The incentives have disappeared. I'm old (64), and when I started out, there were printed trade publications for pretty much any discipline, that showed up in the mail, paid for by advertisers. The articles were deep and useful, because they had to respect the audiences time enough to avoid the trash bin.

The money that funded those got sucked up by ad-tech companies like Google and Facebook.

Blogging, was a low to non-profit version of the same thing. You'd direct your RSS reader to your favorite feeds, read what your "friends" wrote, and reply in the comments, etc.

The thing that happened was the audience shifted from technical people happy to deal with RSS readers, and do the work of maintaining subscriptions found the process of getting a blog going to be burdensome, and moved into the easier walled gardens.

The effort of blogging to a stand alone platform wasn't horrible, nor was writing and editing something long enough to be worth the time and consideration of the reader. To make it worth it for a blogger though, you need an audience, and the feedback cycle was slow, through Google for anyone not using an RSS reader. It was really hard to get attention enough to feel the effort was worth it.

The social networks arrived, and they offered faster feedback, and more of it, with a single mechanism to handle replies, instead of each platform having a different system, and anti-spam mechanism. When Robert Scoble gave up on blogging, that signaled the end of it for me.

If you want to make money from it, it's definitely far harder than it used to be. Ad payout for written content is miniscule compared to that for videos or livestreams, and the decline in traffic has likely hit things like affiliate links and sponsorships pretty hard.

It's also hard to get people to visit regularly, let alone respect the time and effort that goes into writing for a site like this now. Again, people seem to have decided that influencers who make videos are just more 'valuable' than writers.

But I guess there are other reasons to run them. Writing helps you think by letting you explain your ideas more clearly, it provides a potential portfolio piece that may help things like job applications, and it's definitely possible to get attention from the right people by having a public presence like this.

It's just not really something that makes a lot of sense business wise anymore.

I used to run javascripttodaycom. Within ~3 months, it had numerous first result Google searches (something I didn't plan), and the traffic was beyond what I would have ever imagined when starting it. It eventually became the first result for "JavaScript Blog".

When LLMs gained popularity, I used them. Nonstop. My original intentions (explain things so I can understand them better) behind the blog were shattered. I wanted more readers.

(I did eventually remove or completely rewrite those LLM-generated articles).

Now, I don't know if the LLM-generated content did this, but the readership eventually dropped to single digit numbers. Granted, I did stop writing for like a year, but yeah... Why would anyone read anything on the blog when an LLM can generate the answer they're looking for in seconds? AND they can ask follow-up questions?

If you write one for likes and shares then yeah, totally dead. The same is true for all internet content though. AI has removed the need for anyone to ever visit a website again if they're happy to read what AI generates.

If you write one to solidify your thinking, or for you to refer back to in the future, then they're just as useful as ever.

Also, if you write a good post people will drop into the comments to accuse you of generating it, which is pretty disheartening. You can't blame people for not sharing.

I recently launched a hackers' blog aggregator at http://tinkeri.ng (note the layout switcher top-right)

The thing about Tinkering is it's a place to pickup on people's passions.

It's still important to be able to think and write. You can really put yourself on the cutting edge of things. And then you can translate that into better prompts.

The more I think about it, many of the questions people ask here on HN are very much already answered through prompting. That's sort of weird. And if you want a blog post on something, just ask an AI and they'll be pulling from blog posts anyway.

The issue is "Model Collapse" and synthetic data as outlined here: https://share.gemini.google/izx1TAOuSZc5 - my questions there were actually posed here on HN beforehand https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49536605 I just went and asked C3PO about it afterward. The commenter could have done the same.

HN is an IT site, but technology means a more than IT. Technical can be formal or informal. Social media encapsulated informal personal interest technical blogs long before llms. Reach is always the biggest problem. Mention on HN has helped a few personal blogs, I'm sure. If somebody wants to look something up that a particular blog is good about, they can take the data and run, or be entertained by following the llm back to the source. If I want to know the amp-hours in a NiCd C-cell, I go to DDG, then the blog, and then 85% of the time I leave. The ai assisted answer credits the page" Maintaining your Batteries" which looks like it was typed on an Underwood. Walled gardens ruined search.

I feel much less incentivised to post publicly. The only benefit might be that I review and think more before posting than saving locally.

The downside is that now bunch of llms will read it and spill my thoughts all over without any attribution. I might be even ok with that, but now some company is making money on it, and that doesn't sit well with me.

I still see them occasionally and read them when I can. Because the content a human has made is much more interesting than something possibly plausible but useless that an Agent could tell me. I've been working on a project that'll look at the HN new submissions and start to filter out the stuff I really don't care about (news, product announcements, stuff about LLMs), which makes technical blogs more likely to show up, then I can bookmark them for later reading

I'm searching for them harder than ever. Ironically, I have agents crawl for independent bloggers so I can add more people to my ever-growing RSS feed.

I get a lot of traffic to my blog but mostly from bots.

Maybe there is value in another role for technical blogs: providing structured frameworks that change how an agent reasons through a problem.

An agent may understand the underlying technology, but I spend a fair bit of time working out with agents the best framework for approaching a particular problem.

A technical post could lay out various approaches, possible SOPs, and their tradeoffs. That can be useful to an agent even if it doesn’t teach it any new technical facts.

Unless the serve for a specific reason, probably.

It’s not dead if you actually write authentically in your own PoV.

I write mine all the time. Enough people seem to engage with it. Traffic seems fine.

I probably write less for capturing Google traffic, but instead as a signpost of something cool I worked on or learned. That I can send to people I meet as a reference. Impress my friends. Or refer to myself. Or show an agent (I often prefer writing blog articles to skills).

There’s a pretty massive competitive advantage to having your own voice that doesn’t sound like slop. IMO it’s never been a better time to be a messy, slightly unpolsihed human writing on the Web.

They’re not dead. They’re resting ;-)

Mine is and rightly so. AI will do a better job at educating you on any technical subject than I could have ever hoped for.

I can only hope my years of writing and open source code projects are useful to OpenAI otherwise it was all for nothing.

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