To offer a prominent counter-example, consider the success of Substack, Ghost, Medium, and other blogs-and-newsletter platforms. Blogs are thriving for quality writers (especially those with unique experiences), as evidenced by the ability of certain writers (including some I subscribe to) to make a full-time living through these platforms.
Outside of blogs, I personally know people in non-technology fields who have their own personal website, to make it easier for people to contact them and view their portfolio of work. They made their through page builders to avoid the need to learn how to program, and they personally found some collaboration opportunities due to their personal websites. Searching for someone's name and possibly finding their personal website still has value.
Though I do admit that there are far more heavily commercialized or clickbait articles nowadays (such as padded-out listicle-style articles that bury the important information, which may also have questionable accuracy), I personally believe there are still good websites out there to find and learn from, which I've discovered through personal recommendations or searches on niche topics of interest.
A major source of well-written personal websites for me have been those that focus on the use of specialized software (such as Anki and SuperMemo) in spaced repetition: I've learned a lot from excellent recently-published, non-commercial blogs found directly through Google searches. I've also found similar very high-quality and non-commercial personal websites and blogs when searching about other specialized topics, such as workflows to use the Vim text editor to create technical documents with LaTeX typesetting.
I have a blog, like the early 2000’s! I’m also working on a book, hopefully I’ll have it done by the end of this year. The blog is called supermemoadventures. I’ve been using SuperMemo for 17 years, every single day. If you have any questions, feel free to ask here.
Cool! Yeah, at a certain point I was looking for help in my flashcard routine but realized not many people have used a program like SuperMemo for a few years in a row every single day, and I thought it would be a good idea to write down my experiences and observations.
I really enjoyed physicist Michael Nielsen's "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics," as the post lets the reader learn about the thought process behind a researcher who is highly accomplished in a mathematics-heavy field, in both academia and industry (2019): https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
I plan to re-read the post as I gain a better understanding of higher-level mathematics over time, but from my first reads, I could relate and better put to words the idea that using spaced repetition to study technical concepts (though I personally always make sure it's not the main method of study, versus practice exercises) can help you better grasp connections between concepts over time.
A statement from the author's article that I still think about from time to time is: "I can’t emphasize enough the value of finding multiple different ways of thinking about the “same” mathematical ideas."
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From a completely different angle, Nicky Case's "How to remember anything forever-ish" is a fun introductory post for giving an overview of what spaced repetition is, in case a friend or colleague is curious about the study method (2018): https://ncase.me/remember/
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For a much older article that contains the fundamentals of making good elements/items/flashcards, Piotr Wozniak's "20 rules of knowledge formulation" is an article that I've referred to time and time again. I treat the rules more as guidelines, as I personally don't use images or cloze deletion, but I've improved my retention and understanding of topics by avoiding questions that ask for lists, and by always trying to understand a topic before making a flashcard about the subject (though this can be flexible to a certain extent, depending on the subject): https://supermemo.guru/wiki/20_rules_of_knowledge_formulatio...
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As a last one that focuses more on the technical aspects of using the SuperMemo article specifically, I applied the information from this article published in 2010 to create a special Google Sheet to make it easier to import spreadsheets into SuperMemo: https://thesupermemoblog.wordpress.com/2010/05/15/exporting-...
Specifically, to import dozens of vocabulary flashcards at once, I open a spreadsheet file (aka workbook) and begin with a main spreadsheet with the English in column A and the translation in column B. A second spreadsheet then contains a copy of the first spreadsheet's information, but appending "Q: " to the column A entries and "A: " to the column B entries.
I then export this as a .csv file, replace the extension to .txt, and then use Vim (though Sublime Text or another text editor equally works well), to replace each instance of `,A` (that is, each instance of a comma that separates each item) with `\rA` (that is, a line break), to fit the import formatting required by SuperMemo.
This process helps a lot for picking up new phrases from newspaper articles and storing them in my records, and then importing them into my spaced repetition software for review without too much typing. I would guess that Anki's import method is easier and more straightforward, but I still do prefer SuperMemo despite the complexity (and lack of mobile access for the version I use), as I prefer the item scheduling. My impression is that in the long run, I have fewer reviews with the same amount of retention, which anecdotally seems to be true so far.
Outside of blogs, I personally know people in non-technology fields who have their own personal website, to make it easier for people to contact them and view their portfolio of work. They made their through page builders to avoid the need to learn how to program, and they personally found some collaboration opportunities due to their personal websites. Searching for someone's name and possibly finding their personal website still has value.
Though I do admit that there are far more heavily commercialized or clickbait articles nowadays (such as padded-out listicle-style articles that bury the important information, which may also have questionable accuracy), I personally believe there are still good websites out there to find and learn from, which I've discovered through personal recommendations or searches on niche topics of interest.
A major source of well-written personal websites for me have been those that focus on the use of specialized software (such as Anki and SuperMemo) in spaced repetition: I've learned a lot from excellent recently-published, non-commercial blogs found directly through Google searches. I've also found similar very high-quality and non-commercial personal websites and blogs when searching about other specialized topics, such as workflows to use the Vim text editor to create technical documents with LaTeX typesetting.