[hollerith]

>What's distinctive of the old blogging era is that the amount of online content at the time was extremely limited. You couldn't endlessly scroll through blogs.

That is not true: when the first blog started in 1996 or so, text was being added to the web so fast that nobody could read even 1% of it. (Ditto text on the newsgroups before the rise of the web.)

[lurk2]

The issue the grandparent post is alluding to is more a change in consumer habits and technology. Even in 2005, recommendation algorithms were barely impacting the content you saw online. Facebook was chronological until around 2009 from what I remember; you could literally go online and find a friend had filled your feed by posting status updates over and over again. YouTube similarly prioritized your subscriptions over other content, and the other content was usually just whatever other people happened to be watching. You would go online once every couple of days, see what was new, and then log off. If there wasn’t anything new, finding it required a significantly greater time investment than opening up your short form video content app of choice.

There was also probably less duplication; these days you can find dozens of Reddit threads relevant to almost any given query, but most of them will have the same kind of comments. With short form video content you’ll often see 3 variations of the same meme within 15 minutes. Back in the early 2000s a lot of queries would only return a couple of relevant results.