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Comment by winry | Hacker News Reader

Hold on, what happened to Coding Horror's traffic?

Updates have become very infrequent.

People have generally stopped visiting blogs. Even stand-alone web sites are starting to suffer.

I recently re-enabled my Facebook account for dev purposes, and while there liked the Verge, AnandTech, etc. So now my feed is a small amount of family stuff, and a long list of tech news, most of which I quickly scroll past.

It's interesting because I essentially never visit those sites any more. Not long ago I visited the Verge probably daily, and browsed into random stories. I visited Anandtech weekly. And so on. Now I see the headlines that I skip past, and that's that.

And on the pure blog front, a lot of people rely upon sites like HN and reddit to sift through the chaff, the idea being that those killer blog posts will rise to the top. We know that isn't actually true (HN is mostly about luck and pet topics, with a lot of terrible content rising, while Reddit is horribly, horribly gamed), but the end result is that the good content suffers.

Have people "generally stopped visiting blogs?" Do "a lot" of people rely on HN?

Internet usage is 39% globally [1]. I doubt there are any statements you can make that apply to 2.85 Billion People. Feels like you are ascribing your personal opinion/beliefs/experiences to "people" in general.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage

Is this an example of someone adding an irrelevant citation to try to add an air of authority where they have none?

Technology blogs used to be fairly significant ventures. Now there are shockingly few that are still maintained, and even those (such as Coding Horror) detail dramatic declines in readership.

Every reality goes against your garbage post. Yet still you did it. Weird. HN gets stupider by the day.

[1] - http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-cook-spaghetti-squash-in-the...

And more full of trolls :-(

Indeed, here you[1] are.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0787474/

You kind of have to keep up a regular cadence of new content to get people to keep coming back. For instance, Coding Horror has had only 9 posts in the last six months. For the most part, I don't revisit programming/software dev blogs unless there is new content or there is something relevant that I want to go review again. Ergo, if you write most of your posts on the latest teacup-hurricane scandal or the newest version of X software/hardware product, you aren't going to get the kind of long tail that sustains page views when your posting rate slows down. On the other hand, if you are producing quality content that stands the test of time (something like lazyFoo's SDL tutorials comes to mind), then you are going to move up the search rankings on that topic, which will reinforce that long tail.

For sure, but in a way it's a bit of a chicken and egg issue. Spend lots of time making content to see the same sputter and occasional luck on the social news sites.

There was a time a few years ago when you could ask what the best tech blogs where and there would quickly be thousands of posts. Now...most of those have been abandoned, and little has appeared in their place. Even among professional sites it's amazing how many technologies (for instance Intel's tablet chips) get almost no treatment at all, and astonishingly little actual effort is expended, so we just end up with some vapid, high-level commentary that is then blog spammed across autonomously created dupe sites.

It's just a wastelands. People stopped coming and people stopped being interested.

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