HN is a link aggregator that gives a lot of blogs more exposure than they would otherwise get. I would say something like Twitter (micro-blogging and social networking) has contributed to decline of blogs.

If you are going to blame anyone, it's easiest to blame Google's failed EEE attempt on the blogging world with sunset of Reader and attempt to push everyone to Google+. There were so many blogs and meta-blogs I saw directly lost in that fumbled transition. In trying to build their own Facebook, Google did irreparable harm to the blogging world in the process.

I'm certainly no fan of Google, to say the very least. That said, they've kept Blogger relatively unchanged, which is nice.

At least count your blessings that making blogging platforms must not impress promotion committees nearly as much as writing new chat apps.

"Relatively unchanged" is such an interesting POV. It's been in such a stasis that I pretty much assume it is as dead as LiveJournal. Maybe not in literally the same way that LiveJournal got shuffled around in a shell game to some strange Russian owners, but in a very metaphorical sense.

At one point Blogger in the early oughts was ahead of the pack in leading mainstream acceptance and usage of blogs. At one point my feed list was over half Blogger sites, but today I can think of only a few Blogger-hosted blogs left at all in my feed list, none of them have been updated recently, and those that have updated recently were claimed by spammers and (sadly) dropped from my list.

I can't imagine there's much more than a skeleton crew at Blogger keeping the lights on, and I would be unsurprised, if in pushing the metaphor to the LiveJournal thing, to learn that they were being kept in the Bay Area equivalent of Siberia by some half-mad state actors that need Blogger's zombie to keep its current undead behavior in some strange psy ops nightmare.