is also a bit of a miscommunication. If you take "blogging is dead" as "[literally] nobody blogs anymore", it's clearly wrong, no discussion. Instead, if you take it as "blogging is no longer hyped and no longer mainstream", you're much closer to the truth (in my opinion).
Blogging is dead in the same way that dedicated cameras are dead: People still use them for specific use cases and there's a large enthusiast community for them, but the mainstream public moved on. Of course, especially with blogging, there's also a massive filter bubble effect going on; on HN, most people would likely agree with the OP, but a teenager (at least in my country) would staunchly disagree.
I'd really like to see some good data on this, because it's not my experience. I probably read more blogs today than I did 10 years ago. I see tons of sharing of blog posts and website content on social media. It's true that the narrow sliver of people making a living as content creators may have moved on, but I just don't see that the "mainstream public" has.
And if we're just talking certain subjects, like recipe blogs for example (and I'll give you paragraphs of my life experience above each recipe), those seem to be doing very well. I know I access those (and grumble about how much I have to scroll to get to the actual receipe) about 2-3 times a week when cooking, usually.
It's more like concluding that the internet is dead because nobody says "internet" anymore. Still, that trend for "blog" is probably more noise than signal considering the trend for "internet":
That's a better example than mine. I was trying to think of something that also sounded silly, since "blog" has always been kind of a dumb-sounding word.
Given the rise in social media, it's unlikely that Google plays the same role that they used to. There's also no reason to think people are putting "blog" in their searches these days either. That would at best be a weak measure of blog readership.
You're "an economist, professor, and sometimes consultant with a side interest in computation and finding ways to be more productive. Always interested in learning new things.".
The mainstream public is watching the Tide Pod challenge on TikTok.
In Internet? Totally. Blogging intended as "reading blog", from 2008 to 2015 (roughly, I don't have hard numbers) was pretty mainstream in the Internet population of that time.
Maybe now it's not mainstream anymore just because the Internet population increased (again) a lot, and the newjoiners are not into reading blogs but rather watching photos or (short) videos.
I would say even earlier than 2008, at least if my memory is not betraying me.
I guess it depends of your definition of blog, but I remember Fotolog being incredibly popular circa 2006 even when compared to mainstream social networks. While Wikipedia says it's a social network, I recall it was used mostly for blogging (not so much for social interaction).
And IIRC, when Google acquired Blogger (2003) blogging was not exactly a obscure thing, although I don't think I knew anyone with a personal blog back then.
Yeah it was earlier than 2008. Corporate blogging, at least in many tech circles, was pretty big and companies were coming out with social media guidelines by the mid-2000s. Journalists and analysts often had personal brand blogs on their company sites. And, yes, there were personal blogs on sites like Blogger (or self-hosted). I'd actually say the 2003 date was fairly early on for truly mainstream blogging; I started in 2003 and I won't say I was on the leading edge but I was probably an early adopter.
Height of blogging, or at least when it was new and becoming "mainstream" (if in fact it did) before Twitter microblogging and a recognized publication genre was around 2003 or 2005 at the latest I think. You can tell by RSS becoming standardized 1998-2001 and getting direct support in browsers for a while (Safari could subscribe to RDF feeds in HTML meta links in Mac OS (X) 10.4 if not earlier; FF probably earlier with plugins).
You are probably right, as you grow older you tend to lose the feeling of time... or at least, I do :) 2007-2008 was when FB really started to be mainstream so blogging was "hype" way before that.
In that case, I wonder if blogging stayed the same - and it just feels less important because there is so much more internet now. The pond grew and it stayed the same.
A lot of it has changed. A lot has moved to other social media. Companies have pretty much moved away from hosting, much less encouraging, a lot of personal blogs on their sites. A food blog, say, is much more likely to be a professional full-time operation as opposed to a hobby. And so forth. There are still classic personal blogs out there. But they're less common.
I still write a lot but mostly have other outlets than my personal blog.
I think the process was:
1. blogging
2. paid blogging services
3. free blogging services (livejournal, xanga, later myspace)
4. wordpress as a next generation blogging service (invented by ex-livejournal employees) both free and paid
5. walled garden blogging platforms (Facebook had a "notes" feature for long format blogging)
6. product and data analyst managers realizing long format blogging wasn't accessible to mainstream and moving towards 2-3 sentence "posts" and later "microblogging" with twitter, vines, periscope etc
Nowadays most blogs are commercial entities ("Websites") that cover a fairly narrow topics like EVs or Electric Scooters or Photography reviews but personal blogs and websites still exist they just don't fit into the microblogging narrative and aren't prioritized. People who want to be "influencers" are probably not going to start a blog as the immediate reach of a blog is measured in hundreds or low thousands of hits per month.
The “mainstream public” on the internet in the early 2000s, at the height of blogging, was quite different from today’s internet mainstream, mainly thanks to smartphones. Aside from “microblogging” in the form of twitter threads, and other alternative formats like YouTube, the broadening of the internet mainstream over the past 10 years is probably the more significant change.
Did the mainstream public ever really care about cameras the enthusiasts care about? Were dslrs ever something the masses really wanted? I remember simple point and shoots were a big deal.
The final nail in the coffin is ChatGPT, the greatest spam generation tool ever made. I imagine bots, SEO gurus, and the like are having a great time now.
If blogging is dead because of AI, videos are not far behind. I'm already curating away a couple channels a week on YouTube that are pure AI spam, either videos that just steal content from others and use AI to drive a collection of clips (which will only get more sophisticated) or put a TTS-driven monologue over something, where the Text being converted To Speech might as well be AI-driven.
And the human videos are already so optimized for The Algorithm that a good deal of them might as well just cut out the middleman and be written by an AI, for the AI. ("This Breaks the Internet - Reacting to Reaction Videos Reacting To Reaction Videos". You can see the thumbnail already, can't you?)
Yeah, they're behind for now, but all the infrastructure is there for this to explode the instant they're not. Video operations putting out dozens of crap videos a week with nonfunctional "hacks" and all sorts of similar things will be in an arms race to pivot to these things and there's no chance the video site's moderation will be able to keep up with this in the end.
Nobody has to delete the authentic content, they just have to outcompete it by many orders of magnitude. Then not only is the inauthentic content all over all the possible routes you might find content, people stop looking for it entirely.
If you are a YouTube user and have curated your experience as I have, open a browser incognito window and hit the home page of YouTube fresh.
"Creative" as a criterion for video success is at the very least under assault. Looking at what I get, I am not quite so cynical as to say it's dead. It's not. But it is certainly under assault.
There is also the problem of a small number of truly creative content creators getting their content and ideas yanked by people armed with AIs who can then completely out compete the actual creatives.
This has, to an extent, actually already happened for very young child content. Look at "Elsagate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate but for the purposes of my comment here, ignore the disturbing nature of the content and instead observe that the content obviously had heavy computer generation influence, and could only be cranked out more quickly and effectively with some rather simple AI.
Like I said, it's not here yet, but the first derivative is clearly positive here, and the second probably is too. Pure AI content that looks like live action is not a prerequisite.
I'm not entirely sure Elsagate itself didn't itself source from some AI in some critical manner. It doesn't seem to have completely created the video from top to bottom, but it looks an awful lot to me like what you'd expect an AI writing the scripts, with the feedback provided by view numbers, and completely unscrupulous humans implementing the scripts for the views, spinning off into a hyperoptimized regime for that one goal at the expense of all else. And, you know, it basically worked. If anything it worked too well. The first AI corruption of video sites may well be in the past, not the future.
I've never understood the elsagate content. Why are they making it? Is it the sort of thing that young children find appealing if left alone? I can't understand why that would be, and it doesn't seem substantially easier to make than the equivalent content without the disturbing/ inappropriate edge.
Just wait when they'll be able to create from scratch credible AI video stars and influencers then put them one after another on social media. They will do it, no doubt about that: free advertising with no perks/bribes is just too tempting.
We had plenty of spam before chatgpt. The spammers clearly don't care if it looks like seo spam nonesense. Eventually for the fresh internet users of every generation, that will be all they know.
Text is eternal and has a nice Lindy effect going for it. However this article doesn't address the core problem indie bloggers are facing, discoverability. It reads like a self fulfilling prophesy and dismissed the inroads made by video. Many programmers these days simply jump to YouTube to solve a problem and videos solve these problems satisfactorily.
To make blogging great again, we need to solve this issue of discoverability. Otherwise we're all screaming in the wind.
Maybe many beginners might be jumping to videos. I'd like to think that most of the experienced developers like text more as they can quickly scroll past the bits that are irrelevant to them and look for the parts that are interesting. It is harder to do so for a video as you typically have no idea at which point the person will tell you about the concept you were looking for (unless you get some timestamp list but even then you may need to wade through some fluff/water before you get to the juicy bits).
When looking for information, I despise videos and will avoid watching them if at all possible. For exactly the reasons you mention: random access, too much fluff and low information content.
The only exception is things like home repair advice, fixing washing machines, etc. I assume that the people with most knowledge of these skills are more likely to produce videos than write down something.
I agree that the sort of people who do home repair, car repair, etc. are much, much more likely to put a video together (low friction) than to put up a well-written and illustrated instruction manual.
But I still hate it. The video is always too long, has too much non-relevant stuff in it, and a phone camera jammed under a water pump to see the frobnitz valve or whatever is never as good as an exploded view illustration.
Forget AI-powered lawyers and AI-powered fantasy art generators, let's get an AI-powered technical writer and AI-powered technical illustrator going. Train them on Haynes manuals until you can ask them to generate an accurate repair guide for a Kenmore washing machine.
I find with programming video's the information density is really low.
The best channels is where there's no introduction or it's in chapters and easily skipeped.
That's why I've decided to just blog for myself. It's kind of like notes where if i come across it again, i can remind myself or i can grasp something i once understood more easily but with the added component of holding myself to somewhat of a high standard because it's still going to be public.
Can also be something that helps when looking for a job as the recruiter can look at the blog and see the experience you have.
Yeah, this is exactly the same thing I do. It's just a place I dump stuff I learned and want to remember. And can confirm, it was the deciding factor in at least one job interview. People do care about that kind of stuff.
Does everyone need to be discoverable? What would a blog engine look like with zero discoverability? You can't say they wouldn't have any readers, to an extent Gumroad and other similar services have no discoverability.
example: I don't go to Gumroad.com to find random people to give money to, a creator who has captured my through other means directs me there.
Services like Gumroad can have zero discoverability because other services have decent discoverability. So somewhere, discoverability is a crucial service and it's probably best to have control over that rather than assuming a third party service will continue as-is.
Take Twitter for instance, prohibiting the promotion of other platforms. This impacted discoverability for a lot of people because they relied on Twitter as the funnel to get people to patreon/gumroad/their site/etc. Apparently that policy at Twitter is now gone but you get the point.
I don't fully agree with the above idea that discoverability is the main problem however when it comes to blogging. Tumblr solved that for a long time (although now discoverability is a bit rubbish), most still don't use Tumblr so there are greater factors at play here.
creators will always find a way to promote. discoverability has never affected that. this isn't the internet of stmbleupon anymore, we use aggregators and influencers.
Discoverability is a huge challenge... I've considered moving to Substack because of their discovery mechanisms, but I don't like incurring the platform risk having seen the way that applications like Medium have changed over time. Curious if anyone in the HN community has any ideas on that conundrum.
Your blog is really nice! Information like yours is great to see more of. In regards to discoverability[1] I shared a rule you may find useful, why is it a huge challenge? Are you aiming to monetize?
Yeah we're definitely able to do those things, it just seems weird to have the content living in two places and I'm not sure if that will present some sort of other issue for us down the line.
Yeah, I'm always worried about the fact that Substack won't let you set up canonical URLs back to your blog, but we aren't really SEO optimized anyway so maybe it doesn't matter that much...
I think discoverability, reach, and exponential growth is overrated. In the end you either get overwhelmed by your massive userbase, or lose your original intent somewhere along the way, subconsciously catering towards more growth versus blogging for bloggings sake.
Instead, screw all of that. Write your ideas and let it out. It's cathartic, it helps you think more clearly on whatever you are writing up, and serves as a lasting reference should you need to revisit that information again yourself. A blog with no readers is still a great tool for your own productivity.
Well said! One thing I think a lot of people get confused with is prioritizing discoverability. People forget that the internet is large and continues to get larger today. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram which largely "solved" discoverability are now available. What should be practiced more is the "POSSE" rule or "Post On your own Site and Syndicate Elsewhere". This is already what a lot of people do but fail to capitalise due to convenience
I've personally benefited a lot from Thinking About Things, a newsletter that emails me a couple of blog posts every week. https://thinking-about-things.com
A lot of people are still using them, especially in the IndieWeb scene. I came across this really cool blog last night (click the different theme switchers in the top right) and the author is using one:
It would be great to have Google Search product that only searches for blogs as they usually have more in-depth knowledge than what you can find in other mediums (other than books or actual courses but they usually suffer from having too much water or including things that aren't that relevant for my search).
I am not sure if there is such already but it would definitely be more useful nowadays when Google Search top results are just SEO-spam or ads.
Asking the real questions. If some magic could make a search engine that ignored all SEO spam, life would be better. I find it hard to believe google themselves are having such a hard time with the obvious cloned copies of other sites/content that now own most page 1 results. But they seem to be.
Incentivize SEO for fine granularity (punish blogs that spam too many common keywords) and provide more filtering tools to users.
Former is likely already done for many popular platforms along with many other tricks so you would want to have experienced people for that part.
For filtering tools a good one would be adding a way to have filter lists against spammers and generally just more options to how you want to refine your search. I get that Google Search allows you to type some special keywords but I'd rather it be more user-friendly.
maybe for the collective-you. It's too bad there isn't a content-engine driven by one of these when you can describe an emotional outcome and it provide the content to get you there. However, if it could do that, it'd already have solved factoring and we're in deep trouble anyway.
Remember Technorati tags? If you were at all vaguely technical, you HAD to add Technorati tags to your blog, so the Technorati search would find and classify your blog.
> But still, people who read have always been in the minority. And I think that’s what most people who think that “video is the future” don’t get. Sure, people are getting lazier and they want you to feed them content.
> But think about it. Do you really want to serve those types of people?!
The number of people online reading blogs when they were the 'most popular' form of content creation was far lower than the number watching videos or using social media sites or what not.
Statistically there are probably more people writing blogs now, and more people reading them. They've just become less of a percentage of the overall internet audience than they were back before YouTube and Twitch and TikTok and podcasts became big things online.
So while it may seem like those people abandoned blogging, you have to ask yourself whether they would have ever cared for it to begin with.
I enjoy it when my writing is read. And HN, Lobsters, and Reddit give me an outlet for tech writing.
But there's no similar outlet for other writing like if I want to write about cooking or product management or parks in NYC.
Most non-tech subreddits have super strict self promotion rules that means you can't ever share your own posts. Not that reddit is so friendly in general anyway.
I have a small personal audience and sometimes they read these other posts.
But it's not as much fun in these cases.
So I've been trying to think about how to write about other topics and my only conclusion is that you have to target bigger existing magazines or sites.
But there feels like a huge barrier to entry for contributing to these sites. They're very intimidating.
I've reached out to a few smaller outlets and never gotten a response. So that's kind of demotivating.
So yeah it's easy and enjoyable to blog but in terms of getting anyone to see what you produce... I agree with others here that videos and YouTube seem to be one of the best spots for producing stuff that people actually see, on more diverse topics than just tech.
High-quality blog content, written by people who have a deep understanding of a subject that they want to proudly share with their peers is pretty much dead.
I built my professional career on blogging from 2004 to 2012, and attribute my 'public brand' to what I did then. What I currently see is that blog content is generated by corporate PR writers who write very good-looking content that covers a topic yet mostly meaningless. But it does, importantly, gets clicks and engagement from prospective customers. It is far cheaper and easier to get English grads to churn out content based on basic content and brand themes that to get engineers to write content that they believe in. Eventually those dedicated writers will, in turn, be replaced by AIs (see copy.ai).
Also, remember that in the early 2000s, technical people had few options to show their skills other than a personal blog. It was replaced by Stack Overflow (one of the original intentions of the platform), github repositorys and other things that are now available to show off.
Sadly, the days of technical people or other specialsts (say artisnal brewers) creating written content that a lot of people see, is largely behind us. Blogging of old is drowned out not just by video (as OP suggests, and where corporate writers struggle) but by armies of robotic (whether people or AI) corporate content generators.
I find blogs substantially more useful than I did a decade ago. A lot of the noise [1] has moved to social media. What is left is, on the whole, more useful. Simple as that for me.
[1] Noise: cat/dog pics, look what I had for lunch, random half-based political opinions, etc.
I could not agree more, blogging is fun to write and read, much less structured authors can go as far as they want to make the posts interactive. I still think blog is one of the best tools to share thoughts, and more important to own your content.
People need to adjust their expectations and goals.
Is your goal to make content that goes viral that you can monetize and make lots of money with? Consider video. Are you trying to get your word out? Blogs are great and will never die.
Blogs are also great for just writing up what you've done to solve some problem you've encountered, for your own use when you run into the same problem again in years time perhaps
While I agree that blogging isn't dead, I think that blogging serves another purpose as well. It's a great way to solidify understandings about certain topics.
I have a substack on programming and technology, and when I'm working on something I know I will write about, I definitely understand it better. I think it fulfills the same purpose as learning through teaching.
And it's also just extremely fulfilling. Writing about a niche part of a field you are interested in and wished had more spotlight is satisfying, even if no one reads what you wrote. Or at least that's how I feel about it.
Haha 100 percent agree! If anything video content is becoming more pseudo intellectual and clickbait everyday in my opinion. My video consumption is way lower than it used to be.
To a certain extent these video platforms create big personalities of normal people and its hard to trust them at that point (although Joe rogan still manages to sound authentic somehow)
That being said, I do think GPT has the potential to ruin blogging but we will see. As soon as I smell even a little bit of GPT in a blog I am probably gonna bail immediately.
One conversation I've noticed going on recently re Twitter and social media is the power of owned media, like podcast, email, and blogs, over walled gardens. Blogs, maybe "personal websites", are a home base. Maybe not the whole solution but a foundation.
It used to be common for personal websites to be your home base. You'd have maybe the on topic posts of the blog (e.g. a scientist blogging in their field), the off topic posts (e.g. your hiking trip), and then a fileshare of collegues, friends, or family photos perhaps, and then maybe special interest stuff like the base depth of your favorite ski slope, or the local surf report for the day. Basically, it would be a combination of LinkedIn, facebook, twitter, and instagram, all under a domain you control with a feature set and design dictated by you alone, maybe paying a few dollars a month or a year seeing limited traffic, maybe "free" if you run it on the desktop you already have plugged into the corner of the room.
- blogging as speech. Not trying to "build an audience" or monetise, just a place where you can write publicly. Rachelbythebay is probably the best example of this.
- blogging as business. What the author is talking about - build an audience, sell some ads, make some money. Writing as a commercial activity.
- blogging as content marketing. Probably 90% of blogs - not directly monetised, but SEO fodder for a business.
The first isn't dead, but is obscure. The last is mostly braindead (there are some really good posts in amongst the SEO crap, but mostly it's SEO crap).
The middle one is hard to do right - there are soooo many "travel bloggers" out there trying to make this work, and so few who actually do make it work.
I don't know why you are being downvoted. 2005-2010 was the heyday of blogging as I knew it. Maybe you "had to have been there", which would put you in your fourties, at least.
I barely read blogs because they seem to try to expand or over elaborate for sake of sounding sophistication, and set tone as they try to play with audience. I'm not fun at party so I mostly read "documentation" kind of text because the objective is to provide concise and no BS to get you understand the system. If the thing doesn't have official documentation or poor documentation I would read your blog about that .. but if that's the case the thing kinda sucks.
There's two sorts of blogs. There's the one you describe which imo are trying to build an audience and gain reach. Then there are the more straightforward blogs, where the author doesn't care about reach or viewership, and just wants to write up a technical process they painstakingly went through so either others can save themselves some grief, or they can look at what they did when they revisit the same problem years from now. Those types of blogs are indispensable. Its like documentation that someone actually went through and wrote in margin notes, like Snape's potion book.
It's not dying, but I don't hear kids talking about blogs they read. That's not due to increased laziness or decline in intelligence, people don't surf the web anymore. They can't, it's too vast, it's virtually impossible to find a blog that doesn't belong to some larger platform like Medium.
It seems like most bloggers today that go on longer than 5 years are either written by amateur journalists or tech centric people.
> This was coming from someone who has sold millions of books and is still selling hundreds of thousands of books a year.
There we have the answer. Monetizing blogs is dead. And it's probably even true. Are there many people around who directly make money with their personal articles? Isn't it today mostly a space which is usually just one part of a bigger network of content? Or as a support/advertisement for some product?
Many things can happen in the future. People enjoy discussing things online and blogs are definitely one way you can do that. Experts disagree as to whether AI can accurately create blogs that are believable. How would you know anyway? It is an interesting time to be alive.
Blogging is dead in the same way that dedicated cameras are dead: People still use them for specific use cases and there's a large enthusiast community for them, but the mainstream public moved on. Of course, especially with blogging, there's also a massive filter bubble effect going on; on HN, most people would likely agree with the OP, but a teenager (at least in my country) would staunchly disagree.