But in general, without being too doom-and-gloom about it, and perhaps this is because of the election going on, it does feel like there is a greater trend going on of internet users stepping away from social media.
There's no easy way to divert this weariness back to specialized forums a la the 00's or 90's, though, which is probably where everything should be for the internet to remain useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that 85% or so of internet traffic is phones, resulting in discussions being comprised of back-and-forth thumbtap-quality posts that nobody (including the senders) really seems to care about. It's also exacerbated by the fact that search engines cannot seem to index traditional message boards or wordpresses etc. properly; there are too many of them nowadays to navigate (most being identical templates like vbulletin).
https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/
Average age is 16 on Discord, average time spent per day is less than 10 minutes, so it's being used as a messaging service (but connected to a greater gaming-type ecosystem). 90% of servers are less than 15 members. 30% of teens use it, which is significantly higher than the rest of the population.
I don't really have anything concrete to point to for my general feeling about American society slowly moving into a post-social media phase. Tiktok falling into relative unuse with most Americans except Hispanics is probably a main point of data. There hasn't been anything emerging to replace it besides (according to studies) the more cordial YouTube, which you cannot really say is a social media site. It is the most widely used of all of them, though, something like 94% penetration.
My partner is often on her phone intermittently while we're watching something together, and even that bothers me. It seems quite sad to me that people can't put their phones down for even a half hour to watch an episode of a sitcom.
The Guinness Book of Records was started because of a pub argument whose participants lacked a good reference to settle the dispute.
And in that same way, no longer do people have to ramble on into the aether in blog form to work through some shit. Now they can do that with ChatGPT and actually get responses to their thoughts in real time. And most of the time it's agreeable in tone.
Tech continues to change the world.
Maybe that isn't what is contributing to this particular blog dying, but I bet it's contributing to the larger community of blogs dying, which has probably created some inertia.