If you want to see more high quality blog posts, then I highly recommend taking actions to help promote and encourage them. Sign up for a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed when you find a blog that consistently produces quality material. Post new or old content on Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Twitter, and other communities where you think they would be a good fit. Upvote and retweet quality content that you run across, and flag stuff that's blatantly marketing spam. Leave comments on the blog or reach out to the author over email. Even as a single individual, these sort of actions have a much bigger impact than you might expect.

I used to blog extensively, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. The content I would write was loosely for marketing purposes, but I put a lot of effort into generating high quality content that I would genuinely enjoy reading myself. An article that I spent 50+ hours on and felt very proud of might have a 30% chance of reaching the front page of Hacker News. A fluffy post with a decent title that I spent only an hour or two on would still have a 10-15% chance of front paging. The way the math works out, it's simply much lower ROI to generate quality content. It's also a bit heartbreaking to invest a lot of time making something for other people to enjoy only for nobody to ever see it.

The second chance queue on Hacker News is a major step in the right direction, and I'm grateful for all the times where my posts were given another chance. A lot of great content still slips through the cracks however, and relatively small actions by community members would go a long way towards helping incentives align towards generating quality content.

Blogging isn't dead but blog discovery basically is. Fifteen years ago (through about 2009, I would say -- about the time Facebook demonstrably took over MySpace), there were tons of services and startups built around blog discovery.

And even into the early 2010s, Tumblr was still a thriving community that paid host to many different different subcultures and demographics (whereas today, Tumblr is largely fandom).

But now? The spammers helped murder the pingback/trackback -- RSS is still alive but it is often hidden and isn't even always a default for various static site blogging engines -- not to mention the lengths web browsers go to to deny that RSS even exists -- and the art of finding quality like-minded blogs of any size, is incredibly difficult.

Google had a blog search part of its search engine but shut that down nearly a decade ago. (Frankly, the fact that Google keeps Blogger running is sort of amazing, although I would be shocked if more than one or two full time employees worked on it -- I have to assume all the maintenance is done by vendors and contractors.)

Moreover, we've moved our communications to silos that don't allow for easy syndication (you haven't been able to auto-publish your blog/website to Facebook for years, for instance) or to formats (video), that are reliant on major giants (YouTube, Twitch, and to a lesser but growing extent, TikTok) rather than a user's own platform -- and that require a much higher barrier to entry for creators than blogging ever did. Way more people consumed blog content than ever regularly made their own blog -- but now it's even greater.

But beyond the various platform silos and the move away from decentralized to closed social network behemoths, blogging also never properly embraced mobile. The act of blogging on mobile was too difficult for too long (Tumblr being the one exception), while Facebook and Twitter were quick to become mobile-first (and in Twitter's case, was originally designed for mobile).

Blogging isn't dead but the curation and discovery tools that made it really take off in the 2000s is.

As someone who owes their entire career to blogging, this makes me sad. But it is what it is.

Get out of the software development blogging bubble. Spend 3 minutes looking at each of the following: Look at woodworking blogs, recipe blogs, gardening blogs.

One thing you'll note is that those are all filled with a shit fuck ton of ads and are completely unusable.

I know this because my wife wades through that stuff and the only way she can is by using a blocker. I don't use a blocker because very few of the software specific websites I visit have ads (generally).

Recipe blogs are the worst - here's a sample from pinch of yum:

https://imgur.com/A4e53R5

We're overly attached to a specific idea of a "blog". In practice, "web logging" never died, even if the specific blog format has diminished over time.

Blogs are websites that host posts in chronological order, but defined in a very specific way that excludes your Facebook and Twitter. The difference isn't self-hosting - Blogger and Wordpress.com host your blog. I reckon the difference is aggregation. Facebook groups your posts with posts from everyone else. They get to curate individual feeds. People with money get to bypass the curation a little.

Don't get me wrong, I have my own blog (link in profile) and I deleted my Facebook account years ago. But quite honestly, the format is less usable than having centralized aggregators that float the most popular content to the top. This is why we're all on Hacker News, right? The act of having the aggregator allows extra features to be overlayed, like community discussion. Are aggregators the "best" format by every metric? No, but it allows me to read content I like without doing a lot of work, so here I am.

It all changed when marketing firms latched onto "blogging"

Now it's sadly the case a lot of blogs don't have a lot of content, are full of SEO boilerplate, with click-bait headlines instead of being interesting or well written. Some blogs are great, well-written lead ins that end with "to get the end of this story, contact our sales person for a demo!". Or there's the form that pops up that really, really wants your email address for a GREAT newsletter!

I think when a company has a 'blog' it really needs to fulfill a contract of actually providing useful, interesting content. It's the only way, honestly, your brand will build long term trust. Otherwise don't call it a 'blog' call it 'marketing information' or something...

I still had that previous article the author references in another tab[2].

Yes, use an RSS Reader. RSS is not dead[0]. Hackernews often has blog posts. If you see a post you like, go to the main page and see if you like any of the other posts. If it's a blog you think you want to follow, subscribe to it. If, after a few months, you find none of the articles are interesting and often mark them all read, then just unsubscribe.

If you blog, cross-promote it on Reddit, Twitter, your FB page (although if you don't use Twitter/FB often, it'll be just a trickle of clicks[1], but it's better than nothing), etc. Try not to use another platforms just to promote you. If you see blog posts you like, be sure to promote them!

Maybe use one of your RSS reader apps just to dump one of those huge github aggregated blog lists with like 500 tech and personal blogs. You can scroll through it when you're bored and see if there's anything interesting and mark the rest as read.

Maybe setup your own Solr server to index every blog you come across just for the hell of it? (I've been meaning to do this forever!) The big search engines aren't good at showing us blogs, so maybe it's up to us to find and promote them?

[0]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-so...

[1]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-e...

[2]: http://tttthis.com/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-t...

There are many blogs today but when (many) people say they miss the old days of blogging, it is mostly not about the number of blogs.

Back then, there was a huge community around blogs. That community has moved to Twitter and other places. Previously, people would comment on blogs and if you are a frequent reader of a blog, you would recognize a lot of people who comment there and you may even become friends with them. Constructive comments have moved away from the blogs and are now on Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit etc.

There used to be services specifically around the blogging space, like Technorati (and even StumbleUpon to an extent).

I also feel, and this might just be me, people have started associating purpose with mediums. If you want to post silly or just casual stuff, you post it on Twitter. If you have something really valuable and on brand, you post it on your blog. People used to post everything to their blogs because that's where they could previously share their thoughts.

I don't think the volume of blogging decreased. It probably increased.

The reason some people think blogging is dead is because the blog "signal" is much, much quieter than the social media "noise." It's a question of comparative volume.

Blogging is not dead, it's just being rapidly made obsolete by commenting.

Comments are everywhere. Total volume of comments on the internet compared to blogs is larger by several orders of magnitude. Readership is up, everything has comments. Comments don't care about SEO, or money, or fame, that makes them one of the purest forms of content you can find on the internet. You could argue that some sites have people commenting for fame because of karma systems, but ultimately that karma means nothing. Very few comments have ever "gone viral" the way a blog or youtube or tiktok video tries so hard to. Comments are like graffiti; ephemeral, and meant to be enjoyed in the moment you stumble across them. Very few comments make any kind of money for their author the way a blog does.

Marketing firms have not latched onto comments yet the way they latch onto blogs. But when they do, it's over.

"X is alive / X is dead" is binary thinking and taking sides on this is pointless and divisive. Better to use a float rather than a boolean to model how popular something is.

> We also have webmentions, so, if bloggers start using it, it will help us find other's blogs.

My informal research [1] shows approximately zero adoption of webmention. For 44 blog posts I have written in the past two years, I did not have a single external link to a host that would support it.

[1] https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2020/01/checking...

I've tried blogging in the past, but have since given up on it. I found that I was putting in a lot of time and effort to have my work read by maybe 3-5 people and came to the conclusion that I had nothing interesting or worthwhile to contribute or say, nor am I a person who can compete with the usual horde of twitter-tech-celebrities who seemingly control a majority of the audience.

These days, whether it be blogs or social media, the end goal is becoming less about saying something worthwhile and more about building and maintaining some kind of personal brand. So while I'll continue being another worthless face in the crowd, consuming content, I also won't mourn the death of blogging or any other similar forms.

Blogging is not dead. It is just unevenly discoverable.

And that creates an interesting problem that is still waiting for a solution.

Is it a cultural thing that differs from country to country? Here in Norway, the best paid "influencers" are still bloggers - though they are obviously on all channels these days.

edit: But what I'm trying to get at is, no, at least here - blogs are not dead and forgotten / some esoteric channel for the very few.

The blog discovery story is terrible, which I think is the only thing that would make someone say that blogging is dead. Anyone know of any good solutions for this?

I've been kicking around an idea about manually associating blogs to twitter accounts, and then using twitter follows to create a graph for discovery purposes.

A blogger I used to follow, Steve Pavlina, shut down his forums like in 2011 after 5 years of running them stating that they were always completely irrelevant to his biz model. He's still posting to his blog, daily, having started in 2004. Still going strong after 15 years.

The original article was crap since the author stated "spent an hour trying to find blog and ...nothing" Any reasonable response would have been an hour trying to figure out where the "return" key was is NOT the same thing as an hour spent searching. Blog, by folks that don't give a crap about Googles SEO requirements exist, have existed and will still exist in the future.

I wonder if a dedicated company could build a non-privacy invasive RSS reader that could: (1) show targeted ads based on a user's curated blog feed; (2) Develop a profit-sharing model for those authors that generate the most traffic. I'm kind of thinking like hackernews but (A) user-curated content; and (B) Advertising; and (C) optional subscriptions to support the bloggers. There could of course be a discovery mode to find new blogs, but the default would be user-curated. To ensure payments were significant enough to overcome the micropayment problem, perhaps a "minimum payout" could be set for authors so they could accumulate proceeds (and see some fruits of their labor without having to set up their own individual payment system) even if they couldn't withdraw them yet. If someone really was motivated they might even be able to set this up as a non-profit. Just kind of a brain dump. Thinking of this as "the front page for blogs" by bloggers for bloggers (instead of a big corporation whose primary objective is to generate profits, which is exceedingly difficult with traditional RSS feeds). Fraud and spoofing views would be an obvious challenge of this framework.

I think psychology needs to be taken into account here:

The currency we have right now on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is reputation. There, it's in the form of Followers. That's the very currency that Stack Overflow uses to grow and sustain.

It's "gamified". And the blogosphere needs that, too.

And in a way, blogs have that, but it's in the form of Reddit and HN and some other sites, where people get their karma fix by taking the time to read the blog post (upfront time investment), comment on it (risk losing karma), then get their comment being liked (return on investment), which augment their karma.

(Facebook does not have a Karma system like Reddit or HN has. But if it would, it would make the world a bit more like a certain black mirror episode of season 2.)

Why do you see coders put their reddit+HN profile links on their site? Because they want their reputation/karma/notoriety to follow them in real-life context, so it can be converted as real "notoriety currency". (people looking at their profile will say Gosh, this guy has 2000 points on SO and 4000 points on HN, he must be very smart or influent!).

So my guess is that the reason blogs still exist is because of sites like Reddit, HN, where people can get reputation (and not only knowledge) out of their reading. There's also something satisfying in the act of praising a good post with your friends. It's like watching a good movie and talking about how good it is with your friends.

And blogs also survived because that still being viewed as THE most professional was of expressing one's opinions. It gives you gravitas by default when you have your own blog, compared to having a Twitter / Facebook account like the plebs.

And you get the best of both worlds when you promote your blog posts on social networks.

Didn't think blogging even dying given the number of high quality blog posts from personal blogs / Medium on HN. Some dev.to posts really resemble blog posts as well.

Maybe it's a developer specific culture?

I'd say, there are significantly less high frequency blogs than, say, 10 years ago. One of the reasons for this is the radical decline in means of monetization. In the heyday of blogging, you could do it for living, with just a few non-obtrusive ads. Which has changed a lot. Even, if you would plaster your site with ads, like news outlets, with little room left for actually reading, chances are, you won't see much of a return. As a result, blogging is mostly a hobbyist endeavor (again).

I'd welcome some feedback. I'm hoping to start a blog based around my hobby and findings. It won't be anything ground breaking but I'd like somewhere to put my thoughts and feelings. I feel people may enjoy the content and pictures.

Do you think its worth me creating a blog like this, hoping that one day I could build up an organic following and potentially monetise it?

Content on open platforms like blogs and podcasts has two serious handicaps. First, it doesn't have any built in system for liking, commenting on and sharing content. Second, there is no low-friction way to monetize it except for advertising.

I don't see any easy, scalable solutions to these problems but until they're solved open platforms will cater to niche audiences.

It is kinda dead, not in a way BBS is dead, or even IRC. Anecdotally less and less blogs enable comments or curate the comment spam. I even see some HN users advice their readers to use this site for comments where there previously had a comments section. Certain Disqus'ting services did not help this blogging demise.

Related - see my Ask HN on how to host your own blog without giving it to the centralized blogging services (I won't name):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206094

> But now? The spammers helped murder the pingback/trackback -- RSS is still alive but it is often

Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation. It seems both decentralised mail and content netizens have little choice but to seek shelter with large service providers as a defence from the trash on the net.

I’m not saying the large players have a hand in spam, but they certainly aren’t being harmed by it in the same proportion as the individual hosting their own blog or smtp server.

In some sense, it's financial.

All the stuff you said is true. Spammers did sort of win, at least against the more open media structures. Video did represent a hosting hurdle. On RSS, I feel that it failed^ moreso than it got murdered. That one was quite a blow, considering that (a) I still think it could have succeed, somehow and (b) the tremendous "free internet" value of a success case.

Money isn't everything when it comes to gaining people's attention. What's good counts for a lot. There were a lot of factors to the way things played out.

but.....

The financial difference between now and about the time Facebook demonstrably took over MySpace would a douglas adams to describe it. It accounts for a lot.

I wonder if a wikipedia would be possible today, if somehow a good web encyclopedia didn't exist. I suspect that it wouldn't be. Obviously, the interest and capacity to subvert would be (and is) huge. Possibly enough to prevent a solid start. But, financial realities are also a factor. Wikipedia would probably be a highly funded startup, and the incentives would be totally different.

^Notable exception: podcasts. Also the reason why I think it had (has?) massive potential.

Missing the Mobile boat is a major blow to blogging, the way I see it.

Self-hosted blogging had passed on the format of ad-hoc notes while on the move, and basically ignored the entire category of mobile content creation.

It’s odd and sad to see that the desktop-first authoring trend is actually getting re-enforced these days in indie blogging community, as the tools are getting less and less mobile-friendly (another git-driven file-based Markdown static site generator, anyone?)

Tumblr is imho still the best blogging platform. Wonderful posting experience on mobile. Great API. Actively development. Great inspiration (scroll through vintage photos, art, music, funny stuff and nudes on one dashboard). The only thing that sucks is that public blogs are hidden behind that cookie consent wall. For that I built my blog with php and just query their API. Works well!

Blog discovery is now done on social networks, i.e. you publish an article on your blog (often hosted on Medium), then share it on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, HN and then people find it there and can possibly follow you and get new articles either from the social network or from the blog itself.

I would hesitate to call recipe blogs "blogs." They're ad farms with good SEO and the thinnest veneer of content to get clicks.

There are actual cooking and baking blogs of the quality you see in software where professionals or hobbyists talk about their craft but they won't show up on Google with terms like "$food_name recipe" and it doesn't really make sense for them to. Cooking blogs are for cooking nerds -- people who have notebooks and scrap books full of recipe clippings from old magazines and cake boxes and a shelf of random dog-eared culinary textbooks and recipe anthologies that could knock a person out if you got hit with them. These blogs are full of crappy unflattering photography, zero web design skills, okay-ish writing, and cult-like followings.

Unfortunately, blogs == spam in a lot of the non-technical world.

The /r/woodworking subreddit used to have a strict "no blogs" rule that finally got relaxed to just be more "no blog spam".

I noticed similar problems in Pinterest, where you'll find pins that have beautiful images but lead to spam garbage. So, there might have been a page that was initially hosting the image (probably copied from somewhere else), but then, it gets swapped out with an advertising garbage site. And the pin goes up in popularity because most users just don't care about the backing site.

The wider the potential audience, the bigger the potential for spam. And it sure doesn't seem like there's a great, consistent way to filter spam. Search engines do not appear to have kept pace since the rise of walled garden social networks.

At this point, I would pay for curated, interesting updates. It's just hard to see how a product like that would easy to find these days.

That's a weird double standard.

People say they miss blogs of yesteryear (like in the HN submission in TFA) as if they don't still exist. And then people hold up made-for-ads spamsites, like you, and go "see? blogs are dead!"

Why not use the same standard of yesteryear and find some good blogs.

My thoughts on this topic is that everyone who says they miss blogs just stopped looking for them. Our internet usage patterns have changed. Blogs still exist but we just stay in our Reddit/HN bubble and assume it's just wasteland outside of it. It's a silly mistake and something you see HNers condescendingly accusing the masses of, thinking the internet=Facebook.

I use recipe blogs all the time. I'd guess it's just a matter of choosing the right ones, because they do have ads, but they're hardly unusable — they're better than, say, my local CBS affiliate.

Those aren't blogs, those are businesses. They have a lot more in common with other websites that use content as a motivator for ad revenue. More like awful news websites than just someone writing articles.

I guess it's semantics but I've never considered recipe "blogs" as anything near like rachelbythebay or other plain programming blogs.

These blogs recommend products where in reality it’s an ad in disguised. They recommend the products because they are paid to do so.

I don't think it changed at all. It's not like the old bloggers became marketing bloggers. They didn't change. The marketing blogs just became a new thing, a separate thing.

I don't think I've ever been confused between the two, despite them both being called blogs.

It's pretty obvious that a personal blog is one thing, and a company blog is another. They're both "weblogs", neither has a greater right to the name.

Everything ruined when money get involves. It always dilute the value of something into money making machine 'trend' for some get rich quick marketer, they milk it dry(or try to), often in a spammy, tasteless way, then move on to(ruin) something new. What a shallow society we live in.

I mean this is like the Rock Auto newsletter. It's unabashedly a bunch of sales spiel about their newest discounts, with one fun anecdotal story, a picture of a contestants car, and a pop quiz on obscure car knowledge. I love it!