What happened to blogs

https://mpmisko.github.io/2024/wtf-happened-to-blogs/

by mpmisko • 2 years ago

70 61 2 years ago

mpmisko.github.io

GOogle happened and seo-garbage, like you say.

oidar• 2 years ago

Blogs are still here, we just can't hear them over the megaphone on social media. Social media saturates the collective internet's attention so fully, that blogs never really have a chance to peculate up to most. Just look around HN, and you'll see plenty of blogs. If you want to search for blogs written by normal people, head over to kagi and search the "small internet".

Yawrehto• 2 years ago

Or try marginalia.nu! It's a search engine designed to prioritize those sorts of small websites and show you stuff that might get buried by engines like Google, though it does include some larger, typically nonprofit, ones (e.g. Wikipedia). I especially like browsing the random button to get a taste of the websites it has, including random people's websites.

As a search engine, it's not the best. A search for "dogs" has Stack Exchange forums, Wikiquote, Wikisource, someone's GeoCities website on dog trivia, and RationalWiki as the top five results. But I don't think I'd ever have known about small websites like caps.wiki (top five for "technology"), or a website called "blogs of war" (the top link for both Moldova and AI), and so on.

jhbadger2• 2 years ago

But there really was a time when famous researchers had blogs and updated them regularly with lengthy posts. Yes, there are a few people like Terence Tao who still keep it up, but the movement away from blogs a decade or so ago in favor of Twitter and the like is real, unfortunately.

lcnmrn• 2 years ago

Browsers dropped RSS support, Google killed Reader and social networks are easier to use.

jhbadger2• 2 years ago

I really think that's the answer. Blog traffic fell off when Reader was killed and a lot of bloggers stopped blogging and moved to Twitter.

twelve402• 2 years ago

Really interesting to explore.

* Intuitively, I would argue that RSS and reader were a tiny minority for blog traffic gen. Because both were used mostly by -nerds like me- tech-inclined minority. Blogs in their heyday were way bigger than just the tech bubble.

* I would probably bet on search referrals declining. Which, over decades of professional SEO chipping away at the top keywords and the long tail, having amassed the knowledge and direct monetary motivation to displace non-SEO-professional bloggers (or most everyone else, really). So the article kind of checks out for me.

* Twitter (to me at least) always looked like a dump and a direct opposite of a thoughtful blog post, I wouldn't be surprised if it's abhorred both by bloggers and their readers. But what do i know.

* A bunch of people who really enjoy creating content probably also moved on to Youtube where it's probably easier to make money/promote your content than the present-day blogs.

Mandelmus• 2 years ago

What I never understood is: why did browsers drop RSS support?

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

Chrome alone is 65% of all browsers. So Chrome dropping RSS support already addresses an overwhelming majority of all potential readers.

<https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share>

Google's interests are pretty evident and self-serving: RSS short-circuits both the browser (you can use an RSS reader) and Google's search engine. Both directly reduce advertising exposure.

Firefox killed default RSS features in 2018 "because they're hardly used and would take too much effort to modernise":

<https://www.zdnet.com/article/end-nears-for-rss-firefox-64-t...>

Browser extensions can still be used to read RSS feeds.

Gigachad• 2 years ago

No one used it. Outside of tech circles, no one even knew what RSS was.

Sites like Reddit also killed it. People would rather subscribe to topics (subreddits) than individual blogs.

runevault• 2 years ago

This is purely anecdote, but outside blogs read because they are posted here, reddit, or on twitter my blog reading dropped through the floor after Reader died. I tried one of the alternatives that allowed importing reader feeds (Feedly maybe?) but for some reason it did not stick for me and I fell away from the habit.

I wonder if this helped prop up mailing lists as an alternative which in some ways is better than blogs (gives you information on how to contact your regular readers) but also if it is literally ONLY email kills discoverability of old content.

zzo38computer• 2 years ago

Another possibility to find, instead of Google, see if any blog that is not using HTML/CSS/JS at all, and perhaps also does not use email at all. (Some examples might be plain text (with any protocol), and use of protocols other than HTTP(S), such as Gopher etc. Although such things are less common than HTML and HTTP(S) and Google, the quality may be higher because they are not trying to sell you stuff and are not trying to SEO etc.)

nonrandomstring2• 2 years ago

Musicians and audio freaks have a similar ritual lament on how music went to shit; electric killed the blues, digital murdered analogue, nobody knows how to mix/master any more... Amidst such an old-man's cloud-jeering session someone said to me "You know they make more vinyl than ever, and it's better than it's ever been". So I checked, and they were right. I bet there's more great blogs than there's ever been. Discovering them? Sure.

giantrobot• 2 years ago

So many of those statements aren't really true. In no way is anyone "making more vinyl than ever". That's just absurd. Vinyl is currently seeing a resurgence as a collector item but is very very far from its peak unit sales in the 70s[0].

There's no really more blogs than ever either. There's a lot of content masquerading under the blog label trying to appear like organic grass roots content but it's really just content marketing astroturf. The web is lousy with SEO spam "blogs" with thousands of words whose only real purpose is to get you to see ads run on the site. There's a whole industries of assholes that write completely disingenuous content, as in completely fictional reviews/reports, using SEO spam to get eyes on advertisements or clicks on affiliate links.

Google does nothing about obvious SEO spam because they make money off of it. Since "everyone" uses Google all they see for any search is SEO spam content which has a decent chance of being entirely fictional. Just because a spammer uses WordPress doesn't mean their ad copy is a blog.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/7699/lp-sales-in-the-united-s...

nonrandomstring2• 2 years ago

Could be. That conversation was a decade ago when people trusted information online. As you say the most popular means of getting information are defective.

On the problem of critical information existing inside the dishonest systems and companies who have an interest in distortion I previously wrote:

  "With opportunities to fix our digital world from /within/ the system
  vanishing, book publishing remains a bastion of open intelligence.
  What you hold in your hands (or have as a non-DRM file) may soon be
  one of the few remaining means to circulate critical opinions that
  would quickly be censored online."

That's why I still write books intended to be printed and read as real-world paper objects. I don't think it's paranoid or over-stating things to say there's more to the "disappearance" of blogs than SEO and the old being buried by the new. There are understandable reasons why Google, Facebook and other surveillance rackets - giant social engineering scams at enormous scale - want to suppress authentic speech. Burying it in a tide of noise may be tactical, not some unfortunate side effect.

listenallyall• 2 years ago

Most high-quality blogs (in my observation) are/were written by people who grew up when reading an actual newspaper (or two) was an everyday part of life. You didn't have to be a professional journalist to understand how to write a good "article," since you've read thousands of them, and it was natural that is what you'd emulate in your own writing. That's simply not the default model in younger people's heads anymore.

pclmulqdq• 2 years ago

I write a blog that I think is okay, and definitely grew up reading long-form content, but not really reading newspaper. Most of the readers I have met are 5+ years older than me, though.

RockRobotRock2• 2 years ago

Can I rant for a sec please?

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.

cosmicradiance• 2 years ago

How we live is so different from how we ought to live ... - Machiavelli

nextworddev• 2 years ago

It gives you some amount of easy discoverability if you are just starting out.

arthur_sav• 2 years ago

It used to be good and provided you with an audience.

000ooo000• 2 years ago

Can't speak to the data sci Medium content, but Medium's low barrier to entry is its downfall for programming content; I will ignore any Medium link I see because the articles are somehow nearly always crap. I suspect most programming articles on Medium are just devs employing that advice re. getting hired, i.e. "get your name out there! Start a blog!"

salamo• 2 years ago

Towards Data Science. They reached out to me with some kind of profit-sharing offer after I wrote something on Medium a while back. But I have way too much interactive content on my personal site that wouldn't translate to Medium, and I don't do it for money anyways.

thebruce87m• 2 years ago

What do you consider to be the better blog platforms?

RockRobotRock2• 2 years ago

A platform which doesn't encourage me to subscribe with popups, or stop me from reading without logging in.

vouaobrasil4• 2 years ago

It's actually a decent platform. Some people write weird stuff on it but at least they're trying an alternative to ads. In my opinion, that puts them above every ad-powered website out there.

splitbrain• 2 years ago

There are still awesome blogs by real people out there. Here is one way to discover them, one post at a time: https://indieblog.page

muhrizqiardi• 2 years ago

I can't seem to load the list :/

But, Hacker News is really good for finding interesting blogs too.

riffraff• 2 years ago

for those who don't know: there are various websites that aggregate "HN Blogs" and provide searching/opml etc.

e.g.

https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev/

https://dm.hn/

manuelmoreale• 2 years ago

Very much this. Blog are still out there, still written by awesome people.

I’m gonna add a bunch of resources:

- https://ooh.directory/ more than 2000 blogs listed here and organized in categories

- https://kagi.com/smallweb allows you to jump from one page to the next all from a big list of small independent sites that are almost all blogs. Raw sources are available on GitHub https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb

- https://peopleandblogs.com/ I’m personally maintaining this project where once a week I feature a person with a blog

nooormal• 2 years ago

https://blogs.hn

doe_eyes• 2 years ago

The basic answer is "nothing". Things happened to the rest of the internet.

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?

mertd• 2 years ago

I don't believe the SEO blame. I think in reality microblogging won. People get the same engagement with 2% of the effort.

codazoda• 2 years ago

I recently added microblogging to my blogging routine. I just added it to my own page. I use an alias of “status [message]” and it throws it on the top of my status page (an md file) and replaces my previous status on my home page. It’s so simple it’s stupid. I don’t get bells and whistles but it frees me from the platform wars.

twelve402• 2 years ago

um microblogging still looks pretty terrible for long form, not to mention hostile. If you have a story to tell it might be youtube now.

langsoul-com• 2 years ago

Time happened. Before, when the internet wasn't so established, it'd be easier to gain traction.

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.

janalsncm2• 2 years ago

people would rather watch the big ones than small or mid movies

More people will be moderately engaged in mass market content. But small creators can get more specific and get much deeper engagement because they’re not watering things down for the lowest common denominator.

ungamedplayer• 2 years ago

My personal evidence shows otherwise.. but maybe my deep technical topics isn't suitable for most people, or I'm just a shit person, probably both.

You absolutely need to water things down or you won't have an audience.

renegat0x0• 2 years ago

Personal sites are tagged as 'personal' in this repository.

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.

tverbeure• 2 years ago

My long form blog posts about the obscure topics such as old test equipment, obsolete FPGA boards, or my kitchen hood controller board repair will take a couple of weeks before they show up in Google search results but eventually they always do, no SEO required. That’s good enough for me.

marsten• 2 years ago

That's exactly the kind of content I love on the internet, when someone smart dives deep on an obscure topic and then shares it with the rest of us.

HermanMartinus• 2 years ago

There are still lots of blogs, they just aren’t found on search engines.

https://bearblog.dev/discover

benguild• 2 years ago

Social media gobbled up the distribution

Ferret7446• 2 years ago

It's not SEO (at least, not primarily). Blogs moved to centralized sites (Facebook, etc) for the advantages of centralization like ease of discussion and discoverability.

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)

mediumsmart• 2 years ago

Nothing happened to them, blogs are on the internet same as always. you just can’t find them anymore

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

blog != blog

gwerbret• 2 years ago

As has been pointed out elsewhere, there are certainly authentic blogs out there, and lots of them. However, when the author says

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.

janalsncm2• 2 years ago

Google became the gatekeeper of the internet

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.

defrost• 2 years ago

This also works for youtube channel notifications, eg:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v...

is an RSS feed for Cutting Edge Engineering (Capital E mechanical enginering | machinist not software development).

vouaobrasil4• 2 years ago

1. SEO. If you start a personal blog, you will have a hard time being discoverable because any topic you write about will likely have at least 50 if not more SEO garbage sites competing for the same topic and Google is too stupid to list quality content over SEO.

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.

Abouteo• 2 years ago

> High-quality blogs exit, but they are impossible to find in the sea of “personal” blogs trying to sell you something.

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.

8474_s• 2 years ago

the one-to-many model of blog broadcasting information has been outcompeted by communities like facebook groups or subreddits, where interaction is many-to-many, typically much faster response and more incentive to comment(likes, karma, scores).

makeitshine• 2 years ago

The amount of garbage increased, but the blogs as windows into one's interests are still there, but you won't find them easily via search.

sufehmi• 2 years ago

So many people missing the point then and now.

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.

nicbou• 2 years ago

I run a website for a living. I also have a personal blog since about 15 years.

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.

nunez• 2 years ago

The content in blogs moved to social media, mostly.

tennisflyi• 2 years ago

Monetization

smitty1e• 2 years ago

I blogged political stuff in the Tea Party days. Had a blast. After a couple years, I realized it was pissing in the wind, and just do snark on Xitter now.

What happened to blogs

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