As someone with a long term interest in blogging/media/publishing, I tend to gravitate towards such headlines, but I'm struggling to grasp the author's point in this piece?<p>Did someone tell them "blogging is dead" so they went out and wrote a 500 word defense? And while I do agree with the conclusion, some data would have been nice to review, like the golden age vs. second golden age. Something more than just pure conjecture.
I'm a Gen-Xer. I blog. I like writing, and I enjoy public feedback. But this article and its multiple references to how blogging is for the "intelligent" and the "intellectually sophisticated" individual... I couldn't get past that part. What a load of crap. Blogging is for anyone who wants to be read.
> Such people think, because they don’t know many institutionalized professionals who still blog, that blogging must be dead. What they don’t realize is that the credibility premium historically enjoyed by professional institutions is plummeting toward zero. This fact is so obvious to younger Millenials and Zoomers that it goes unremarked, undebated, because it is already baked-in to their reading/watching behaviors.<p>The idea that traditional news media is losing credibility to blogs has been around since at least the 2004 US Presidential Election, which is when regular people starting discovering blogs.<p>The web was a lot less populated then, and large sites did not attempt to crowd out smaller sites by generating SEO-optimized content by the metric ton. Bots didn't pollute commment sections to the point where organic communities left out of exasperation. You could create a blog and be reasonably certain of developing an audience. The idea of AOL-style walled gardens seemed deeply outdated.<p>FFWD 10 years, and now the vast majority of internet activity occurs in walled gardens, be it FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, YouTube, Twitch, you name it. People don't even bookmark sites anymore, their muscle memory causes them to open Reddit or FB and just mindlessly browse.<p>So you start a self-owned blog in 2020. The only way to direct traffic to it is to also post on all the other walled gardens, because that's where the people are. That sounds like a lot of addtional work just to get eyeballs on a page.
"Those who think blogs are irrelevant today — usually Gen-Xers or older — typically underestimate the degree to which real power has evacuated traditional institutions such as academia and New York publishing houses. "<p>I don't know that I've seen anyone say blogging is irrelevant. Maybe I just missed that. It's not the "new hotness" now, but it still gets the job done. There's no shortage of people burned out on Twitter/Facebook/etc doing some form of blogs now (I guess the new hotness is static sites again?) or blogging at something like Medium. Though I honestly have no idea how popular Medium really is. I never see it outside of HN, but I certainly don't have eyes everywhere.<p>I've had a blog since the 90s and I still find my feedreader the best way to keep up with the news that matters to me. It's not all blogs, but it's mostly, and the writing being done on blogs is just as good and relevant now as it was 15-20 years ago.
Blogging is just another tool, and one that will probably never go away.<p>People who want to publish their voice often use a multifaceted approach. I have been directed to various blogs by personalities I discovered on social media. The blog serves as a permanent, long form version of their content.<p>If you're <i>really</i> looking to get your voice out there, you're probably posting to multiple places - Facebook, Instagram, blogs, YouTube, or whatever else fits your particular brand of content.