WTF Happened to Blogs

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?

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.

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.

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".

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

>> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

https://bearblog.dev/discover

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.

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.)

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)

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.

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.

GOogle happened and seo-garbage, like you say.

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).

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.

The content in blogs moved to social media, mostly.

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.

Social media gobbled up the distribution

Monetization