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Comment by mmwon | Hacker News Reader

I believe blogging will have a Renaissance since it has all the benefits from "social networks" but excluding the ads, the unnecessary "likes", and focus on the fundamentals which are sharing and discussing, just like forums, but blogs will be about individuals mainly.

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IDK what blogs you're reading, but many of those sites are a confederation of ads with small islands of content interspersed between.

Many bloggers are trying to do it as a way to gain income at this point, and the ads are either all over the site or inserted directly into the "content".

Well, like mine, which is completely about me and my thoughts with zero ads, and I share and discuss whatever I want https://safetyinsolitude.blogspot.com/ This is what I send to people if they want to know my digital self.

So yeah, mentality needs to change to stop seeking revenue out of everything...

The issue is that some people want to blog for a living (and there's nothing wrong with that IMO) which leads the platforms to optimize for that. I don't think enough people are willing to spin up their own self-hosted blogs just to throw their thoughts into the aether. Not when points to what the internet has become exists and they can get the engagement/dopamine they want elsewhere.

That's not to say your prediction is wrong, just feels extremely unlikely, barring some massive regulatory upheaval changing the internet's current paradigm.

I think OPs original point was more of a circa-2005 blog, which would be nice. But your point is equally as valid. Try searching for a recipe for your favorite dish - the first two pages are blog posts each filled with incessant chatter about how the dish makes them feel. You have to scroll to the very bottom just to get the actual recipe.

The Livejournal era has passed. You can't go back to that on a platform because platforms will continue to be for profit and nobody is going to pay for you to host their blog so you need ads to make the business viable.

The other option is everyone spinning up and hosting their own sites, which will not happen because Helen the mommy blogger has 2 kids to deal with and photos to edit and content to write so she does not also want to learn how to set up hosting and write HTML.

I'd like for certain things to "go back to the way they were" but that's just not how it works usually.

I'm skeptical. Blogs are difficult for subject matter experts (people skilled in a domain, and not necessarily skilled at making money off of the web) to monetize.

Not everyone is using social media to make money.

Not everyone wants to monetize in the first place.

The issue is that its not 2005 anymore. An organic blog that doesn't play the SEO game will just be buried by the millions of junk websites that play that game, and won't get traction like they did in the era where searching for a topic on the internet brought up relevent nonspam results.

That is a bug in search engines though, not in blogs.

It's the way the internet is now, though, and it makes it so that is harder for average people to find and read and write blogs than it was years ago. In other words, it's tough going back to horses when all the stables in the city are gas stations now.

Someone just needs to make a niche search engine that caters specifically to blogs. Preferably as a labor of love instead of a get rich quick scheme.

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