Two years ago Wilhelm had some well-considered words to say (TAGN) regarding the state of blogging in the 2020’s. A couple of years have passed and I have considered my own thoughts on the topic. And then I came across this post over on the Dead Parrot BBS, which inspired me to assemble my thoughts into a post here.
Blogging isn’t dead, it’s just pinin’ for the fjords. That’s a line from Monty Python and their famous dead parrot skit: most of my readers will get the reference, but the skit is funny in any case.
My thoughts
There is no question that blogging has declined since the 2010 era. Google has downgraded blogs in their search results which makes them harder to find. And the dominance of social media like Facebook and Twitter means that a lot of people simply aren’t looking to begin with. Even people who know my blog is here seem to find a goodly number of excuses for not visiting.
But that doesn’t mean that blogging as a whole is truly dead. Moribund, perhaps: approaching death, diminished in life, but still alive and still vital in some sense. It can be frustrating to see an ever decreasing audience paying attention to what we write, but that can also be our own fault. Are we writing what people want to read? That is a hard question to answer, but when I look at what passes for content on Facebook and X (Twitter) I am left thinking that anything I write here has to be above that bar.
There are entire new communities of bloggers that have appeared in recent years. The Indieweb movement, which rests upon the idea that a person should own their “place” on the internet, is an example of this. Controlling one’s own content and how it is used is a strong inducement to blog using one of the simpler self managed platforms. There are barriers to entry in terms of technical know-how, however, that probably keep the majority of people in their managed safe spaces.
Could more people be induced to cast off the shackles of the corporate web, to set aside their Facebook, X, and Instagram sharecropping? I don’t think it will ever be a large movement but I suspect that enough people will feel the constraints placed on them by the social media empires aren’t desirable and will look to alternatives.
Facebook (FB) has its place, but making it your exclusive home on the internet comes with costs that a lot of people are starting to recognize. Just try finding a particular post on Facebook from someone, even yourself, from a few days, weeks, or months ago. The FB feed makes content disappear more often than it surfaces the things we want to see. And Facebook owns all of your content: every single post belongs to them. That doesn’t sit well with a lot of people.
I’ve seen growth in blogging interest anecdotally in the annual Blaugust participation numbers: not huge, but increasing each year. I haven’t seen much in the way of traffic increases on my own site, but I can at least see some growth when I produce more frequent or at least somewhat regular content. Maybe in time this kind of thing will be enough to start a small but noticeable shift in the internet denizen population. Perhaps instead of 2 billion people using Facebook daily there will be 1.8 billion, and a couple hundred million will start to get their online “fix” from blogs instead.
Going along with that is a need for people to have the tools to consume blogs in a healthy way. A lot of folks don’t know what an RSS feed reader is or how to use one. Consuming blogs without a feed reader is like reading a news paper where the pages are scattered willy-nilly about your town: frustrating and not very enjoyable. There are free to use online news feed readers like Feedly available, but it seems as if the barrier to entry for these tools is just a bit too high for some people. Maybe a browser plugin that detects RSS (news) feeds on a site and allows you to automatically add them to a suitable feed reader could alleviate some of the challenge.
Conclusion, for now
The state of the blogosphere (I had to write that word at least once in this post) is definitely one of declined attention. I do think that there are some significant headwinds still in the form of the overwhelming dominance of social media in regards to internet usage of all kinds. And so long as Google continues to downgrade blogs in their search results even finding us will remain a challenge.
But it feels as if we reached some sort of floor or bottom in the decline of blogging within the past couple of years. The concept of self-ownership of content is taking hold through the Indieweb community, and efforts like Blaugust continue to breathe life into the blogging environment as a whole. Each year I wonder if I’m speaking to an empty room, but in August I get just enough comments and responses to remind me that someone at least is out there reading the occasional post here.
The parrot may not truly be dead- it could just be resting or pining for the fjords.
The header image for this post was AI generated using ChatGPT
Blogs face the TLDR problem, the amount of initial effort for the eventual reward. We as a society in general, and media in particular have created a system that prioritizes the quick reward without the same effort for engagement. In other words we have turned ourselves into a society of short attention span people.
Then, you have to consider the target audience. What is the blog about? What does it give the reader. A blog about a specific interest or hobby can still maintain a readership because people know what reward they will get, and they are already motivated to put the effort in to get it. Similarly, family “newsletters” will also do well serving their limited audience of people who care about the daily activities of the John Smith family.
Your blog is perhaps summer up as “Kelly’s opinions about stuff.”. People who want to know about your day to life and events in your house have to wade through a lot of things that don’t interest them when they just want pictures of the cats. Similarly for people interested in you tech, or motorcycle posts.
Now I do get value from your opinions, let’s face it a huge component of our 40+ year friendship has been you and I opinionating at each other. So I am probably your perfect target demographic 😉
And even so, there are times I just skip your blog because it takes a certain amount of time, especially if I am moved to reply and interact. Life doesn’t always give me that time.
Blogs will never go away, but like actual hand written letters, they will have to adapt to increasingly specialized niches.
I find a lot of what your comment says to be reasonable, Chris. I do find that the attention span issue is at the root of a lot of what takes people away from blogs. That is why I have generally shortened my writing down a bit. But it is still too long for most visitors.
I also spun off two separate blogs, one for gaming (https://aginggamer.net/) and one for motorcycle stuff (https://geekonaharley.org/) What is left here are my general geek opinions and interests and my personal stuff. I can’t really split that up any more without losing who I am in the process.
But this article wasn’t about my blog in particular- rather it was about blogging in general. I agree it will remain a niche activity, but I like to think it will grow a bit as people continue to realize how much they give up by selling their souls to Meta and X. I know for myself that I like keeping my content under my own control.
The whole “blogging is dead” thing has been getting on my nerves for years. As far as i can tell, the whole trope is based on a false premise: that the short moment when blogging was a big deal represented some kind of normality that has now been replaced by social media of varying kinds.
It seems to me it’s really the other way around. There was a brief period, a handful of years, when long-form blogs were momentarily fashionable. That was a fad and like all fads it had its time and then it was over. It happened to MySpace and Friends Reunited and GeoCities and Home Pages and you can see the same thing happening now to YouTube Influencers. None of these things has real permanency but the underlying motivation, to communicate with people you don’t already know, does. If blogging is dead then that just means it’s time to find another means of communicating.
But of course it’s not “dead”. It’s just only of interest now to a smaller range of people, those who find its particular structures and techniques amenable. It puzzles me how people keep describing the form as dead, too, if by that they mean no-one is writing or reading blogs any more. It suggests to me they can’t be looking very hard. I have quite literally more blogs in my Feedly than I have time to read each day. I’ve had to ration myself because of the amount of time it was taking me to get through them all.
Google is a bit odd with the results these days but I don’t think blogs are the only thing to suffer there. Maybe old school search is another fad that won’t last. It’s had a good run, after all. If you really want to find something, you can still, though. It just takes a bit more effort. I guess if someone doesn’t want to make that effort, they’re probably not all that interested to begin with.
That’s an interesting perspective, Bhagpuss. The idea that the ‘strangeness’ was the time when blogs were popular as opposed to the loss of that popularity being the problem is an intriguing one. It is also interesting to consider that, despite the supposed “death” of blogging, there are still more blogs to read than time in a day.
I think a big piece of what is missing today is discoverability. The search engines no longer fill that role, hiding things like blogs behind measures of popularity that are obscure or outright AI copying that makes blogs effectively disappear. If we had better mechanisms for discovery it might be that blogging could better retain a measure of “popularity” and not just raw counts.
The question of finding blogs is an interesting one. I think of the diaries and journals written throughout history. Few survive and amongst those that do, how many are in the dusty archives of some local museum or historical society?
Only when some researcher or historian with time on their hands spends months or years working on a project does it have chance of being “discovered” and the information therein spread.
The digital age made it so these diaries or journals of regular folk would not get lost in a house fire or trash bin, and could be found by an automated search.
Now increasingly that researcher is some AI program that alters the primary source unless it is archived off line. Historians and archeologists always lament the lack of the common voice, that history is filtered by what survived, or those rich and famous enough to be widely published or build monuments.
Digitization offered hope of a solution to that, but there is a real risk that the filters are returning, only this time it will be whatever a large language model scrapes and hallucinates.