The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

https://danielstanica.com/posts/Great-Blogging-Collapse

by thm • 21 days ago

245 181 21 days ago

If you gave me one of the "100 Successful Blogs" without framing it as a "successful blog", I would not say "this is a successful blog". The 5 or so I looked at all seemed very similar, like they were part of an MLM scheme, and had uninteresting content. I did not recognize a single one of the 100.

evmar• 17 days ago

If you imagine Google's job is to present useful information, these blogs that are maximizing cash while simulating usefulness are exactly the sorts of things I would hope Google to want to filter out.

(I don't think Google's often capricious ranking changes really succeed at this, but the outcomes in this post seems like something hypothetically good?)

simonw• 17 days ago

This whole thing is a pretty fascinating insight into a whole other corner of the internet ecosystem:

For more than a decade, one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog."

Then:

These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated as evidence that the model was real and profitable. [...] If you tried to start a blog between roughly 2015 and 2022, most probably you read blog income reports as they were the proof of concept and held up to a generation of aspiring small publishers as this is what winning looks like, and you can do it too.

It's the blog/SEO equivalent of today's TikTok influencer culture.

ghaff3• 17 days ago

There was a pretty small slice of bloggers like Michael Arrington who really put in a lot of time and created a brand/company that did pretty well off blogging (for a time). But blogging then and now is pretty much a side-gig for a lot of people that doesn't bring in much money. Which is fine. But social media, which has itself contracted, has cut into a lot of that.

ijk2• 17 days ago

I did start a blog in that time period and this is the first time I've ever heard of this. (Admittedly, I wasn't trying to directly make a living off of it.)

wannabebarista• 17 days ago

About half of what I clicked through were sales funnels.

Traffic for my blog has fluctuated depending on whether or not my site is referenced in the Overview that month for relevant phrases.

conartist6• 17 days ago

AI slop imagery, insta-stopped reading. There are humans making content that I will give my traffic to before that

swiftcoder2• 17 days ago

These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated as evidence that the model was real and profitable

Was the claim really that the model was profitable on the basis that they managed to find a whole 100 individuals who were making the income of an entry-level software engineer? That's... not a ringing endorsement for the income potential

xp844• 17 days ago

This comes off as pretty out of touch. Entry-level SE roles have been a bit rocky since about that time and of course fell off a cliff a year later, but more relevantly, that wasn’t simply career advice directed at people who already know how to code.

100k is a decent compensation level to be able to earn just by being interesting and writing. A lot of teachers make less than that despite the education needed.

A majority of people who don’t have specific relevant degrees or specific great talents will never make that much (inflation adjusted).

swiftcoder2• 17 days ago

My contention is not that 100k is low (it's a pretty great salary in most places). It's that 100 people total is a tiny number, and it's not like 100k is getting rich money - if only 100 people are earning that much, how little are the rest of them earning?

draginol• 17 days ago

I think you could argue that this is following the same trend as forums (and usenet before that). You get a consolidation of where people go to read up on things that interest them.

Look at Slashdot for example, it was once so popular that any site it linked to could be "slashdotted" from all the traffic. Now people go elsewhere. YouTube, TikTok, Reddit.

hn_throwaway_997• 17 days ago

What happened to Slashdot wasn't a "consolidation", though, it was a suicide. I was a heavy reader of the site up until they had an infamous redesign that made the site literally unusable for me, so I left.

That's very different from the scenario discussed in the article.

no_no_no_yes• 17 days ago

Wow following the Digg playbook

esafak• 17 days ago

It is an interesting case study. Most designers would not think that they can tank a site.

flomo• 17 days ago

I don't think that was it. Slashdot would only run stories from their 'content partners' like ZDNet and the Register, so they were always 2 days behind Reddit/HN/Twitter/etc.

(When RMS was 'cancelled', that would have been a huge deal there in the old days, they had one post days later.)

Also Digg wasn't just a graphical redesign, they changed how the site worked. I don't think Slashdot ever did that.

bediger40004• 17 days ago

I had the same blog post get on HN and on Slashdot. HN link didn't get to the front page, got about 25 human visits. The link on Slashdot got the blog post 2500 visits, plus the Slashdot IP addresses visited tons of other posts and content on my web site. Maybe places don't get "slashdotted" any more, but a link on Slashdot seemingly gets you a ton more visits than a link on HN.

Also, Slashdot visitors use more MacOS and Linux than Windows. The reverse is true of the small number of HN visitors.

inigyou6• 16 days ago

Is Reddit still alive? And TikTok has no search feature

marssaxman• 17 days ago

one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“

I would date the Great Blogging Collapse to the arrival of this idea, not whatever happened a decade later.

toofy• 17 days ago

yeah, the answer lies exactly there.

the monetization is what killed blogs. great blogs still exist, but they’re almost entirely people writing about whatever their passion is, because they’re passionate. it’s as old as time, my dad uses the term “sellouts” when he’s contrasting terrible bands with good bands from his era. skateboarders call them kooks. same thing only with blogs, sellouts.

find the people who are writing blogs out of passion, not the idiot bloggers writing seo spam.

nicbou5• 16 days ago

These are also getting wrecked by the AI overviews and LLMs in general.

paulpauper• 17 days ago

Blogging as medium is thriving despite AI and LLMs. It has moved to Substack + Twitter and newsletters, and away from Google and Facebook as a source of traffic generation. Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now, and also combined with Twitter monetization. This didn't exist 5 years ago.

There are way more blogs now compared to 2013, and much longer and technically proficient writing compared to the terse blog posts that dominated 1-2 decades ago. Even major media sources such as the NY Times The Atlantic are copying the substack contrarian style that is thriving now.

paulryanrogers2• 17 days ago

Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now

How many though? I get the impression it's really just a very small subset at the top, with a very long tail making almost nothing.

hn_throwaway_997• 17 days ago

Isn't that basically the story of 99.9% of any sort of Internet publisher, e.g. I imagine the same dynamics apply to YouTube or Twitch. It's a fundamental feature of the "winner takes all" economics of the Internet.

ghaff3• 17 days ago

"Easily making six figures on Substack" is doing a lot of work there. But I agree that, if you're seriously looking to make money, Substack is probably a better avenue than having a blog someplace.

Hard_Space3• 17 days ago

I don't know - the 'great enshittification' of Substack seems an inevitable event, for which reason I have stayed away from using it as a platform, except for a few experiments. It was initially populated by refugees from Medium, itself enshittified, and there seems no reason that Substack refugees won't eventually become a thing for the same reason. Reminds me of that Twilight Zone (or was it Night Gallery..?) episode with the guy who keeps moving from one sinking ship to another (Titanic, Lusitania, etc.).

fhsm• 17 days ago

What’s the slash dot of the current era or blogging?

I’m skeptical that it’s out there and robust because I think hn would be the obvious answer and yet it’s not as if small bloggers are dominating the charts here.

I am skeptical that there is any single author where I would be interested in the majority of their output. Perhaps I’m the outlier and other people find authors where they want to consume ~all.

Regardless it seems to me that all of these sole proprietor subscription models are contingent on being generally interested in that person‘s average output whereas the past was faceted meta-aggregation over all producers which I think made it work.

TFNA3• 17 days ago

Substack blogging is very different from old-school blogging. The Substack culture puts much more emphasis on writing daily in order to maintain engagement, and to closely target those daily posts to a market that will open its wallets. And not necessarily because that market is being well informed but because it finds cultural validation in the writer's views. The result is that a lot of successful Substack bloggers are essentially repeating the same basic talking points again and again, never saying anything really new or substantial.

Ever talk to a YouTuber who started out hoping to share detailed info on the things they were personally passionate about, but then felt pressure to tailor their stuff to the algorithm and water it down in order to maintain any audience at all? Substack is the same economy.

skybrian• 17 days ago

There's zero overlap between this list and the blogs I read. Looking over the list, there seem to be a lot of "mommy blogs?"

xp844• 17 days ago

“These hundred authority sites and blogs were chosen back in 2022 as they appeared in “bloggers who make six figures” roundups that the entire creator economy circulated”

AznHisoka• 17 days ago

Mommy bloggers was probably the most ludicrous niche back then. Tons of consumer companies wanted to pay them to promote their product or have a “giveaway”

Invictus0• 17 days ago

s/ludicrous/lucrative

nozzlegear• 17 days ago

And if "mommy" content is no longer popular in blog form, then, anecdotally, it's found a new, lucrative medium in short-form videos a la Tiktok.

zkmon• 17 days ago

The era that existed before blogging, wasn't that bad. So nothing to be concerned about. Less stuff to read and comprehend. Recipes, traveling, DIY? They are good, It is not like someone pouring out all their views and thoughts on you.

CSMastermind• 17 days ago

Substack is doing just fine. Blogging didn't collapse, a bunch of spammy get rich quick types were a flash in the pan as expected.

asmodeuslucifer• 17 days ago

For more than a decade, one of the most rewarding blueprints for making money online was to “start a blog.“

I can't believe this sentence exists.

higginsniggins• 17 days ago

They all moved to Substack.

vachina2• 17 days ago

From a consumer’s POV, Substack usually signals the article is trash (because the incentive is money instead of making good content)

zerobees2• 17 days ago

I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn?

Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashion or travel. A lot of this has moved onto Instagram and TikTok as a byproduct of people using phones as their primary "content consumption" devices.

But I think the internet in general is moving away from bespoke, homebrew content. This is very visible even on HN, where the daily line-up contains corporate and university press releases + newspaper articles about as often as it contains personal blogs.

pessimizer2• 17 days ago

If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on.

This is a far more dubious hypothetical. I imagine that the top 100 of anything (that a lot of people do) that brings in income or fame will still be there in 5 years. They're the most successful, most profitable of the bunch. How many of the top 100 companies in terms of revenue do you imagine will disappear in 5 years? I'd guess around 0.0%.

"People move on" is a meaningless statement. Why were there so many colon cancer deaths over the past 5 years? Well, people move on. Why do people move on?

Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money

i.e. blogging, which once brought in money, doesn't seem to as much anymore. Why?

pinkmuffinere• 17 days ago

I imagine that the top 100 of anything (that a lot of people do) that brings in income or fame will still be there in 5 years.

This sort of blanket assumption is exactly what the parent is arguing against. The mortality rate of top-n things is relatively easy to measure, and should be baselined first. Then we can compare recent performance vs historical performance, and actually say if something has changed. There's no need to start with the assumption "not much changes over 5 years" -- it can be measured instead.

ijk2• 17 days ago

If we use the S&P 500 as a proxy for the top 500 companies, I would guess that a lot more than 0% will be gone by the end of 5 years.

It's hard to find non-paywalled sources for business analysis, but from what I can find it'd be about 20%.

alephnerd• 17 days ago

Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashion or travel. A lot of this has moved onto Instagram and TikTok as a byproduct of people using phones as their primary "content consumption" devices

This needs to be repeated ad nauseum on HN.

For most people (especially those not working in jobs which require heavy amounts of writing, analysis, and reading), text is NOT the default method with which they interact and communicate information.

TikTok, IG reels, YouTube shorts, longer form YouTube content, podcasts, television, etc all feel "easier" and more "natural" for the vast majority of people.

bobthepanda2• 17 days ago

Audio is just easier to multitask with than reading.

mananaysiempre• 17 days ago

Why does it need to be repeated? It is clear enough that the blogging era was a bit of an atypical period, that much is true; but why, on a website called Hacker News, should I need to care about what most people choose to do with their lives? Yes, in reality it’s partly VC News, but the mandate is intellectual curiosity, which most people have had beaten out of them by the time they were fourteen. Some amount of disdain for what most people end up doing by default, for what’s normal, etc., is absolutely instrumental to not having that happen to you.

(For what little it’s worth, and in the spirit of aforementioned curiosity: nausea gives you ad nauseam; with some caveats, a Latin noun in the singular governed by the preposition ad gets the ending -m while retaining the final vowel of its stem.)

coldtea3• 17 days ago

TikTok, IG reels, YouTube shorts, longer form YouTube content, podcasts, television, etc all feel "easier" and more "natural" for the vast majority of people.

That's not exactly neutral though, but part of a larger theme of regression from literacy to a visual and oral culture (and a dopamine seeking junky one).

inigyou6• 17 days ago

Video feels easier to consume but is it really easier to produce one that people find easy to consume?

Zak• 17 days ago

The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text.

Video outcompeting text as a mainstream medium for both information and entertainment is as old as television. Youtube would be a more reliable way to make money than a blog in 2026 even if it was primarily consumed on TVs or PCs.

coldtea3• 17 days ago

The phones part is a red herring here. Phones work fine for reading text.

Not as "fine working" as a book or a magazine or even a PC - not with 10 other districtions available in the form of different apps (and sending notifications), and not with that small of a screen.

Is that really controversial?

heavenlyblue4• 17 days ago

Your post is a red herring, some platforms simply replaced bespoke blogging websites. How would I, without any special services, consume multiple blogs today? It's so much easier with instagram/social media.

inigyou6• 17 days ago

We did have that. What was Mythbusters if not a YouTube show?

coldtea3• 17 days ago

I find this study a bit weird because it doesn't really establish a baseline. If you look at "top 100" blogs in year n, I imagine that many of them will be dead in year n + 5 simply because people move on. So are we looking at the evidence of blogging going extinct, or just at the natural churn?

It's still interesting to see that "top 100" hugely succesful blogs can go so much down, even if it's "natural churn".

Then there's the fact that blogs in the "Top 100" are big business (money wise), often established for a decade or more, and have enough subscribers/viewers to spare. So unlikely to just be "dead" in n+5, just declining (which this tracks).

Also note that this specifically focuses on blogs designed to make money and dealing with general-interest stuff like fashion or travel. A lot of this has moved onto Instagram and TikTok as a byproduct of people using phones as their primary "content consumption" devices.

So? That's an explanation for the drop. The post tracks the drop itself.

tayo42• 17 days ago

Ranking number one no longer even guarantees you're the source the AI quotes.

I noticed Google's AI summary seems to link to seemingly obscure videos occasionally.

It Will be interesting to see what happens to YouTube once AI turns it All to text and indexes it. Efficiently viewing YouTube must be at odds with how they want you to keep watching

zerobees2• 17 days ago

I suspect you're projecting too much meaning into it. I routinely get TikTok "citations" on science questions. I think it's more or less the LLM making up after-the-fact justifications for what it says by picking something out of a hat.

jefftk3• 17 days ago

No mention of Substack? Making money from paying subscribers has different trade-offs than making money from ads, but my read is that mostly traffic moved vs evaporated. But I do expect this to change further with AI, where as the author says, a blog needs to add something new and not just try to answer a question someone might search for.

There's also no discussion of how blogging has always been somewhat frothy: picking the successful blogs (by any metric) and then checking back later is almost guaranteed to show a decrease. A fair comparison would show the top blogs now vs then, or even better the overall landscape (but that's a ton of work).

watwut3• 17 days ago

Result of ai will be that there will be no blogs. No one will find blogs and if someone writes one, search chatbot will just copy it.

So, eventually no one will write them.

krapp3• 17 days ago

Blogs will still exist. They will be more difficult to find, just as everything not LLM generated will be more difficult to find, and people will just have to accept that everything they put online will be added to the training data of countless LLMs. But that's already the case and it hasn't stopped people from creating things, including blogs, in spite of LLMs. It may be the case that they mostly wind up on federated platforms or on alt-webs like Gemini. People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that.

jefftk3• 17 days ago

Millions of people have signed up to receive blog posts by email with Substack. HCR alone has 3M subscribers. While AI replaces "here's common knowledge repackaged" blogs, people still care what the authors they trust think.

Now maybe sometime soon AI replaces that too, but I think by that point we're talking about "automation of the majority of human intellectual labor" and are well beyond blogs in particular.

jillesvangurp• 17 days ago

Substack, Medium, Tumblr, etc. absorbed a lot of the blogging crowd. And of course we have hordes of people throwing AI slop at each other on Linkedin. Tumblr and Medium are of course a bit past their prime at this point. That's what happens to VC funded companies after they fail to take over the world. Might happen to Substack as well.

Add to that Bluesky, Mastodon, X, Threads, etc. and you have a very fragmented space of people exchanging content at each other.

It's not so much that blogging is dead but that it got overtaken by other platforms that aren't necessarily much better. And the fragmentation hurts distribution. And commercialization, injects a lot of bad incentives into the whole space that rewards people that are mostly just very loud and uninteresting.

A lot of the blogging tools still work fine. It's not that hard to accumulate lists of interesting RSS feeds. Mastodon actually has RSS feeds, BTW. It can double as a blogging platform.

It's just that it all competes for attention and some people are a bit too loud. At this point, the signal to noise ratio is pretty terrible for an unfiltered list of blogs these days. That was fine when people moderated themselves. But now that they don't, it's hard to filter out all the noise. And the commercial algorithms don't help much as they tend to favor click bait rather than substance.

d4rkp4ttern• 17 days ago

I’m curious why many tech bloggers choose Substack, when it’s almost trivial to set up your own blog with infinitely more style control, and math/syntax-highlighting etc.

jefftk3• 16 days ago

Substack handles emailing and payments well. Many people want to receive posts by email, which is a pain to do on your own with high deliverability. Some are willing to pay for it, and payments are similarly annoying (and benefit from a familiar interface, which Substack now provides).

singhrac• 17 days ago

This article was AI generated and a waste of time. So many obvious LLM patterns that I stopped reading 10% of the way down the page.

iamflimflam1• 17 days ago

Agreed - having played a lot with AI content generation - it's impossible not to recognise it.

What's annoying is that you can put effort in and de-AI something. But it takes work. And no one wants to put the time in.

inigyou6• 17 days ago

A perfect mirror of the whole blogging-for-money space then

pessimizer2• 17 days ago

https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/the-great...

We believe that this document is a mix of AI-generated, and human-written content: 78% AI likelihood

Hard_Space3• 17 days ago

Yes, it was polluted with multiple 'Not just [x] but [y]' examples - the most obvious tell of AI-generated text, among other aggravating examples. It was hard to read, but I was interested enough in the subject to slog through it.

Tomte• 17 days ago

"A straightforward, honest, zealous officer doing his duty in the most laborious manner—that’s my style. No Frills. No fancy work. Just honest perspiration. Stolid and a bit stupid—that‘s my ticket."

Agatha Christie, 1936

roadbuster• 17 days ago

Looking at the categories should tell you what happened (lifestyle & fashion, finance, travel, parenting, food & recipes):

They moved to Youtube/Instagram/TikTok for better reach, a larger, total audience, and improved monetization

hn_throwaway_997• 17 days ago

Given the topic of the article, it is deeply ironic that one of the sites whose traffic cratered 99% was "Adam Enfroy teaches how to grow successful blogs with AI". Apparently not.

I say this not just to be snarky (OK, maybe a little bit), but a lot of the content on these blogs was just bad, e.g. hawking get rich quick schemes where the author obviously was giving bad advice.

graemep• 17 days ago

The articles does say

The blog-as-a-business model, involving publishing, ranking, monetizing clicks, and repeating the cycle, is dead. Not dying but dead

It is about a particular type of directly profit making blog business model:

The recipe was pretty straightforward: publish helpful content, rank it on Google, and monetize that traffic with affiliate marketing and ads.

hn_throwaway_997• 17 days ago

Understood, I think the ironic part is the adamenfroy.com site appears to have pivoted from "make money with the blog-as-business model" to "scale your business with AI" (whatever that means), i.e. chasing the latest buzzword.

All of these "paid short courses so you can make tons of passive income", which were a sizable number of the blogs on this article's list, are invariably pyramid/grifter scams, whether it's Trump University, "learn Amazon drop shipping", "real estate investing", yada yada. The course proprietor makes a lost more money than any of their clients ever do.

latentframe• 17 days ago

This also shows why brand matters more than ever : people that search your name is a much stronger signal than chasing keyword

holoduke• 17 days ago

The only place for me to consume information is this place, some reddits and yes my Claude cli. I know you guys thinking. But it's how it is. I don't use any other medium anymore. I am thinking of ditching reddit. The bubble toxicity is too much there.

Bender2• 17 days ago

I know my little crappy blog does not count but I am curious if any others do something similar to me. When interest wanes I take the articles offline, destroy the VM and edit them offline for some period of time until there may be interest and then I put them back up on a different domain so that archive sites become disjointed and disconnected from it to bury my edits of typos and such. This allows my articles to (d)evolve with me as I, the internet platforms, society and other things change.

falsemyrmidon• 17 days ago

That seems like a lot of effort to go through

Bender2• 17 days ago

That seems like a lot of effort to go through

I create and destroy VM's all the time. It only takes a few minutes to set it back up and that's without any automation. Perhaps others share your view and I am the only one that does this. No sense in wasting money on a VM that will just sit idle and maybe get a hit or two per day from real people that is as I block most bots and all search engines [1].

[1] https://nochan.net/b/Internet-Crap/20260606-How-To-Block-Som...

vachina2• 17 days ago

I guess this is a sign Google Search is working as it should? Demote spam and surface high value information.

torton• 17 days ago

In the age of AI, interchangeable content farms that earn pennies by filling 80% of the screen with ads are dead. In fact, the user hostility of those "blogs" is what pushes people even further towards AI interfaces that output what matters up top and (for now) without ads.

nicbou5• 16 days ago

Good websites are suffering the same fate though.

Loic3• 17 days ago

You know what? I cannot care less if people are not reading blogs anymore. I reactivated my blog because it is a lot of fun to write, a lot of fun to take the time to put down my ideas, try to correctly formulate them, fighting with my crappy English or German (and the loss of my French).

So, you can move on, you can go fully away from the blogosphere (it was a word, 20 years ago), this will not change that I am happy writing my ideas/thoughts down, for me.

Forgeties793• 17 days ago

I think it is very good and healthy to not care too much about readership numbers, but you seem pretty high on your pedestal here - you still publish it to the public, you still seek an audience. If you’re doing it just for you, then why are you hosting a blog For the world to see? Surely there is some part of you that wants people to read it, otherwise you wouldn’t, right?

Loic3• 17 days ago

Just knowing that people could read my blog is forcing me to take better care of my writing. This is the most important reason. And only my friends and family know the address, it is not indexed :-D

loloquwowndueo2• 17 days ago

Dunno man, sometimes I blog stuff I want to remember (how to do task X or Y, some arcane ffmpeg incantation, recipes, etc) and when I need it, it’s easier to find it in my public blog which is accessible from anywhere, vs. it being a file buried in some computer I have to sit in front of, or somewhere in a shared drive I have to authenticate to, etc.

For some things there is value in them being publicly accessible even if nobody but me cares or uses them.

nottorp• 17 days ago

But you seem to be writing, not "creating content". Nothing in the article applies to you.

squidbeak• 17 days ago

I've been reading a set of bloggers for 20 years and all but one are all still at it, though one moved a few years ago onto Substack, which ended his RSS feed.

They don't seem to receive high traffic, but they're damn good blogs - which seems to me like a better form of 'success' than any amount of popularity. After all you can find the herd's footprints around all kinds of pointless shit.

unshepper• 17 days ago

Substack does support rss, though they don't link it anywhere. Just add /feed on the end of the url.

firefoxd• 17 days ago

I consider blogging to be similar to the music industry. To me if AI fully takes over the music industry, I don't see it as a bad thing because I don't think there is a shortage of music in the first place. You could literally listen to a different song from a different artist for the rest of your life. The industry is saturated.

In 2020, I was getting an insane amount of visitors from Google on my blog. Today, Google doesn't bring more than a hundred a day. Yet search impressions are higher than ever. It felt like a failure on my part, but then we always talk about the small web and what happens when the websites become two commercial. Despite the thousands of AI blogs that regurgitate whatever gets posted on HN, we get to read so many good small blogs right here. Blogging is still a fun practice, and I encourage people to do it, even it's only to help them refine the ideas in their mind.

Earw0rm• 17 days ago

Nope, sorry.

As someone who cares about music, there may be a superabundance of adequate, filler-level stuff which AI can adequately substitute for.

But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff.

There's only one Stevie Wonder, and only a handful of great albums of his. There have been similarly valuable talents since, across different styles and genres.

The industry is saturated at the B tier, sure. But without a market for that stuff, how are the labels supposed to grow and develop the few-times-in-a-generation talent that matters?

another_twist• 17 days ago

Same sentiment here. B-tier hit factory stuff is easy to catch and easier to ignore and move on from. Also happy to recognize a fellow Stevie Wonder fan.

aboardRat44• 15 days ago

But for any given mood, moment or taste, there's only a finite amount of A-grade stuff.

This finite amount is still enormous. I have downloaded many gigabytes of music from rutracker, and I don't think I'll get through it by the day I'm dead.

KennyBlanken2• 17 days ago

It's been pretty well proven that social media companies punish posts with links.

Social media was once hailed as how you attract readers, but social media platforms are interested in either a)revenue or b)keeping people on their platform. A link to someone's blog doesn't help with that.

jbvlkt• 17 days ago

I cannot stand writing style of this page. I have read almost half and the most important thing they say is, that I will learn later. Ok, I will never know.

CapitalistCartr• 17 days ago

If I write a detailed explanation of some industrial electrical detail in some electrician forum, perhaps one or two people will upvote it. If I write some very general, snarky comment in a general forum, I'll get hundreds to thousands of upvotes. Blogs are the same. An excellent niche blog might churn along for many years, but few will ever know it exists, and it won't get on one of these surveys. A clever, popular blog, written to get big quickly, and heavily promoted by the author, will get on all the lists. And most of them won't last five years.

peterdemin• 17 days ago

“The hard truth is” an AI slop tell, which the whole article is

worik2• 17 days ago

The era of building websites solely for Google traffic and monetizing them through ads and affiliate marketing has ended.

Yay!

Quite an assertion, I hope it is true

inigyou6• 17 days ago

Sadly it's only true because Google itself replaced that entire business sector with its own AI overviews

worik2• 15 days ago

That entire business sector is a cess pit of SEO slop.

Good riddence

economistbob• 17 days ago

Everyone removed their blogroll. That is what happened. Someone gave Automattic (WordPress foundation that could receive "donations" from advertising platforms) the idea that making blogs mostly discoverable via paid advertising was a good idea. Automattic removed the blogroll by default, and then most of the blogs removed, and then most of the blogs vanished. Blogs were discovered via the huge list of other blogs. There were so many incredible blogs. One could then check all their linked blogroll blogs because birds of a feather flocked together...

Automatic became an NGO. A big advertising seller paid the NGO lots of money. The NGO removed blogrolls so that blogs were discoverable by paid advertising instead of word of mouth. Countless blogs also removed their blogrolls, and blogging declined.

That is one more thing that Google has done to destroy the web that gave birth to it. That happened around 2012.

Also, old blogs were like having a subject matter expert as your personal mentor via correspondence. Those new blogs would have been called content farms in the days of the blogroll. Search back then was based on keywords and boolean. You could type "NOT youtube" and no youtube would fill your results. The top blogs are content farms by the old standards.

Google removed the ability to use boolean search to get exactly what you want based on text content, and then they removed the blogrolls via bankrolling the WordPress developers. Now the top content farmers get top billing on every search engine, which requires marketing spend, the blogrolls are niche structures, and you cannot boolean your way to a real set of search results.

https://mor10.com/newspack-automattic-google-and-the-saasifi...

65102• 17 days ago

Blog search was good, Technorati was good, google reader was good.

But I agree, if it doesn't have a blogroll it is safe to ignore the blog. It might even be considered the single identifier that separates the blogs from the spam.

smitty1e2• 17 days ago

I went with feedly whe Google reader died.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r• 17 days ago

It’s always “safe to ignore” a blog because there’s seldom actual negative consequences for doing so. If you want to use such a silly, absurd heuristic, feel free to pay the opportunity cost. Pointless nostalgia-driven web surfing at its finest.

jl6• 17 days ago

Yeah, money ruins everything. I’ve recently enjoyed blogs on Gemini (the protocol, not the AI), which is massively unpopular even by its own low peak in ~2021. In other words, it’s a perfect haven. I hesitate to tell anyone.

krapp3• 17 days ago

I think literally everyone who cares about Geminispace is already here on HN so I wouldn't worry about it.

johnnyApplePRNG• 17 days ago

I thought the number was going to be like 5 or 7 blogs remaining after 4 years... 21 actually seems pretty healthy, given general blogevity imho.

mobilene• 17 days ago

I find myself irritated by this article because its headline is about how blogging has collapsed, but you have to get into the article to find that it's only the blogs that were gaming SEO to make a buck that have collapsed. Those blogs deserved to die.

I've had a personal blog for 19 years. I write about my special interests: old cameras, old roads, old buildings. And whatever else comes to mind. My search traffic has been steady for years.

Finnucane• 17 days ago

Lileks is still going. What else matters?

didntknowyou• 17 days ago

blogging was like a diary, mostly authentic with people just primarily focused on sharing. some with banner ads on the site to get pocket change.

then with substack, social media monetisation, etc everything became income focus. writers got taken over by influencers and content became focused on grabbing attention. didn' take long for readers to leave after that.

alexpotato• 17 days ago

There used to be great writing in magazines and people paid for those.

In fact, Playboy is famous for having excellent authors write articles or do serials. This is my favorite example of "you can be 'good' at two wildly different disciplines"

unsungNovelty2• 17 days ago

Most of the type of blogs this article talks about is exactly what I would ignore. Looks more like Google stopped playing the SEO game and is looking for authentic content. Or atleast is cutting down the noise for whatever reason.

QQ00• 16 days ago

My conclusion was the same. So many blogs hyperoptimize for SEO but 1 change from ranking algorithm decimated them all.

nicbou5• 16 days ago

Nope. The effect described affects all websites. I wrote about my case a month ago, and many people have reached out in private to commiserate.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai

unsungNovelty2• 10 days ago

Thanks for sharing. I think business tied with google is definitely taking a hit. I agree.

And with those kind of websites comment, I meant heavily SEO optimised website. Their content and website are for Google search engine. Not for humans.

Also, I am coming from indieweb POV which isn't about making business out of it. But I do empathise with indie businesses such as yourself. Hope things get better for you.

gnoll_of_gozag• 17 days ago

this is about commerical blogs but what i miss more are the more casual ones

cohost was great for this. you could see the creator of tcrf just postin out there having a basic day. and the next post could either be an elaborate shitpost or a long read on the inner workings of the nes

ive checked out bubbles town and bearblog but it feels just like a worse doomscroll than social media and the people there are kinda lame.

maurits2• 17 days ago

This isn't about blogging per se. Its about commercial product-to-market fit. That market now favors short centralized video content.

nicbou5• 16 days ago

Access to that market is controlled by a monopoly, and that monopoly is now putting AI generated content and ads above competitors.

This is in the article.

philipwhiuk• 17 days ago

Lovely bit of AI "art" to caption this one.

jdw64• 17 days ago

Personally, I think now might be a good time to run a personal homepage

TomMasz• 17 days ago

I was around when blogging started and I've seen a lot of blogs come and go. The web was a much different place then and it was easier to attract and hold an audience than it is now. It's still possible to have a successful blog but it will never be as easy as it was in 2000.

vivzkestrel• 16 days ago

- let me tell you my problem on HN

- my life is too short

- far too many of you write blogs

- i dont have the luxury to sit and read every single post of every single blog in here

- at the same time i have a fear of missing out

- most blogs have 1 or 2 good articles but rest are either something I am not interested in or mediocre at best

- i have been thinking for a while on how to solve this problem because i have 10000 bookmarks on my bookmark list and it grows every single day

- perhaps one way is to ask the person to define a set of criteria as to what makes a post worth reading and have an LLM run that criteria on every single blog post of every single blog ever made

- for example, a criterion could look like this

- "find me any blog with aricles atleast 2000 words in length on python revolving around any python topic but give higher weightage to performance optimization, benchmarks, data science related libraries like pandas, polars, with atleast 4 code snippets, by an author who posts atleast once a month and has written atleast 2 articles in the last 2 years and has linked a github repo to code samples and uses interactive css animations to explain their ideas"

nicbou5• 16 days ago

This is happening to my website. It is locally famous and beloved. I do not sell nonsense or pester users and every wrote is written by a human. Now traffic is down 75% from two years ago. LLMs and AI overviews are wrecking me.

https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/death-by-ai

maurits2• 14 days ago

I have a blog because I like having a blog. It has made me neither rich nor famous.

Most prolific visitor is probably my mom and some bot out of Singapore.

kelvinjps10• 14 days ago

I think Google is not longer the main driver but social media and sites where you submit links like hacker news and Reddit

The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?

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