[nkrisc]

I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all.

Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.

[Baeocystin]

I'd believe it. As an IT consultant, I interact with a lot of people who are semi-techs themselves- mostly small business owners who are used to wearing a lot of hats, and also the type to have been motivated to run their own personal blogs about diving/photography/conlangs/quilting/gardening/whatever their personal hobbies are.

Ten years ago, the majority(!) had at least something up and running, where they would post essays, thoughts, whatever came to mind.

Nowadays? All gone. All! When asked why, the answer almost always is along a mix of ever-increasing negative feedback and harassment from randos, and aggressive automated spamming of their forums. Loss of the pseudo-anonymity plays a large role as well. Many have deleted years' worth of work, simply because they are afraid of someone trolling through their posts to find something to harass them with.

I was never a blogger myself, but I am sad about the change. There was a lot of good stuff out there for a while, and sometimes it just plain made me happy to read someone joyfully nerding out on a favorite subject of theirs.

[nkrisc]

I think a lot of people are still writing this kind of content, but you have to look elsewhere for it: Reddit, Facebook, Twitter; to name the obvious ones. It’s also harder to find, but you can find all kinds of personal content written in comments and posts on these sites.

[Baeocystin]

I realize that this is a hard thing to 'prove', but I am personally certain that the amount and quality of such things has dropped significantly from a decade ago.

Not to zero. You can still find things tucked away in a post on reddit or the like. Almost never, as far as I have experienced, on Facebook or its ilk, as the affordances are different. I genuinely think there has been a loss.

[salawat]

It used to have positive utility, as before you were acquainting with people you would literally have had nil chance of acquainting with before.

Now?

Nope. Putting anything out there is basically just doing the rest of the world's Open Source Intel for them. Maybe it isn't the Net that changed. It's just there's way more sharks out there that can't just leave well enough alone.

[kritiko]

I frequently append site:reddit.com to searches for a niche search term these days. I think a lot of people who would have blogged or commented on blogs are posting there instead.

[bee_rider]

I wonder if they'll do a walled garden after their IPO. I've always found the site pretty useless, outside the 'old.reddit.com' version. On the bright side, maybe this will open up space for one of the federated clones to grow.

[ufo]

I think the bigger issue now is that more content is inside social media "silos" like twitter, instagram or youtube. I don't have the numbers though.

[Volker_W]

Why is this a problem? Can't google index social media silos?

[bluGill]

Which ones. They can index their own, but for the others only the public stuff. Facebook has a lot of things private so nobody can see them except your friends. (they are by no means perfect, but a lot of things are private and only seen by friends - most of it isn't of interest to a search engine anyway but comments of the form "I love X product" could in a perfect world be indexed as a sign of what people find good)

[freeflight]

> I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all.

Most of these many more people are mobile users, where creating long-style text content can be quite bothersome.

What ain't bothersome, with a smartphone, is taking pictures and videos to slap filters over them, alas that's why we are where we are with TicToc, Instagram and Twitter dominating large parts of the web.

It's even noticeable in a lot of online discussions with text outside of these communities; The average length of forum posts feels like it's gotten way shorter over the decades. People have less attention to read anything that looks longer than a few sentences, often declaring it a "wall of text" based on quantity of text alone.

Imho it's a big part of what drives misinformation; Doing any kind of online research on a small phone screen is extremely bothersome compared to the workspace an actual computer/laptop, particularly with multi-monitor, gives.

There's also the difference in attention; When I sit down at my laptop/desktop, I actively decide to spend and focus my attention on that task and device.

While smartphone usage is mostly dominated by short bursts of "can't do anything else right now", I don't chose to take out my phone and surf the web, it's something I do when I'm stuck in some place with nothing else to do and no access to an actual computer.

But for the majority of web-users [0], that smartphone access to the web is all they know, which then ends up heavily shaping the ways they consume and contribute to it.

[0] https://techjury.net/blog/what-percentage-of-internet-traffi...

[denton-scratch]

> TicToc, Instagram and Twitter dominating large parts of the web

For my part, I'm glad these fora aren't indexed well; I don't want my search results dominated by single-sentence posts and photos. In particular, I don't have accounts on any of these services.

I'd be happy if search engines would decline to index sites behind paywalls. Links to Medium, Substack and Washpo are very common, and if the first thing I see is a popup demand for payment, that browser-tab gets closed.

[prox]

I wonder if it would be possible to have a big filter button “commercial” or “non-profit” or something along those lines. So you get results that are not deemed commercial or are.

Don’t know how hard it would be to know which is which. Maybe non-commercial : don’t run ads, don’t sell a product or service and provide information only.

[lethologica]

I wonder if the majority are moving to vlogging instead?