
Blogging Is Not Dead - g-garron
https://www.garron.blog/en/blog/blogging.html
======
foob
If you want to see more high quality blog posts, then I highly recommend
taking actions to help promote and encourage them. Sign up for a mailing list
or subscribe to an RSS feed when you find a blog that consistently produces
quality material. Post new or old content on Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters,
Twitter, and other communities where you think they would be a good fit.
Upvote and retweet quality content that you run across, and flag stuff that's
blatantly marketing spam. Leave comments on the blog or reach out to the
author over email. Even as a single individual, these sort of actions have a
much bigger impact than you might expect.

I used to blog extensively, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this.
The content I would write was loosely for marketing purposes, but I put a lot
of effort into generating high quality content that I would genuinely enjoy
reading myself. An article that I spent 50+ hours on and felt very proud of
might have a 30% chance of reaching the front page of Hacker News. A fluffy
post with a decent title that I spent only an hour or two on would still have
a 10-15% chance of front paging. The way the math works out, it's simply much
lower ROI to generate quality content. It's also a bit heartbreaking to invest
a lot of time making something for other people to enjoy only for nobody to
ever see it.

The second chance queue on Hacker News is a major step in the right direction,
and I'm grateful for all the times where my posts were given another chance. A
lot of great content still slips through the cracks however, and relatively
small actions by community members would go a long way towards helping
incentives align towards generating quality content.

~~~
PakG1
What do you recommend as a good RSS reader these days? Can't say that I found
one I like.

~~~
jeremyperson
Have you tried Feedly ([https://feedly.com/](https://feedly.com/))?

------
filmgirlcw
Blogging isn't dead but blog discovery basically is. Fifteen years ago
(through about 2009, I would say -- about the time Facebook demonstrably took
over MySpace), there were tons of services and startups built around blog
discovery.

And even into the early 2010s, Tumblr was still a thriving community that paid
host to many different different subcultures and demographics (whereas today,
Tumblr is largely fandom).

But now? The spammers helped murder the pingback/trackback -- RSS is still
alive but it is often hidden and isn't even always a default for various
static site blogging engines -- not to mention the lengths web browsers go to
to deny that RSS even exists -- and the art of finding quality like-minded
blogs of any size, is incredibly difficult.

Google had a blog search part of its search engine but shut that down nearly a
decade ago. (Frankly, the fact that Google keeps Blogger running is sort of
amazing, although I would be shocked if more than one or two full time
employees worked on it -- I have to assume all the maintenance is done by
vendors and contractors.)

Moreover, we've moved our communications to silos that don't allow for easy
syndication (you haven't been able to auto-publish your blog/website to
Facebook for years, for instance) or to formats (video), that are reliant on
major giants (YouTube, Twitch, and to a lesser but growing extent, TikTok)
rather than a user's own platform -- and that require a much higher barrier to
entry for creators than blogging ever did. Way more people consumed blog
content than ever regularly made their own blog -- but now it's even greater.

But beyond the various platform silos and the move away from decentralized to
closed social network behemoths, blogging also never properly embraced mobile.
The act of blogging on mobile was too difficult for too long (Tumblr being the
one exception), while Facebook and Twitter were quick to become mobile-first
(and in Twitter's case, was originally designed for mobile).

Blogging isn't dead but the curation and discovery tools that made it really
take off in the 2000s is.

As someone who owes their entire career to blogging, this makes me sad. But it
is what it is.

~~~
souterrain
> But now? The spammers helped murder the pingback/trackback -- RSS is still
> alive but it is often

Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation. It seems both
decentralised mail and content netizens have little choice but to seek shelter
with large service providers as a defence from the trash on the net.

I’m not saying the large players have a hand in spam, but they certainly
aren’t being harmed by it in the same proportion as the individual hosting
their own blog or smtp server.

~~~
SquishyPanda23
> Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation.

I think this is very close to the heart of why decentralization hasn't worked
(yet?)

Try to design a decentralized system that is resistant to abuse, and really
think through the loopholes as an attacker would.

It's very difficult.

Decentralization is little villages. Little villages are weak and they gain
strength against their common enemies as they band together.

So there's a natural force toward centralization that isn't countered by
anything but a lot of slogging through the engineering challenges of trying to
make decentralization work.

~~~
SllX
Decentralization works all the time in meatspace, but when you have a wide
open channel of information anywhere, it tends to get flooded with lots of
_bad_ information.

Email spam is the obvious one. Algorithmically promoted conspiracy crap was
the less obvious less predictable one that bit YouTube and other services and
is much harder to police because it turns out the police are also just as
biased and dumb as the people they're trying to police, just in different
ways.

Someday the Internet will be filled with programs flooding the Internet with
increasingly sophisticated malformed information, and at some point it will
probably devolve into an arms race of these programs trying to con the other
programs. I think Anathem had a passage in there about this, "insanity
programs" or something to that effect, can't really remember, but until that
day, you'll have to actually pay _people_ to disseminate your own carefully
crafted propaganda instead.

Centralized services provide the illusion of safety against this in much the
same way urban landscapes do, but there's no substitute to taking
responsibility for your own safety, your own hygiene, and your own bullshit.

~~~
kyuudou
> Someday the Internet will be filled with programs flooding the Internet with
> increasingly sophisticated malformed information

We've been there for a while now:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7dfJ1lZ13g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7dfJ1lZ13g)

------
rhacker
Get out of the software development blogging bubble. Spend 3 minutes looking
at each of the following: Look at woodworking blogs, recipe blogs, gardening
blogs.

One thing you'll note is that those are all filled with a shit fuck ton of ads
and are completely unusable.

I know this because my wife wades through that stuff and the only way she can
is by using a blocker. I don't use a blocker because very few of the software
specific websites I visit have ads (generally).

Recipe blogs are the worst - here's a sample from pinch of yum:

[https://imgur.com/A4e53R5](https://imgur.com/A4e53R5)

~~~
Spivak
I would hesitate to call recipe blogs "blogs." They're ad farms with good SEO
and the thinnest veneer of content to get clicks.

There are actual cooking and baking blogs of the quality you see in software
where professionals or hobbyists talk about their craft but they won't show up
on Google with terms like "$food_name recipe" and it doesn't really make sense
for them to. Cooking blogs are for cooking nerds -- people who have notebooks
and scrap books full of recipe clippings from old magazines and cake boxes and
a shelf of random dog-eared culinary textbooks and recipe anthologies that
could knock a person out if you got hit with them. These blogs are full of
crappy unflattering photography, zero web design skills, okay-ish writing, and
cult-like followings.

~~~
watwut
It would actually made sense of them to show up. What google chooses to show
does not make sense to show up. When it comes to cooking, google is just
horribly bad.

~~~
Finnucane
Is there a "Hacker News" equivalent for cooking/foodie blogs? If not, there
probably could be.

~~~
tekknolagi
Sure there is. There's a super well-frequented bread forum that is kind of
like HN. Experience reports, recipe recommendations, etc.

~~~
saagarjha
You can't say that it exists and not share the name of it!

~~~
tekknolagi
Ah sorry. It's the fresh loaf.

------
jakevoytko
We're overly attached to a specific idea of a "blog". In practice, "web
logging" never died, even if the specific blog format has diminished over
time.

Blogs are websites that host posts in chronological order, but defined in a
very specific way that excludes your Facebook and Twitter. The difference
isn't self-hosting - Blogger and Wordpress.com host your blog. I reckon the
difference is aggregation. Facebook groups your posts with posts from everyone
else. They get to curate individual feeds. People with money get to bypass the
curation a little.

Don't get me wrong, I have my own blog (link in profile) and I deleted my
Facebook account years ago. But quite honestly, the format is less usable than
having centralized aggregators that float the most popular content to the top.
This is why we're all on Hacker News, right? The act of having the aggregator
allows extra features to be overlayed, like community discussion. Are
aggregators the "best" format by every metric? No, but it allows me to read
content I like without doing a lot of work, so here I am.

~~~
ravenstine
Isn't the need for aggregators a failure of search engines? To the credit of
Google, as much as I disdain them, combating SEO spam is a hard problem. I
think that blogging feels "dead" because of SEO spam and because ads pay for
jack shit these days.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Google knows very well that they're padding their search results with
e-commerce sites to the detriment of meaningful content.

------
softwaredoug
It all changed when marketing firms latched onto "blogging"

Now it's sadly the case a lot of blogs don't have a lot of content, are full
of SEO boilerplate, with click-bait headlines instead of being interesting or
well written. Some blogs are great, well-written lead ins that end with "to
get the end of this story, contact our sales person for a demo!". Or there's
the form that pops up that really, really wants your email address for a GREAT
newsletter!

I think when a company has a 'blog' it really needs to fulfill a contract of
actually providing useful, interesting content. It's the only way, honestly,
your brand will build long term trust. Otherwise don't call it a 'blog' call
it 'marketing information' or something...

~~~
crazygringo
I don't think it changed at all. It's not like the old bloggers became
marketing bloggers. They _didn 't_ change. The marketing blogs just became a
new thing, a separate thing.

I don't think I've ever been confused between the two, despite them both being
called blogs.

It's pretty obvious that a personal blog is one thing, and a company blog is
another. They're both "weblogs", neither has a greater right to the name.

~~~
hn_check
"I don't think it changed at all. It's not like the old bloggers became
marketing bloggers"

The old bloggers all just moved on. Or at least the vast majority of them did.
The number of terrible blogs are legion.

Everyone has a motivation for the things they do, and a lot of the time the
motivation for a blog is professional credibility/development, and for the
self-employed, more directly in "leads" and good business.

Neither works out. After your dozen-th time on the front-page of HN you
realize it works the same as always -- a lot of passing, casual readers who
might find the content exemplary but...eh. There was a time when those people
would become regulars because you showed that you make good content, but it's
just unnecessary now. Just watch HN and Reddit and if they make something good
again, maybe it'll appear there.

~~~
taejo
> The old bloggers all just moved on. Or at least the vast majority of them
> did.

Did they? Or do they just make up a decreasing fraction of blogs? I've got 95
blogs in my feed reader. My guess is that I've been subscribed to most of them
for more than five years, but still about 80% of them posted within the last
year (an arbitrary cut-off point, but I don't think it's fair to call
something dead if it only ever showed signs of life a couple times a year in
its prime).

------
djsumdog
I still had that previous article the author references in another tab[2].

Yes, use an RSS Reader. RSS is not dead[0]. Hackernews often has blog posts.
If you see a post you like, go to the main page and see if you like any of the
other posts. If it's a blog you think you want to follow, subscribe to it. If,
after a few months, you find none of the articles are interesting and often
mark them all read, then just unsubscribe.

If you blog, cross-promote it on Reddit, Twitter, your FB page (although if
you don't use Twitter/FB often, it'll be just a trickle of clicks[1], but it's
better than nothing), etc. Try not to use another platforms just to promote
you. If you see blog posts you like, be sure to promote them!

Maybe use one of your RSS reader apps just to dump one of those huge github
aggregated blog lists with like 500 tech and personal blogs. You can scroll
through it when you're bored and see if there's anything interesting and mark
the rest as read.

Maybe setup your own Solr server to index every blog you come across just for
the hell of it? (I've been meaning to do this forever!) The big search engines
aren't good at showing us blogs, so maybe it's up to us to find and promote
them?

[0]: [https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-
so...](https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-social-
network-protocol/)

[1]: [https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-
bob-e...](https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-effect/)

[2]: [http://tttthis.com/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-
to-t...](http://tttthis.com/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-the-
internet-it-would-be-blogs)

~~~
hopesthoughts
I've never stopped using RSS. I'm now up to over 500 feeds. It took me a
really long while to find a service I was happy with after Google Reader shut
down, and it's still not perfect. However I've gotten it to where I can use it
efficiently.

------
ramkarthikk
There are many blogs today but when (many) people say they miss the old days
of blogging, it is mostly not about the number of blogs.

Back then, there was a huge community around blogs. That community has moved
to Twitter and other places. Previously, people would comment on blogs and if
you are a frequent reader of a blog, you would recognize a lot of people who
comment there and you may even become friends with them. Constructive comments
have moved away from the blogs and are now on Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit
etc.

There used to be services specifically around the blogging space, like
Technorati (and even StumbleUpon to an extent).

I also feel, and this might just be me, people have started associating
purpose with mediums. If you want to post silly or just casual stuff, you post
it on Twitter. If you have something really valuable and on brand, you post it
on your blog. People used to post everything to their blogs because that's
where they could previously share their thoughts.

------
bovermyer
I don't think the volume of blogging decreased. It probably increased.

The reason some people think blogging is dead is because the blog "signal" is
much, much quieter than the social media "noise." It's a question of
comparative volume.

------
xwdv
Blogging is not dead, it's just being rapidly made obsolete by commenting.

Comments are everywhere. Total volume of comments on the internet compared to
blogs is larger by several orders of magnitude. Readership is up, _everything_
has comments. Comments don't care about SEO, or money, or fame, that makes
them one of the purest forms of content you can find on the internet. You
could argue that some sites have people commenting for fame because of karma
systems, but ultimately that karma means nothing. Very few comments have ever
"gone viral" the way a blog or youtube or tiktok video tries so hard to.
Comments are like graffiti; ephemeral, and meant to be enjoyed in the moment
you stumble across them. Very few comments make any kind of money for their
author the way a blog does.

Marketing firms have not latched onto comments yet the way they latch onto
blogs. But when they do, it's over.

~~~
AQuantized
I think this underestimates how much exploitation of this idea of comments as
unbiased is currently taking place. There's a reason you can sell a Reddit
account with a ton of karma and activity for a decent buck. Tons of PR firms
now utilize faux accounts on almost all social media.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> There's a reason you can sell a Reddit account with a ton of karma and
> activity for a decent buck.

What does "a decent buck" amount to, these days? How much does it take to get
people to sell their reputation to an unethical marketing firm?

~~~
MattGaiser
$16-$20.

[https://www.playerup.com/accounts/redditaccount/](https://www.playerup.com/accounts/redditaccount/)

Not a lot for Westerners, but that is a week of wages in a place like Ghana.
Decent pay for re-posting popular content.

~~~
ImaCake
I think that is just enough to make it worthwhile even for a poor American. If
you can coordinate and plan ahead a little you would break minimum wage.

------
skybrian
"X is alive / X is dead" is binary thinking and taking sides on this is
pointless and divisive. Better to use a float rather than a boolean to model
how popular something is.

------
avian
> We also have webmentions, so, if bloggers start using it, it will help us
> find other's blogs.

My informal research [1] shows approximately zero adoption of webmention. For
44 blog posts I have written in the past two years, I did not have a single
external link to a host that would support it.

[1]
[https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2020/01/checking...](https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2020/01/checking_webmention_adoption_rate/)

~~~
rcarmo
Webmentions, pingbacks and the like were often abused for link spam. I
disabled all of that on my blog ages ago (and I had to implement it in the
first place, so... that was a drag).

~~~
onli
Webmentions don't exist for that long. It's unlikely you had to disable them
ages ago. But they are basically trackbacks and it's easy to conflate them.

That's also something I should repeat. As someone involved in an active blog
engine project for many years now, webmentions annoyed me. They seemingly
ignored that trackbacks existed and had already solved the issues webmentions
now solve again. They should have been compatible, an extension ideally, but
they are not. The project was not even interested enough to host a
trackback/webmention converter, which would have given them an enormous
adoption boost. Signals to me a complete disinterest of the "indie web" to
integrate with the actually already existing independent and open web. I don't
get it, it's a shame.

~~~
njkleiner
They were never really supposed to be interoperable with pingback from what I
can tell, see the reasons here[0].

You're right in the sense that it's a classic case of <insert XKCD standards
comic here>, but FYI there is a pingback to Webmention converter now[1].

[0]: [https://indieweb.org/Webmention-
faq#Why_webmention_instead_o...](https://indieweb.org/Webmention-
faq#Why_webmention_instead_of_pingback) [1]:
[https://webmention.io/#forwarding](https://webmention.io/#forwarding)

~~~
onli
Pingbacks I understood, xmlrpc was a mistake. Trackbacks on the other hand...
That's the FAQ that annoyed me the most (just didn't see it again when writing
the comment above), as if trackbacks had no link verification in modern
blogging engines.

It's great that the pingback conversion exists now, one issue less :)

------
shruubi
I've tried blogging in the past, but have since given up on it. I found that I
was putting in a lot of time and effort to have my work read by maybe 3-5
people and came to the conclusion that I had nothing interesting or worthwhile
to contribute or say, nor am I a person who can compete with the usual horde
of twitter-tech-celebrities who seemingly control a majority of the audience.

These days, whether it be blogs or social media, the end goal is becoming less
about saying something worthwhile and more about building and maintaining some
kind of personal brand. So while I'll continue being another worthless face in
the crowd, consuming content, I also won't mourn the death of blogging or any
other similar forms.

~~~
blueridge
Agreed. Pulling over a comment I left the other day in a similar thread about
blogging, seems relevant here:

We all know too much about one another these days. It doesn't seem to matter
to whom we address our writing. There is something to writing for yourself,
writing offline, writing as a means of forming a private life and a private
consciousness. And what about writing for the experience of writing itself?
Forget publishing.

Ours is a society that says so little about nearly everything, and most
commentary on the web today isn't worth reading. Furthermore, all content is
ephemeral, people share gentle opinions instead of strong convictions because
it is safer for one's public reputation, nobody is good at or cares about
typography, self-editing is not a skill that people have, and you can never
tell where the delusional self-promotion ends and the truthful personal
expression begins.

We have become so sensitive to other people's personalities, accomplishments,
productivity habits, recommendations, and advice for life. To what end? I
don't know. Reading blogs is not my idea of quality time.

------
Hoasi
Blogging is not dead. It is just unevenly discoverable.

And that creates an interesting problem that is still waiting for a solution.

~~~
ImaCake
>It is just unevenly discoverable.

I suspect this makes me selfish, but I like it like this. It is _fun_ finding
out of the way blogs and being part of a tiny audience following an
interesting but rarely discussed topic.

------
TrackerFF
Is it a cultural thing that differs from country to country? Here in Norway,
the best paid "influencers" are still bloggers - though they are obviously on
all channels these days.

edit: But what I'm trying to get at is, no, at least here - blogs are not dead
and forgotten / some esoteric channel for the very few.

------
dnissley
The blog discovery story is terrible, which I think is the only thing that
would make someone say that blogging is dead. Anyone know of any good
solutions for this?

I've been kicking around an idea about manually associating blogs to twitter
accounts, and then using twitter follows to create a graph for discovery
purposes.

~~~
ImaCake
The problem with any automated method is it is subject to hijacking by people
who are interested in money.

I think the best thing to do is to return to manual link referals. There are
plenty of bloggers who will link to other blogs throughout their articles, or
post articles with explicit lists of blogs they like. Good, interesting, blogs
will rise to the top by being linked a lot.

------
vinceguidry
A blogger I used to follow, Steve Pavlina, shut down his forums like in 2011
after 5 years of running them stating that they were always completely
irrelevant to his biz model. He's still posting to his blog, daily, having
started in 2004. Still going strong after 15 years.

~~~
coding123
Nice, thanks for pointing this out. I am amazed by the quality of writing!

Nice random nugget:

[https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2020/05/herd-
stupidity/](https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2020/05/herd-stupidity/)

> This isn’t a situation where you should look to the masses for guidance.
> When you see idiotic behavior, don’t let the fact that everyone else seems
> fine with it persuade you that it’s probably okay. Stupid behavior that’s
> popular is still stupid. A bar full of idiots taking reassuring cues from
> each other is still a bar full of idiots.

~~~
redis_mlc
Prophetic ... applies to the corona lockdown perfectly.

~~~
taejo
It's correct, but since it's from last week it's hardly prophetic.

------
PerilousD
The original article was crap since the author stated "spent an hour trying to
find blog and ...nothing" Any reasonable response would have been an hour
trying to figure out where the "return" key was is NOT the same thing as an
hour spent searching. Blog, by folks that don't give a crap about Googles SEO
requirements exist, have existed and will still exist in the future.

------
abbadadda
I wonder if a dedicated company could build a non-privacy invasive RSS reader
that could: (1) show targeted ads based on a user's curated blog feed; (2)
Develop a profit-sharing model for those authors that generate the most
traffic. I'm kind of thinking like hackernews but (A) user-curated content;
and (B) Advertising; and (C) optional subscriptions to support the bloggers.
There could of course be a discovery mode to find new blogs, but the default
would be user-curated. To ensure payments were significant enough to overcome
the micropayment problem, perhaps a "minimum payout" could be set for authors
so they could accumulate proceeds (and see _some_ fruits of their labor
without having to set up their own individual payment system) even if they
couldn't withdraw them yet. If someone really was motivated they might even be
able to set this up as a non-profit. Just kind of a brain dump. Thinking of
this as "the front page for blogs" by bloggers for bloggers (instead of a big
corporation whose primary objective is to generate profits, which is
exceedingly difficult with traditional RSS feeds). Fraud and spoofing views
would be an obvious challenge of this framework.

------
juliend2
I think psychology needs to be taken into account here:

The currency we have right now on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is
reputation. There, it's in the form of Followers. That's the very currency
that Stack Overflow uses to grow and sustain.

It's "gamified". And the blogosphere needs that, too.

And in a way, blogs have that, but it's in the form of Reddit and HN and some
other sites, where people get their karma fix by taking the time to read the
blog post (upfront time investment), comment on it (risk losing karma), then
get their comment being liked (return on investment), which augment their
karma.

(Facebook does not have a Karma system like Reddit or HN has. But if it would,
it would make the world a bit more like a certain black mirror episode of
season 2.)

Why do you see coders put their reddit+HN profile links on their site? Because
they want their reputation/karma/notoriety to follow them in real-life
context, so it can be converted as real "notoriety currency". (people looking
at their profile will say Gosh, this guy has 2000 points on SO and 4000 points
on HN, he must be very smart or influent!).

So my guess is that the reason blogs still exist is because of sites like
Reddit, HN, where people can get reputation (and not only knowledge) out of
their reading. There's also something satisfying in the act of praising a good
post with your friends. It's like watching a good movie and talking about how
good it is with your friends.

And blogs also survived because that still being viewed as THE most
professional was of expressing one's opinions. It gives you gravitas by
default when you have your own blog, compared to having a Twitter / Facebook
account like the plebs.

And you get the best of both worlds when you promote your blog posts on social
networks.

------
ipiz0618
Didn't think blogging even dying given the number of high quality blog posts
from personal blogs / Medium on HN. Some dev.to posts really resemble blog
posts as well.

Maybe it's a developer specific culture?

------
masswerk
I'd say, there are significantly less high frequency blogs than, say, 10 years
ago. One of the reasons for this is the radical decline in means of
monetization. In the heyday of blogging, you could do it for living, with just
a few non-obtrusive ads. Which has changed a lot. Even, if you would plaster
your site with ads, like news outlets, with little room left for actually
reading, chances are, you won't see much of a return. As a result, blogging is
mostly a hobbyist endeavor (again).

------
lazarous
I'd welcome some feedback. I'm hoping to start a blog based around my hobby
and findings. It won't be anything ground breaking but I'd like somewhere to
put my thoughts and feelings. I feel people may enjoy the content and
pictures.

Do you think its worth me creating a blog like this, hoping that one day I
could build up an organic following and potentially monetise it?

------
cageface
Content on open platforms like blogs and podcasts has two serious handicaps.
First, it doesn't have any built in system for liking, commenting on and
sharing content. Second, there is no low-friction way to monetize it except
for advertising.

I don't see any easy, scalable solutions to these problems but until they're
solved open platforms will cater to niche audiences.

------
type0
It is kinda dead, not in a way BBS is dead, or even IRC. Anecdotally less and
less blogs enable comments or curate the comment spam. I even see some HN
users advice their readers to use this site for comments where there
previously had a comments section. Certain Disqus'ting services did not help
this blogging demise.

------
gtrubetskoy
Related - see my Ask HN on _how_ to host your own blog without giving it to
the centralized blogging services (I won't name):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206094](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206094)

------
tracker1
From a blog without an RSS feed...

~~~
acangiano
[https://www.garron.blog/en/feed.xml](https://www.garron.blog/en/feed.xml)

~~~
tracker1
how did you find that... when I hit the home page, I looked at the source and
not finding either an RSS header or a link to that feed.xml

------
imprettycool
The nice thing about RSS is that it's never gonna die

------
klysm
It’s really interesting that HN can be a long term asynchronous channel for
discourse through independent blogs

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alexmingoia
What makes content discoverable on Twitter? Reposting and linking to other
posts.

Bloggers should do more of that.

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milap
We need youtube for bloggers.

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Cthulhu_
Youtube is already dominated by bloggers, it's all game reviews, food /
cooking, makeup, etc. Just open it up in an anonymous browser window and
you'll see what I mean.

However, and I'm making an assumption here, it's not the blogs you're
personally interested in.

I bought a synthesizer the other day (UNO Synth, relatively cheap (most
electronic instruments are expensive I'm afraid :( )) and you quickly run into
the music youtubers, just people at their own home or home studio that show
you a product and fiddle with it. There is a LOT of content like that on
youtube, in all genres.

It's just that they're not for everyone. I prefer reading a blog over watching
a video about programming. I don't like having to listen to people (except if
it's my adopted dad AvE), and I don't have the patience to sit through a half
hour video.

But it's there. One channel that frequently features something that would be
on HN is Tom Scott, who makes a wide range of relatively short / punchy videos
about a subject, ranging from weird art installations in the middle of nowhere
to the basics of computers and text compression. That is blog content, it's
just that the presentation is different.

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NN88
Google reader killed it.

Not to mention, Reddit won't let you post blogs to their largest subreddits.

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ManoSinkosika
Your content is great. I think blogging will never be dead

