I find that claim surprising considering how many more people there are simply using the internet at all.
Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.
Fewer unique blog domains due to “blogging” sites that aggregate users? Sounds plausible. Fewer people blogging overall? I’m not convinced yet.
Ten years ago, the majority(!) had at least something up and running, where they would post essays, thoughts, whatever came to mind.
Nowadays? All gone. All! When asked why, the answer almost always is along a mix of ever-increasing negative feedback and harassment from randos, and aggressive automated spamming of their forums. Loss of the pseudo-anonymity plays a large role as well. Many have deleted years' worth of work, simply because they are afraid of someone trolling through their posts to find something to harass them with.
I was never a blogger myself, but I am sad about the change. There was a lot of good stuff out there for a while, and sometimes it just plain made me happy to read someone joyfully nerding out on a favorite subject of theirs.
Not to zero. You can still find things tucked away in a post on reddit or the like. Almost never, as far as I have experienced, on Facebook or its ilk, as the affordances are different. I genuinely think there has been a loss.
Now?
Nope. Putting anything out there is basically just doing the rest of the world's Open Source Intel for them. Maybe it isn't the Net that changed. It's just there's way more sharks out there that can't just leave well enough alone.
Most of these many more people are mobile users, where creating long-style text content can be quite bothersome.
What ain't bothersome, with a smartphone, is taking pictures and videos to slap filters over them, alas that's why we are where we are with TicToc, Instagram and Twitter dominating large parts of the web.
It's even noticeable in a lot of online discussions with text outside of these communities; The average length of forum posts feels like it's gotten way shorter over the decades. People have less attention to read anything that looks longer than a few sentences, often declaring it a "wall of text" based on quantity of text alone.
Imho it's a big part of what drives misinformation; Doing any kind of online research on a small phone screen is extremely bothersome compared to the workspace an actual computer/laptop, particularly with multi-monitor, gives.
There's also the difference in attention; When I sit down at my laptop/desktop, I actively decide to spend and focus my attention on that task and device.
While smartphone usage is mostly dominated by short bursts of "can't do anything else right now", I don't chose to take out my phone and surf the web, it's something I do when I'm stuck in some place with nothing else to do and no access to an actual computer.
But for the majority of web-users [0], that smartphone access to the web is all they know, which then ends up heavily shaping the ways they consume and contribute to it.
[0] https://techjury.net/blog/what-percentage-of-internet-traffi...
For my part, I'm glad these fora aren't indexed well; I don't want my search results dominated by single-sentence posts and photos. In particular, I don't have accounts on any of these services.
I'd be happy if search engines would decline to index sites behind paywalls. Links to Medium, Substack and Washpo are very common, and if the first thing I see is a popup demand for payment, that browser-tab gets closed.
Don’t know how hard it would be to know which is which. Maybe non-commercial : don’t run ads, don’t sell a product or service and provide information only.