[filmgirlcw]

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.

[souterrain]

> 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.

[SquishyPanda23]

> Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation.

I think this is very close to the heart of why decentralization hasn't worked (yet?)

Try to design a decentralized system that is resistant to abuse, and really think through the loopholes as an attacker would.

It's very difficult.

Decentralization is little villages. Little villages are weak and they gain strength against their common enemies as they band together.

So there's a natural force toward centralization that isn't countered by anything but a lot of slogging through the engineering challenges of trying to make decentralization work.

[SllX]

Decentralization works all the time in meatspace, but when you have a wide open channel of information anywhere, it tends to get flooded with lots of bad information.

Email spam is the obvious one. Algorithmically promoted conspiracy crap was the less obvious less predictable one that bit YouTube and other services and is much harder to police because it turns out the police are also just as biased and dumb as the people they're trying to police, just in different ways.

Someday the Internet will be filled with programs flooding the Internet with increasingly sophisticated malformed information, and at some point it will probably devolve into an arms race of these programs trying to con the other programs. I think Anathem had a passage in there about this, "insanity programs" or something to that effect, can't really remember, but until that day, you'll have to actually pay people to disseminate your own carefully crafted propaganda instead.

Centralized services provide the illusion of safety against this in much the same way urban landscapes do, but there's no substitute to taking responsibility for your own safety, your own hygiene, and your own bullshit.

[kyuudou]

> Someday the Internet will be filled with programs flooding the Internet with increasingly sophisticated malformed information

We've been there for a while now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7dfJ1lZ13g

[gonehome]

A lot of the intent behind Urbit is to solve this (which is why I find it pretty interesting) and push things back towards decentralization.

Basically have a small cost to creating an identity in the network to prevent spam. The system is peer-to-peer where each user has their own 'server' on their local machine which interacts directly with the server's of other users.

It's a pretty neat idea, they recently released their first version.

[souterrain]

Interesting. Seems like a cousin to https://solidproject.org/ but with Ethereum as a sort of identity provider.

[netcan]

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.

[prebrov]

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?)

[type0]

You don't mean microblogging right? I have yet to see a good written blog composed from a mobile phone.

[prebrov]

Genre-binding naming conventions are exactly the problem.

"Blog" originally stood for "web log", and as such didn't put any constraints or expectations on the media format, length, or quality. At some point format-specific platforms came in, artificially fragmented self-publishing into "microblogging", "photoblogging", "videoblogging", and took it over.

Not everything has to be a well written article, but blogging relinquished "just thinking out loud" type of publishing to mobile-first social networking walled gardens, and it's a real shame and a loss.

Shift to mobile is a massive contributor. Many newcomers to the internet are mobile first, and either don't have permanent access to desktop computers at all, or just couldn't be bothered.

And I don't see many blogging platforms that take this audience seriously. Wordpress seems to be the only one that has a mobile app at all.

[filmgirlcw]

Right — and the WordPress app has taken years to get semi-decent. There was a third-party WP app that WordPress acquired/acqhired many years ago that was excellent (it was the only app that allowed me to access a very customized WP backend with custom fields and other configurations so I could edit work posts back in the day), but the best features were never brought over to the main WP app and WP has evolved now so those features wouldn’t even be useful.

Tumblr has a great mobile app — as I said in my initial post, it was actually on top of the mobile trend — but none of the other blogging platforms do. They assume a response web page will work and it won’t — or that you’ll be creating a new file and kicking of a CI/CD build pipeline for a static site — which still doesn’t help if you just want to write an update or post a photo from your phone.

Even easy web builders like Squarespace and Wix and the like have, frankly, subpar mobile options.

You can’t blame people for just deciding to use Facebook or Instagram.

[m-localhost]

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!

[filmgirlcw]

I still lament the days before Tumblr got rid of RSS feed imports. I know why that happened (spam), but it was so nice to be able to help build kind of a curated feed of activity from all over.

But I agree that Tumblr remains a gem. I’m glad Automattic bought it and agreed to continue to support its staff and development.

[devit]

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.