[HeinzStuckeIt]

I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.

[biztos]

Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention.

I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.

And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.

Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.

[carlosjobim]

> And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.

There are other ways to monetize, which doesn't depend on a lot of eyeballs. If you write high quality niche content and sell related products or services, then each eye ball can be worth a lot.

[bthallplz]

> Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.

I've been thinking lately about still posting things to various places like here and Reddit but compiling them later on and posting them to my website (likely with a link to where I posted them originally). That seems like a good middle ground for me and would enable me to build up a decent resource for myself and others, if I'm up for cleaning up the texts to provide or remove context as necessary.

Much of this idea of mine is from a desire to archive and pull together more of the stuff I've put effort into that's spread all over the web.

[ghaff]

>I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere

That's been true of me. A paragraph or three that I would once have done as a blog now slip neatly and easily into social media of various sorts. Going to try to do something about that next year but this year ended up crazy for various reasons.

[HeinzStuckeIt]

Social media might be getting less attractive for that, though. Compare Reddit now to ten years ago, and you can see that even on more serious subreddits, everyone’s comments have become very short, often little more than a single line. If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.

[bluebarbet]

>If one posts a couple of solid paragraphs as a reply, one looks like an autistic weirdo info-bombing.

As one should. The rando who spams a discussion thread with an impenetrable wall of text is like that guy who uses their "question" at the end of an in-person panel discussion to ramble incoherently for three minutes. Yes, here we can scroll past it, but it's still presumptious and annoying. This is not primary content (that's at the top). Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point.

[bccdee]

> This is not primary content

In a forum, the discussion IS primary content. That's the problem: Reddit has shifted away from being a discussion forum toward an endless-scroll content feed.

> Here we're all nobodies to everyone else. For my part I try to remember that fact - and get to the point.

Kind of an odd turn of logic. If being a nobody devalues your anecdotes or tangents, then it equally devalues your point. If, conversely, your point can be valuable in and of itself, then your anecdotes and tangents can be valuable in and of themselves too.

> Yes, here we can scroll past it, but [...] This is not primary content (that's at the top).

Incidentally, you don't have to scroll past anything to reach the content at the top of the page. It's at the top of the page.

[bluebarbet]

My point is that the primary content at the top of the page has a byline. It's already vouched for, somewhat, by the reputation of the domain, or publication, or author. We have an idea of whether to spend our time investigating further. By contrast my rando comment (or yours) has nothing to recommend it but some opaque username. That's why I (and I'm betting most people) will scroll right past the "autistic weirdo"'s wall of text. And why I personally choose to try not to write that text.

[HeinzStuckeIt]

Two ordinary paragraphs like one would find in any serious publication, are now enough to make an “impenetrable wall of text”?

You also overlook the fact that many Reddit posts are not links to content. For example, they could be text-post questions posed to a community in order for the OP to receive guidance. This recent culture discouraging substantial discussion about things that are complex and can’t be abbreviated, makes the site less useful that way.

[ghaff]

There's certainly a general trend towards shorter. At my last company, I was involved with our content folks (and created a fair bit myself). In the course of my time there, longer (say 3,000 word) whitepapers basically went away and most of the other content such as video almost universally got shorter based on monitoring what content people viewed/read and for how long.