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by moate 1769 days ago
IDK what blogs you're reading, but many of those sites are a confederation of ads with small islands of content interspersed between.

Many bloggers are trying to do it as a way to gain income at this point, and the ads are either all over the site or inserted directly into the "content".

2 comments

I think OPs original point was more of a circa-2005 blog, which would be nice. But your point is equally as valid. Try searching for a recipe for your favorite dish - the first two pages are blog posts each filled with incessant chatter about how the dish makes them feel. You have to scroll to the very bottom just to get the actual recipe.
The Livejournal era has passed. You can't go back to that on a platform because platforms will continue to be for profit and nobody is going to pay for you to host their blog so you need ads to make the business viable.

The other option is everyone spinning up and hosting their own sites, which will not happen because Helen the mommy blogger has 2 kids to deal with and photos to edit and content to write so she does not also want to learn how to set up hosting and write HTML.

I'd like for certain things to "go back to the way they were" but that's just not how it works usually.

Well, like mine, which is completely about me and my thoughts with zero ads, and I share and discuss whatever I want https://safetyinsolitude.blogspot.com/ This is what I send to people if they want to know my digital self.

So yeah, mentality needs to change to stop seeking revenue out of everything...

The issue is that some people want to blog for a living (and there's nothing wrong with that IMO) which leads the platforms to optimize for that. I don't think enough people are willing to spin up their own self-hosted blogs just to throw their thoughts into the aether. Not when points to what the internet has become exists and they can get the engagement/dopamine they want elsewhere.

That's not to say your prediction is wrong, just feels extremely unlikely, barring some massive regulatory upheaval changing the internet's current paradigm.