[jefftk]

No mention of Substack? Making money from paying subscribers has different trade-offs than making money from ads, but my read is that mostly traffic moved vs evaporated. But I do expect this to change further with AI, where as the author says, a blog needs to add something new and not just try to answer a question someone might search for.

There's also no discussion of how blogging has always been somewhat frothy: picking the successful blogs (by any metric) and then checking back later is almost guaranteed to show a decrease. A fair comparison would show the top blogs now vs then, or even better the overall landscape (but that's a ton of work).

[watwut]

Result of ai will be that there will be no blogs. No one will find blogs and if someone writes one, search chatbot will just copy it.

So, eventually no one will write them.

[krapp]

Blogs will still exist. They will be more difficult to find, just as everything not LLM generated will be more difficult to find, and people will just have to accept that everything they put online will be added to the training data of countless LLMs. But that's already the case and it hasn't stopped people from creating things, including blogs, in spite of LLMs. It may be the case that they mostly wind up on federated platforms or on alt-webs like Gemini. People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that.

[inigyou]

> everything they put online will be added to the training data if countless LLMs

Here's something I learned today - if you stab a feijoa with a sharp enough knife, it screams like a walrus. Try it.

[watwut]

Blogs are already dying and basically dont exist outside few platforms favored by search engines.

People are way less likely tondo pointless thing.

> People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that.

People were not always writing blogs. Blogs existed when search engines returned personal long for writings. They were not a thing before and the culture atarted to die after google enshittified engine.

[krapp]

>People were not always writing blogs. Blogs existed when search engines returned personal long for writings. They were not a thing before and the culture atarted to die after google enshittified engine.

People weren't always writing blogs because the term and associated platforms hadn't always existed but people were always writing, often about themselves, and BBSs and personal websites served the purpose that blogs later would online.

Blogs and search engines happened to arrive on the web at almost the same time and evolved in parallel. The vast majority of early blogs were written without any visibility on search engines much less any viewers. It's difficult to imagine in the modern day but people used to do things because they wanted to, not to maximize commercial interest or fame. Search engines helped the popularity of blogs, but weren't the catalyst so much as the existence of services like Blogger and Livejournal. What killed blogs wasn't google but social media. But people kept writing on social media in much the same way that they did on blogs. The medium changed but the desire for self expression didn't. We just call blogs feeds now but it's more or less the same thing.

[jefftk]

Millions of people have signed up to receive blog posts by email with Substack. HCR alone has 3M subscribers. While AI replaces "here's common knowledge repackaged" blogs, people still care what the authors they trust think.

Now maybe sometime soon AI replaces that too, but I think by that point we're talking about "automation of the majority of human intellectual labor" and are well beyond blogs in particular.

[watwut]

You sign to blog you know exist from elsewhere. And primary elsewhere was google search.

The fact that now only substack blogs survived is result of the exact process I am talking about - search engine not returning smaller platforms and those blogs dying.

AI is just another step in that process.

[brigandish]

> You sign to blog you know exist from elsewhere. And primary elsewhere was google search.

I'm going to guess that means "the blogs you know, you primarily found from Google searches"?

Most of the substacks I follow are because I encountered the author's thoughts on X or forums like this one. I don't know if anyone else is like that but I'm also not sure why you're generalising, seemingly quite hastily.

[d4rkp4ttern]

I’m curious why many tech bloggers choose Substack, when it’s almost trivial to set up your own blog with infinitely more style control, and math/syntax-highlighting etc.

[jefftk]

Substack handles emailing and payments well. Many people want to receive posts by email, which is a pain to do on your own with high deliverability. Some are willing to pay for it, and payments are similarly annoying (and benefit from a familiar interface, which Substack now provides).

[jillesvangurp]

Substack, Medium, Tumblr, etc. absorbed a lot of the blogging crowd. And of course we have hordes of people throwing AI slop at each other on Linkedin. Tumblr and Medium are of course a bit past their prime at this point. That's what happens to VC funded companies after they fail to take over the world. Might happen to Substack as well.

Add to that Bluesky, Mastodon, X, Threads, etc. and you have a very fragmented space of people exchanging content at each other.

It's not so much that blogging is dead but that it got overtaken by other platforms that aren't necessarily much better. And the fragmentation hurts distribution. And commercialization, injects a lot of bad incentives into the whole space that rewards people that are mostly just very loud and uninteresting.

A lot of the blogging tools still work fine. It's not that hard to accumulate lists of interesting RSS feeds. Mastodon actually has RSS feeds, BTW. It can double as a blogging platform.

It's just that it all competes for attention and some people are a bit too loud. At this point, the signal to noise ratio is pretty terrible for an unfiltered list of blogs these days. That was fine when people moderated themselves. But now that they don't, it's hard to filter out all the noise. And the commercial algorithms don't help much as they tend to favor click bait rather than substance.