[ahefner]

From my perspective (for me, personally), the closing of Google Reader killed blogs. That's when I largely stopped reading them. Other readers seemed not worth the trouble, for various reasons. Was this before or after the onslaught of SEO slop? Seems like this shouldn't have been an issue in the age of RSS readers - why would you subscribe to blogspam?

Briefly, Twitter was a useful alternative to promote blog posts (the set of people you follow on Twitter not necessarily being that different than who you'd subscribe to via RSS), but then the blog hosting platforms themselves seemed to age into irrelevance while things like Medium and Substack appeared (neither judging nor endorsing them) while Twitter degraded.

I suppose you're right about Twitter to some degree, though anything that could fit in 140 characters probably belonged better there anyway.