[watwut]

To large extend, that content stopped dying after Google deprioritized it in search results. People stopped being able to find it, sites/communities stopped having views, authors gave up.

I stopped caring about my blog about that time - after I was unable to google my own postd. I remembered the name and some of the content, but it was just not coming up in the search. There was also noticeable drop in views. I kind of concluded it is pointless when it is not coming up in searches unless I SEO hard.

[sanderjd]

I could be convinced of this narrative. Like, if someone writes a book about this, with good evidence of what caused this to happen, I might find that persuasive.

But to me, what happened was social media and video becoming the locus of attention. I don't think people stopped putting content on independent websites because their traffic from search results went down, I think they just started putting content on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and TikTok instead. To me, the whole way the web is used just changed over this period of time, in ways that mostly had very little to do with Google's search algorithm.