[hombre_fatal]

Does anyone have convincing macro ideas about why blogging died? Or maybe a link to some high level historian insights of the era?

Like the days where it seemed like everyone maintained a Blogger site and wrote longer form content?

Maybe it's more because blogging was a fluke to begin with. Kind of like in my junior high (2002?) every kid had an online journal (Xanga) that died when we moved to sharing those thoughts on Myspace.

Maybe it could be seen is more of a ephemeral shared "mass-delusion" that we should maintain blogs and post our thoughts online about favorite topics. (Hmm, I think this seems very reasonable.)

But moving to social media doesn't seem to explain everything. People had long form blogs about all subject you could think of. And it's not like it was obsoleted by posting those thoughts on Facebook. Instead the idea of individuals posting their long (text) thoughts on hobby topics just seemed to almost die completely.

[empath75]

What happened is that long form writing on the internet bifurcated into professional work and social media, and a lot of popular bloggers either became influencers or professional writers, and the 'casual' bloggers moved to social media, especially facebook. People switching to phones over computers also made reading long form text more difficult.

Blogging _seems_ like it was more popular in retrospect because for a while it was a large percentage of content _on the internet_, but the internet wasn't that popular at the time. Social media now absolutely dwarfs the size of any of the blogging sites even at their peak, and Substack and Medium are probably roughly the same size that the old blogging sites were.

[epc]

Personally, it became too much of a hassle to maintain. Comment spammers would whale on your comment systems, so you either shut them off or offloaded to some third party. If you ran Google ads it always seemed to take more effort to stay in Google's good graces than you’d actually earn. The one month I earned $200 Google suspended my ads account over seemingly trivial issues (that had been on the site for…years). If you wrote anything slightly controversial you got to be the target of people who really, truly, believe the worst thing in the world is to have an opinion different from theirs and your job should be forfeit as a result. Or maybe your life.

In the latter years (even pre–LLM bot feeding frenzy) the number of bots inhaling content over, and over, and over again overwhelmed the perfectly normal bandwidth limits.

At least with social media it's someone else's dime paying for the hosting and security apparatus. You still get the brigading and pile–ons and death threats.

[unsungNovelty]

I don't think blogging is dead. It just moved on to different places. Non-tech majorly moved to 3rd party sites like Medium, Dev.to, Hashnode, Bearblog, Substack and ghost etc. And technical Folks moatly to SSGs.

And it's not the only method anymore. We are far more connected as far as social media is concerned so it might feel like blogging is dead.

I mean, most posts I click are individual blogs here in HN. WordPress blogs kind of things just moved to 3rd party sites like medium etc I mentioned above. Hosting WordPress blogs were easier then. Now it's using Medium, Substack where you can make money as well.

I wrote about this a while ago. Where I share a lot more links of independent blog scenes- https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...

[CalRobert]

It still exists (Medium, etc) but the eyeballs are all on twitter, Bsky, TikTok, etc