I am not sure if there is such already but it would definitely be more useful nowadays when Google Search top results are just SEO-spam or ads.

EDIT: I just got a genuine "oh wait..." moment. There indeed was a Google Blog Search product and, of course, it was killed ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Blog_Search )

Former is likely already done for many popular platforms along with many other tricks so you would want to have experienced people for that part.

For filtering tools a good one would be adding a way to have filter lists against spammers and generally just more options to how you want to refine your search. I get that Google Search allows you to type some special keywords but I'd rather it be more user-friendly.

I have tried with the Firefox addon and it gets better quick.

It is almost always the same sites.

And building up page rank takes time so it is a winning battle ... but hey! Google drives no hands!

Remember Technorati tags? If you were at all vaguely technical, you HAD to add Technorati tags to your blog, so the Technorati search would find and classify your blog.

The Future Was Then!

Text is eternal and has a nice Lindy effect going for it. However this article doesn't address the core problem indie bloggers are facing, discoverability. It reads like a self fulfilling prophesy and dismissed the inroads made by video. Many programmers these days simply jump to YouTube to solve a problem and videos solve these problems satisfactorily.

To make blogging great again, we need to solve this issue of discoverability. Otherwise we're all screaming in the wind.

Usually you just want the code pointing you in the right direction and if the writer was nice the header file is included in the snippet.

For e.g. repairing cars it is really great.

The only exception is things like home repair advice, fixing washing machines, etc. I assume that the people with most knowledge of these skills are more likely to produce videos than write down something.

But I still hate it. The video is always too long, has too much non-relevant stuff in it, and a phone camera jammed under a water pump to see the frobnitz valve or whatever is never as good as an exploded view illustration.

Forget AI-powered lawyers and AI-powered fantasy art generators, let's get an AI-powered technical writer and AI-powered technical illustrator going. Train them on Haynes manuals until you can ask them to generate an accurate repair guide for a Kenmore washing machine.

Just getting started, but it has already yielded some fun results.

example: I don't go to Gumroad.com to find random people to give money to, a creator who has captured my through other means directs me there.

Take Twitter for instance, prohibiting the promotion of other platforms. This impacted discoverability for a lot of people because they relied on Twitter as the funnel to get people to patreon/gumroad/their site/etc. Apparently that policy at Twitter is now gone but you get the point.

I don't fully agree with the above idea that discoverability is the main problem however when it comes to blogging. Tumblr solved that for a long time (although now discoverability is a bit rubbish), most still don't use Tumblr so there are greater factors at play here.

https://localghost.dev/

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34553528

If a newsletter that arrives via email is a blog, is a newsletter that the post office delivers a blog?

Instead, screw all of that. Write your ideas and let it out. It's cathartic, it helps you think more clearly on whatever you are writing up, and serves as a lasting reference should you need to revisit that information again yourself. A blog with no readers is still a great tool for your own productivity.

To a certain extent these video platforms create big personalities of normal people and its hard to trust them at that point (although Joe rogan still manages to sound authentic somehow)

That being said, I do think GPT has the potential to ruin blogging but we will see. As soon as I smell even a little bit of GPT in a blog I am probably gonna bail immediately.

Blogging is dead in the same way that dedicated cameras are dead: People still use them for specific use cases and there's a large enthusiast community for them, but the mainstream public moved on. Of course, especially with blogging, there's also a massive filter bubble effect going on; on HN, most people would likely agree with the OP, but a teenager (at least in my country) would staunchly disagree.

I guess it depends of your definition of blog, but I remember Fotolog being incredibly popular circa 2006 even when compared to mainstream social networks. While Wikipedia says it's a social network, I recall it was used mostly for blogging (not so much for social interaction).

And IIRC, when Google acquired Blogger (2003) blogging was not exactly a obscure thing, although I don't think I knew anyone with a personal blog back then.

I still write a lot but mostly have other outlets than my personal blog.

The Oatmeal summed what occurred pretty well

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people

Nowadays most blogs are commercial entities ("Websites") that cover a fairly narrow topics like EVs or Electric Scooters or Photography reviews but personal blogs and websites still exist they just don't fit into the microblogging narrative and aren't prioritized. People who want to be "influencers" are probably not going to start a blog as the immediate reach of a blog is measured in hundreds or low thousands of hits per month.

I'd really like to see some good data on this, because it's not my experience. I probably read more blogs today than I did 10 years ago. I see tons of sharing of blog posts and website content on social media. It's true that the narrow sliver of people making a living as content creators may have moved on, but I just don't see that the "mainstream public" has.

https://i.imgur.com/I4jLBo0.jpg

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=internet

https://imgur.com/a/ovi3wJ0

The mainstream public is watching the Tide Pod challenge on TikTok.

And the human videos are already so optimized for The Algorithm that a good deal of them might as well just cut out the middleman and be written by an AI, for the AI. ("This Breaks the Internet - Reacting to Reaction Videos Reacting To Reaction Videos". You can see the thumbnail already, can't you?)

Yeah, they're behind for now, but all the infrastructure is there for this to explode the instant they're not. Video operations putting out dozens of crap videos a week with nonfunctional "hacks" and all sorts of similar things will be in an arms race to pivot to these things and there's no chance the video site's moderation will be able to keep up with this in the end.

Nobody has to delete the authentic content, they just have to outcompete it by many orders of magnitude. Then not only is the inauthentic content all over all the possible routes you might find content, people stop looking for it entirely.

"Creative" as a criterion for video success is at the very least under assault. Looking at what I get, I am not quite so cynical as to say it's dead. It's not. But it is certainly under assault.

There is also the problem of a small number of truly creative content creators getting their content and ideas yanked by people armed with AIs who can then completely out compete the actual creatives.

This has, to an extent, actually already happened for very young child content. Look at "Elsagate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate but for the purposes of my comment here, ignore the disturbing nature of the content and instead observe that the content obviously had heavy computer generation influence, and could only be cranked out more quickly and effectively with some rather simple AI.

Like I said, it's not here yet, but the first derivative is clearly positive here, and the second probably is too. Pure AI content that looks like live action is not a prerequisite.

I'm not entirely sure Elsagate itself didn't itself source from some AI in some critical manner. It doesn't seem to have completely created the video from top to bottom, but it looks an awful lot to me like what you'd expect an AI writing the scripts, with the feedback provided by view numbers, and completely unscrupulous humans implementing the scripts for the views. And, you know, it basically worked. If anything it worked too well. The first AI corruption of video sites may well be in the past, not the future.

Google search is increasingly broken. Eventually, we will need AI to derive value from the internet by filtering all the crap out.

But there's no similar outlet for other writing like if I want to write about cooking or product management or parks in NYC.

Most non-tech subreddits have super strict self promotion rules that means you can't ever share your own posts. Not that reddit is so friendly in general anyway.

I have a small personal audience and sometimes they read these other posts.

But it's not as much fun in these cases.

So I've been trying to think about how to write about other topics and my only conclusion is that you have to target bigger existing magazines or sites.

But there feels like a huge barrier to entry for contributing to these sites. They're very intimidating.

I've reached out to a few smaller outlets and never gotten a response. So that's kind of demotivating.

So yeah it's easy and enjoyable to blog but in terms of getting anyone to see what you produce... I agree with others here that videos and YouTube seem to be one of the best spots for producing stuff that people actually see, on more diverse topics than just tech.

Is your goal to make content that goes viral that you can monetize and make lots of money with? Consider video. Are you trying to get your word out? Blogs are great and will never die.

Yes, there are still blogs, and still people blogging. And many companies have something they call "blogs".

But once we're done with there hairsplitting, this is not blogging as it was. That died circa 2012.

> But still, people who read have always been in the minority. And I think that’s what most people who think that “video is the future” don’t get. Sure, people are getting lazier and they want you to feed them content.

> But think about it. Do you really want to serve those types of people?!

The number of people online reading blogs when they were the 'most popular' form of content creation was far lower than the number watching videos or using social media sites or what not.

Statistically there are probably more people writing blogs now, and more people reading them. They've just become less of a percentage of the overall internet audience than they were back before YouTube and Twitch and TikTok and podcasts became big things online.

So while it may seem like those people abandoned blogging, you have to ask yourself whether they would have ever cared for it to begin with.

[1] Noise: cat/dog pics, look what I had for lunch, random half-based political opinions, etc.

https://ooh.directory/

https://bearblog.dev/discover/

https://blogroll.org/

https://www.gyford.com/phil/blogroll/

https://interconnected.org/home/blogroll

https://lists.sh/read

I built my professional career on blogging from 2004 to 2012, and attribute my 'public brand' to what I did then. What I currently see is that blog content is generated by corporate PR writers who write very good-looking content that covers a topic yet mostly meaningless. But it does, importantly, gets clicks and engagement from prospective customers. It is far cheaper and easier to get English grads to churn out content based on basic content and brand themes that to get engineers to write content that they believe in. Eventually those dedicated writers will, in turn, be replaced by AIs (see copy.ai).

Also, remember that in the early 2000s, technical people had few options to show their skills other than a personal blog. It was replaced by Stack Overflow (one of the original intentions of the platform), github repositorys and other things that are now available to show off.

Sadly, the days of technical people or other specialsts (say artisnal brewers) creating written content that a lot of people see, is largely behind us. Blogging of old is drowned out not just by video (as OP suggests, and where corporate writers struggle) but by armies of robotic (whether people or AI) corporate content generators.

I have a substack on programming and technology, and when I'm working on something I know I will write about, I definitely understand it better. I think it fulfills the same purpose as learning through teaching.

And it's also just extremely fulfilling. Writing about a niche part of a field you are interested in and wished had more spotlight is satisfying, even if no one reads what you wrote. Or at least that's how I feel about it.

It seems like most bloggers today that go on longer than 5 years are either written by amateur journalists or tech centric people.

There we have the answer. Monetizing blogs is dead. And it's probably even true. Are there many people around who directly make money with their personal articles? Isn't it today mostly a space which is usually just one part of a bigger network of content? Or as a support/advertisement for some product?

- blogging as speech. Not trying to "build an audience" or monetise, just a place where you can write publicly. Rachelbythebay is probably the best example of this.

- blogging as business. What the author is talking about - build an audience, sell some ads, make some money. Writing as a commercial activity.

- blogging as content marketing. Probably 90% of blogs - not directly monetised, but SEO fodder for a business.

The first isn't dead, but is obscure. The last is mostly braindead (there are some really good posts in amongst the SEO crap, but mostly it's SEO crap).

The middle one is hard to do right - there are soooo many "travel bloggers" out there trying to make this work, and so few who actually do make it work.

... in all seriousness, this is going to suck.