Comment by ricardobeat a day ago
> But with the revival of personal blogs well underway
Is it? I haven't seen anyone in my circle return to blogging, nor kids of this generation.
Discoverability is going to be a massive problem, since search engines are dead. Maybe word-of-mouth through social media is enough?
The content will be discovered just fine. It'll get embedded in the LLMs on the next round of training. Won't be attributed to your blog of course, but an approximation to the information will still get out there.
The way things are going, I’m not sure if the mega corps will ever truly turn a profit off the blood sucking. Maybe suck some USA tax money for a bailout…
In the meantime, there are lots of actual humans trying to do things who will benefit from your knowledge being repackaged and delivered by the blood suckers.
I honestly can’t wrap my head around people getting excited about companies ingesting their work to munge up and sell without compensation or any attribution. I’m sure the feeling is mutual, but I really don’t get it.
> an approximation to the information
Playing telephone has now been automated ...
I would argue personal blogs are back and Substack is the medium of choice this time around
Substack to me seems to be 40% self-promotion or advertising a service, 40% long-form LinkedIn posts / AI slop, and the remaining 20% is behind a subscription with eventual freebies. Mostly professional writing. It’s far from being a new blogspot.
There was a brief moment where it felt like a really fresh take on blogging, but the number of big names that have come in make it feel a lot less "wild west, anyone could go big on this platform". The addition of Substack Notes (essentially, X / Twitter built in to Substack) also sort of brings it down to earth. It's hard to pretend your "longform reading" is more sophisticated than the low-attention-span Tiktok masses when you've got Twitter baked in.
I still like Substack overall, there is a vibe over there that I certainly like more than Twitter or Instagram. But it also has that air of snooty elitist nerdism that characterized the middle days of Twitter - and it seems like the level of get rich quick self promotion is at least in line with the rest of the net.
I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight.
To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.
Decentralized and expensive. Maybe I’m looking at the wrong blogs but my impression so far is that a lot of subscriptions are around 5-10$ monthly for a single creator. I can get a ton of newspapers (ok not papers, websites) magazines etc for that price or better, and those have way more than one contributor. The video platform Nebula for example has 175 creators for 6$/month.
It does seem to work for a lot of people, though. Good for them.
We'll have to get the old (webrings)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring] back in fashion.
We could always resurrect WAIS and Gopher.
I sometimes compare Mediawiki vs SharePoint to Web x.0 vs WAIS n Gopher.
One is light on resources, storing just the information with some formatting hints, leaving presentation to standards and the other is SharePoint. The comparison is really about bloat, not functionality, but the two are intertwined.
SharePoint was, as I remember it, one big unnormalised table. Everything else was views on that.
> nor kids of this generation.
(I fear) the blog of this generation's kids is called TikTok or whatever and the form is video instead of text.
TikTok is the exact opposite of blogging.
It was about sharing bits of your daily life and personal thoughts and feelings, while building a small community. Having more than 50-100 readers was a major event (and not a thing people aimed for).
Almost right. The blog of this generation is called YouTube, and there's millions of such videos, with the author mostly talking.
Why? YouTube pays creators, blogs don't.
OT: "
My hunger-self does feel so memories are as lucid made with others in hope
"
...say, "People making a name of 'themselfes' for profit (boinboing IIRC), cos it has to be a (1994) profit ?
And to say something, that: it is only "the complexity of big-tech-companys", in terms of content" ?
Asking, cos i tryed...
I do it for um... "politikum" (if that is the correct term) maybe while keeping to give someone an excuse to laugh about...
...try, but remember mostly after a day or two, maybe one week... often before i lost a (often needed) password or email-adress, i delete it.
Did it for fun, get lost...than => doing something other...
> //deviantart.com/journalseducatethink/gallery
regards, ...
PS: rewritten while listening to: > //youtu.be/dzw7u9KOOBM?t=66
I restarted my blog after a 20 year break (https://jonathanclark.com) thanks to AI making taking out the drudgery.
yes, for example this article including charts and summaries were generated by AI. https://jonathanclark.com/posts/ai-coding-million-lines-2025... Typically I act as an editor rather than a direct writer with cursor now replacing word
I'm sorry to be harsh, but honest question - What's the purpose of using AI to create toy software that already exists (eg. YouTube downloader)? Normally the purpose would be to learn how to create that type of software, but that's presumably being skipped.
Similarly... what's the point of blogging if you're not writing it yourself? This post is very long, but seems to basically just be riffing on the title over and over, at least by the 3rd graph. If you're not explaining anything and readers aren't receiving anything - what's it for?
I really am asking with curiosity even though it's probably clear I have an opinion on this endeavor. There must be a reason you've paid money to do all this!
Social media referral traffic is also dead, mostly due to algorithms that really don’t want users to click out of their websites.
The only exception is Bluesky because it does not have algorithmic feeds, but technical content does not do well as most technical people did not migrate.