I remember reading that Google did something to derank them, so they may finally be dead, but they continued on for a long time past when I visited them daily for hipster cred.
Perhaps you could also infer that I used linked in during that time, or maybe even instagram! Google! Software engineer!
Just for the record all I’m saying is the blogs of this particular era were very interesting to me and I miss them.
I've had the same conversation with old hippies about record stores and how you just don't appreciate the music when you can just find it online.
The point is that old people have rose tinted glasses to when they were finding out new things for the first time regardless of how good or bad it was.
My own take for the time was that we were starved for good video content which is why we focused on the much smaller and more easily compressible audio files.
Some time between P2P networks and piracy sites being shut down there was this amazing period of discovery. It seemed like it was mostly blogspot curated mega uploads of flac files. You could literally just curl huge, lossless, obscure records that someone else found for you. It really felt like a beautiful flash in a pan. I’m sure a lot of people still have these files hanging around on hard drives but there’s no incentive to be the curator anymore.
There would be blogs of high quality vinyl and cd rips of really thoughtfully curated clusters of types of music. I actually remember not being surprised when Kim Dotcom got arrested but being very bummed knowing the era was over.
Soulseek lives on as a weird vestige of this time, but the curation is not really there.