[doe_eyes]

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?