Comment by ryanstorm

I agree with you, but just for kicks I'd like to go through your examples.

First, blogging is alive and well in the outdoor sports space. "Trip reports" serve as incredibly helpful tools for research. In climbing, [Steph Abegg](https://www.stephabegg.com/tripreports/chronology) has one of the most useful sites cataloging, detailing, and photo logging all of her ascents. The late Marc-Andre Leclerc was a beautiful human, and while there are films and memories about him, it's his [blog](https://marcleclerc.blogspot.com/) that allows the world to get a truer sense for who he was.

I'm probably in the minority, but I prefer blogs over YouTube for their ability to parse the info more easily. TikTok takes most of the control in how it presents any info you might find and tops it off with immeasurable distraction.

ChatGPT can be great for quickly gathering relevant knowledge, but it still needs cross-referencing, and lacks the creative and novel elements that comes from a valuable human blog post.

Mainstream news articles tend to lack personality and voice.

"If you build it they will come" seems to still hold true for the posts and trip reports I've written. I've been pleasantly surprised by the email I've receive in my inbox asking esoteric follow-up questions, wondering how they even found my posts in the first place.

Overall traffic is admittedly mostly non-existent, and that's fine as I'd be glad to help or inform the few that do come across my posts. Though more to your point, I do wonder how many potential (younger?) readers will never come across a blog post because it's not ingrained as a place to look for info, as opposed to YouTube/TikTok etc.