IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media. By creating centralized ways to distribute information. They started by killing rss, was way too decentralized. Facebook, Twitter, every single platform are just gate keepers that have complete power on what you see. They all start in the same way, making it convenient to access information, by centralizing it. Once you change your habits, they make it in such a way that you get locked in, and they start inserting in the feed all kind of junk you don't want, until a point when you are sick of it and jump to the next place, which is still in phase one, convenient, enjoyable. Then the story repeat, you end up seeing 90% junk, just to be able to see some of the posts of the people you follow.
Somehow there is a lot of truth in this fake quote: "Those who would give up essential liberty to decide whom to follow, for getting a little temporary convenience in exchange, deserve neither to chose what to read nor convenience"
IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media
The social media part is true, though in a way that is more user-benefitting than many bloggers (such as myself) appreciate or will acknowledge. And HN is one such "social media" site that invariably helped "kill" blogs, so there's an irony that this is being discussed here.
Before HN / Reddit (others will put Twitter / Bluesky / whatever else in here), I had a list of "must read" blogs that I would monitor to, essentially, keep up. My feed reader alerted me to their entries, I would pay attention to "must read" blog lists, and so on.
That process yields a lot of chaff for the wheat you yield. An enormous amount. Especially after many bloggers started thinking that they need to have daily content (bloggers like Atwood proselytized that the key to being successful was overwhelming quantity), however facile and useless, to hit some quota. I would rather have a feed that was quiet but then once a week a banger hits amongst dozens of authors, but instead it was just an enormous amount of filler.
Eventually I just stopped monitoring it. With sites like HN, and various Reddit subs, my (proven) hypothesis is that the good content will rise on social media, and the chaff will sit in obscurity. Kind of like torrent seeders, this relies upon the few who are willing to dig through the chaff, /new, etc, however I'm okay missing content if only the well thought out, high effort content rises to the top.
I would partially disagree here regarding reddit/HN. They are closer to the old forums than to blogs. You do not follow people, you follow themes, concept, "ideas". They are constituted by a bunch of impersonal people with a common interest.
But those forums were also killed by social media. Reddit/hn along with a few other platforms are modern impersonations of those forums. Also the groups on social media are replacing those forums.
In m opinion "the good content will rise on social media", eventually. But you will have to see 9 junk promoted content for an eventually good one.
> IMO blogs were killed by big tech and social media.
They were killed by search engines not indexing them anymore. Search engines are now curated guides that have nothing to do with the search engines of the past, which were basically just grep. Their purpose now is to direct you to revenue generating products, and they will simply change or ignore your query in order to do that. Individual people doing individual things are of no interest to the money machine.
Somehow there is a lot of truth in this fake quote: "Those who would give up essential liberty to decide whom to follow, for getting a little temporary convenience in exchange, deserve neither to chose what to read nor convenience"