[will-burner]

An assumption of the article is that in addition to getting readers, bloggers want to make money from their blogs via advertising, brand endorsements, etc. That's fair and true for the author in this case, but not necessarily true of all bloggers, especially the tech type that are on hacker news.

[kmbfjr]

I used to publish some of my edge use case and home lab networking experiments. I had about 150 pages on L3 switches, Wireguard, IoT connectivity.

No ads, no SEO, just sharing information. By the beginning of the year, my only requests were bots. The only referrals were from someone on Reddit linking to a page.

I took it down. Google extracted the value of my work, they are doing the same to everyone else.

[Pet_Ant]

Sorry, why was someone linking from Reddit not a valid reason for keeping it up? You already made it, why lose it? Hosting fees?

[imp0cat]

This.

He even mentions the "Blogging Apocalypse" and follows with a downwardly sloped graph titled "bye bye traffic" with no units or further explanation.

    I shortened my sentences. I used keywords that Google could identify easily. I wrote in a way that allowed Google to understand our content,[...] If I wanted people to find our article on Prague in a Google search I had to call it something Google understood. And then I had to repeat what the article was about in the first 100 words. And then do it again and again in the content. It led to some less than stellar paragraphs occasionally, [...]

If the "blogging apocalypse" can rid us of SEO spam, then perhaps it's not a bad thing?

[juunpp]

I'm not sad about Google ad-driven blogs disappearing, good riddance.

I'm not positive about the new web either. I'm sure it'll be worse and surveillance will only increase.