[HN Gopher] Blogging is not dying anytime soon
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Blogging is not dying anytime soon
Author : imartin2k
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-01-26 10:45 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dariusforoux.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dariusforoux.com)
| Decabytes wrote:
| While I agree that blogging isn't dead, I think that blogging
| serves another purpose as well. It's a great way to solidify
| understandings about certain topics.
|
| I have a substack on programming and technology, and when I'm
| working on something I know I will write about, I definitely
| understand it better. I think it fulfills the same purpose as
| learning through teaching.
|
| And it's also just extremely fulfilling. Writing about a niche
| part of a field you are interested in and wished had more
| spotlight is satisfying, even if no one reads what you wrote. Or
| at least that's how I feel about it.
| josefresco wrote:
| Related: https://startafuckingblog.com
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| "Always bet on text"
|
| Text is eternal and has a nice Lindy effect going for it. However
| this article doesn't address the core problem indie bloggers are
| facing, _discoverability_. It reads like a self fulfilling
| prophesy and dismissed the inroads made by video. Many
| programmers these days simply jump to YouTube to solve a problem
| and videos solve these problems satisfactorily.
|
| To make blogging great again, we need to solve this issue of
| discoverability. Otherwise we're all screaming in the wind.
| asdff wrote:
| I think discoverability, reach, and exponential growth is
| overrated. In the end you either get overwhelmed by your
| massive userbase, or lose your original intent somewhere along
| the way, subconsciously catering towards more growth versus
| blogging for bloggings sake.
|
| Instead, screw all of that. Write your ideas and let it out.
| It's cathartic, it helps you think more clearly on whatever you
| are writing up, and serves as a lasting reference should you
| need to revisit that information again yourself. A blog with no
| readers is still a great tool for your own productivity.
| saperyton wrote:
| I've personally benefited a lot from Thinking About Things, a
| newsletter that emails me a couple of blog posts every week.
| https://thinking-about-things.com
| criddell wrote:
| Is a newsletter a blog? For me, a weblog (or blog) has always
| been a webpage that I can either read in my browser or my
| newsreader.
|
| If a newsletter that arrives via email is a blog, is a
| newsletter that the post office delivers a blog?
| layer8 wrote:
| That newsletter links to actual blog posts, I believe. It's
| basically a blog post recommendation newsletter.
| sureglymop wrote:
| That's why I've decided to just blog for myself. It's kind of
| like notes where if i come across it again, i can remind myself
| or i can grasp something i once understood more easily but with
| the added component of holding myself to somewhat of a high
| standard because it's still going to be public. Can also be
| something that helps when looking for a job as the recruiter
| can look at the blog and see the experience you have.
| generalizations wrote:
| Yeah, this is exactly the same thing I do. It's just a place
| I dump stuff I learned and want to remember. And can confirm,
| it was the deciding factor in at least one job interview.
| People do care about that kind of stuff.
| tomalaci wrote:
| Maybe many beginners might be jumping to videos. I'd like to
| think that most of the experienced developers like text more as
| they can quickly scroll past the bits that are irrelevant to
| them and look for the parts that are interesting. It is harder
| to do so for a video as you typically have no idea at which
| point the person will tell you about the concept you were
| looking for (unless you get some timestamp list but even then
| you may need to wade through some fluff/water before you get to
| the juicy bits).
| ripe wrote:
| When looking for information, I despise videos and will avoid
| watching them if at all possible. For exactly the reasons you
| mention: random access, too much fluff and low information
| content.
|
| The only exception is things like home repair advice, fixing
| washing machines, etc. I assume that the people with most
| knowledge of these skills are more likely to produce videos
| than write down something.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| I agree that the sort of people who do home repair, car
| repair, etc. are much, much more likely to put a video
| together (low friction) than to put up a well-written and
| illustrated instruction manual.
|
| But I still hate it. The video is always too long, has too
| much non-relevant stuff in it, and a phone camera jammed
| under a water pump to see the frobnitz valve or whatever is
| never as good as an exploded view illustration.
|
| Forget AI-powered lawyers and AI-powered fantasy art
| generators, let's get an AI-powered technical writer and
| AI-powered technical illustrator going. Train them on
| Haynes manuals until you can ask them to generate an
| accurate repair guide for a Kenmore washing machine.
| ElFitz wrote:
| That's pretty much why I'm working on summarising content,
| no matter the media.
|
| Just getting started, but it has already yielded some fun
| results.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye videos are really bad as a manual for programming.
|
| Usually you just want the code pointing you in the right
| direction and if the writer was nice the header file is
| included in the snippet.
|
| For e.g. repairing cars it is really great.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I find with programming video's the information density is
| really low. The best channels is where there's no
| introduction or it's in chapters and easily skipeped.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I miss the days of webrings.
| rcarr wrote:
| A lot of people are still using them, especially in the
| IndieWeb scene. I came across this really cool blog last
| night (click the different theme switchers in the top right)
| and the author is using one:
|
| https://localghost.dev/
| hackitup7 wrote:
| Discoverability is a huge challenge... I've considered moving
| to Substack because of their discovery mechanisms, but I don't
| like incurring the platform risk having seen the way that
| applications like Medium have changed over time. Curious if
| anyone in the HN community has any ideas on that conundrum.
| ripe wrote:
| I copy my blog text to Substack and use the platform as a
| push mechanism. I hear your concern and am open to
| suggestions.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Just checked out your blog, pretty cool stuff. Thanks for
| sharing.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| If you can script this for yourself, write your post, push to
| your platform and auto publish to substack, or vice versa.
| aliqot wrote:
| Does everyone need to be discoverable? What would a blog engine
| look like with zero discoverability? You can't say they
| wouldn't have any readers, to an extent Gumroad and other
| similar services have no discoverability.
|
| example: I don't go to Gumroad.com to find random people to
| give money to, a creator who has captured my through other
| means directs me there.
| waboremo wrote:
| Services like Gumroad can have zero discoverability because
| other services have decent discoverability. So somewhere,
| discoverability is a crucial service and it's probably best
| to have control over that rather than assuming a third party
| service will continue as-is.
|
| Take Twitter for instance, prohibiting the promotion of other
| platforms. This impacted discoverability for a lot of people
| because they relied on Twitter as the funnel to get people to
| patreon/gumroad/their site/etc. Apparently that policy at
| Twitter is now gone but you get the point.
|
| I don't fully agree with the above idea that discoverability
| is the main problem however when it comes to blogging. Tumblr
| solved that for a long time (although now discoverability is
| a bit rubbish), most still don't use Tumblr so there are
| greater factors at play here.
| aliqot wrote:
| creators will always find a way to promote. discoverability
| has never affected that. this isn't the internet of
| stmbleupon anymore, we use aggregators and influencers.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| It's not dying, but I don't hear kids talking about blogs they
| read. That's not due to increased laziness or decline in
| intelligence, people don't surf the web anymore. They can't, it's
| too vast, it's virtually impossible to find a blog that doesn't
| belong to some larger platform like Medium.
|
| It seems like most bloggers today that go on longer than 5 years
| are either written by amateur journalists or tech centric people.
| CM30 wrote:
| I think this is the key point:
|
| > But still, people who read have always been in the minority.
| And I think that's what most people who think that "video is the
| future" don't get. Sure, people are getting lazier and they want
| you to feed them content.
|
| > But think about it. Do you really want to serve those types of
| people?!
|
| The number of people online reading blogs when they were the
| 'most popular' form of content creation was far lower than the
| number watching videos or using social media sites or what not.
|
| Statistically there are probably more people writing blogs now,
| and more people reading them. They've just become less of a
| percentage of the overall internet audience than they were back
| before YouTube and Twitch and TikTok and podcasts became big
| things online.
|
| So while it may seem like those people abandoned blogging, you
| have to ask yourself whether they would have ever cared for it to
| begin with.
| nodemaker wrote:
| Haha 100 percent agree! If anything video content is becoming
| more pseudo intellectual and clickbait everyday in my opinion. My
| video consumption is way lower than it used to be.
|
| To a certain extent these video platforms create big
| personalities of normal people and its hard to trust them at that
| point (although Joe rogan still manages to sound authentic
| somehow)
|
| That being said, I do think GPT has the potential to ruin
| blogging but we will see. As soon as I smell even a little bit of
| GPT in a blog I am probably gonna bail immediately.
| mateusfreira wrote:
| I could not agree more, blogging is fun to write and read, much
| less structured authors can go as far as they want to make the
| posts interactive. I still think blog is one of the best tools to
| share thoughts, and more important to own your content.
| henrik_w wrote:
| There is https://refined.blog/ for finding personal blogs about
| software engineering. Can be sorted by Hacker News upvotes too.
| mkka wrote:
| One conversation I've noticed going on recently re Twitter and
| social media is the power of owned media, like podcast, email,
| and blogs, over walled gardens. Blogs, maybe "personal websites",
| are a home base. Maybe not the whole solution but a foundation.
| asdff wrote:
| It used to be common for personal websites to be your home
| base. You'd have maybe the on topic posts of the blog (e.g. a
| scientist blogging in their field), the off topic posts (e.g.
| your hiking trip), and then a fileshare of collegues, friends,
| or family photos perhaps, and then maybe special interest stuff
| like the base depth of your favorite ski slope, or the local
| surf report for the day. Basically, it would be a combination
| of LinkedIn, facebook, twitter, and instagram, all under a
| domain you control with a feature set and design dictated by
| you alone, maybe paying a few dollars a month or a year seeing
| limited traffic, maybe "free" if you run it on the desktop you
| already have plugged into the corner of the room.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| I barely read blogs because they seem to try to expand or over
| elaborate for sake of sounding sophistication, and set tone as
| they try to play with audience. I'm not fun at party so I mostly
| read "documentation" kind of text because the objective is to
| provide concise and no BS to get you understand the system. If
| the thing doesn't have official documentation or poor
| documentation I would read your blog about that .. but if that's
| the case the thing kinda sucks.
| asdff wrote:
| There's two sorts of blogs. There's the one you describe which
| imo are trying to build an audience and gain reach. Then there
| are the more straightforward blogs, where the author doesn't
| care about reach or viewership, and just wants to write up a
| technical process they painstakingly went through so either
| others can save themselves some grief, or they can look at what
| they did when they revisit the same problem years from now.
| Those types of blogs are indispensable. Its like documentation
| that someone actually went through and wrote in margin notes,
| like Snape's potion book.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think there's different types of blogging:
|
| - blogging as speech. Not trying to "build an audience" or
| monetise, just a place where you can write publicly.
| Rachelbythebay is probably the best example of this.
|
| - blogging as business. What the author is talking about - build
| an audience, sell some ads, make some money. Writing as a
| commercial activity.
|
| - blogging as content marketing. Probably 90% of blogs - not
| directly monetised, but SEO fodder for a business.
|
| The first isn't dead, but is obscure. The last is mostly
| braindead (there are some really good posts in amongst the SEO
| crap, but mostly it's SEO crap).
|
| The middle one is hard to do right - there are soooo many "travel
| bloggers" out there trying to make this work, and so few who
| actually do make it work.
| glasss wrote:
| I call everything online a blog now, so from my perspective yea
| it's not going anywhere.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| I find blogs substantially more useful than I did a decade ago. A
| lot of the noise [1] has moved to social media. What is left is,
| on the whole, more useful. Simple as that for me.
|
| [1] Noise: cat/dog pics, look what I had for lunch, random half-
| based political opinions, etc.
| eatonphil wrote:
| I enjoy it when my writing is read. And HN, Lobsters, and Reddit
| give me an outlet for tech writing.
|
| But there's no similar outlet for other writing like if I want to
| write about cooking or product management or parks in NYC.
|
| Most non-tech subreddits have super strict self promotion rules
| that means you can't ever share your own posts. Not that reddit
| is so friendly in general anyway.
|
| I have a small personal audience and sometimes they read these
| other posts.
|
| But it's not as much fun in these cases.
|
| So I've been trying to think about how to write about other
| topics and my only conclusion is that you have to target bigger
| existing magazines or sites.
|
| But there feels like a huge barrier to entry for contributing to
| these sites. They're very intimidating.
|
| I've reached out to a few smaller outlets and never gotten a
| response. So that's kind of demotivating.
|
| So yeah it's easy and enjoyable to blog but in terms of getting
| anyone to see what you produce... I agree with others here that
| videos and YouTube seem to be one of the best spots for producing
| stuff that people actually see, on more diverse topics than just
| tech.
| stevoski wrote:
| Blogging, as it was in the first decade of the 2000's died long
| ago.
|
| Yes, there are still blogs, and still people blogging. And many
| companies have something they call "blogs".
|
| But once we're done with there hairsplitting, this is not
| blogging as it was. That died circa 2012.
| Delphiza wrote:
| I don't know why you are being downvoted. 2005-2010 was the
| heyday of blogging as I knew it. Maybe you "had to have been
| there", which would put you in your fourties, at least.
| rcarr wrote:
| Some good resources for finding blogs:
|
| https://ooh.directory/
|
| https://bearblog.dev/discover/
|
| https://blogroll.org/
|
| https://www.gyford.com/phil/blogroll/
|
| https://interconnected.org/home/blogroll
| qudat wrote:
| https://prose.sh/read
|
| https://lists.sh/read
| saperyton wrote:
| Thinking About Things: https://thinking-about-things.com
| fortran77 wrote:
| I read more blogs than ever, mostly on Substack
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| People need to adjust their expectations and goals.
|
| Is your goal to make content that goes viral that you can
| monetize and make lots of money with? Consider video. Are you
| trying to get your word out? Blogs are great and will never die.
| asdff wrote:
| Blogs are also great for just writing up what you've done to
| solve some problem you've encountered, for your own use when
| you run into the same problem again in years time perhaps
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > This was coming from someone who has sold millions of books and
| is still selling hundreds of thousands of books a year.
|
| There we have the answer. Monetizing blogs is dead. And it's
| probably even true. Are there many people around who directly
| make money with their personal articles? Isn't it today mostly a
| space which is usually just one part of a bigger network of
| content? Or as a support/advertisement for some product?
| tomalaci wrote:
| It would be great to have Google Search product that only
| searches for blogs as they usually have more in-depth knowledge
| than what you can find in other mediums (other than books or
| actual courses but they usually suffer from having too much water
| or including things that aren't that relevant for my search).
|
| I am not sure if there is such already but it would definitely be
| more useful nowadays when Google Search top results are just SEO-
| spam or ads.
|
| EDIT: I just got a genuine "oh wait..." moment. There indeed was
| a Google Blog Search product and, of course, it was killed (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Blog_Search )
| unlikelymordant wrote:
| How could you reliably filter out seo spam blogs though?
| cacois wrote:
| Asking the real questions. If some magic could make a search
| engine that ignored all SEO spam, life would be better. I
| find it hard to believe google themselves are having such a
| hard time with the obvious cloned copies of other
| sites/content that now own most page 1 results. But they seem
| to be.
| rightbyte wrote:
| If Google just blacklisted the top 50 or whatever SEO spam
| programming pages it would probably remove 99% of the spam
| on programming queries.
|
| I have tried with the Firefox addon and it gets better
| quick.
|
| It is almost always the same sites.
|
| And building up page rank takes time so it is a winning
| battle ... but hey! Google drives no hands!
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| What magical FFox addon you're talking about?
| rightbyte wrote:
| I think it is called uBlacklist (not the same guy as
| uBlock). I don't have my computer with me so can't check.
| tomalaci wrote:
| Incentivize SEO for fine granularity (punish blogs that spam
| too many common keywords) and provide more filtering tools to
| users.
|
| Former is likely already done for many popular platforms
| along with many other tricks so you would want to have
| experienced people for that part.
|
| For filtering tools a good one would be adding a way to have
| filter lists against spammers and generally just more options
| to how you want to refine your search. I get that Google
| Search allows you to type some special keywords but I'd
| rather it be more user-friendly.
| nodemaker wrote:
| The more something looks like GPT the lower it should be
| ranked. GPT can make that assessment for you in fact.
| aliqot wrote:
| I'm not trusting an AI to vet my information stream.
| nodemaker wrote:
| "AI" is already vetting your information stream.
| aliqot wrote:
| maybe for the collective-you. It's too bad there isn't a
| content-engine driven by one of these when you can
| describe an emotional outcome and it provide the content
| to get you there. However, if it could do that, it'd
| already have solved factoring and we're in deep trouble
| anyway.
| MattDemers wrote:
| Then it just becomes a cat-and-mouse game for someone to
| make a tool that "de-GPTs the copy" and then so on and so
| on.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| Man alive, I just got a Technorati flashback.
|
| Remember Technorati tags? If you were at all vaguely technical,
| you HAD to add Technorati tags to your blog, so the Technorati
| search would find and classify your blog.
|
| The Future Was Then!
| marbu wrote:
| You can try Marginalia Search for this use case:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/
| aliqot wrote:
| what is it about the name or URL that weirds me out? I can't
| tell if it is "marginal" in the name, or the .nu
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I think this is also a bit of a miscommunication. If you take
| "blogging is dead" as "[literally] nobody blogs anymore", it's
| clearly wrong, no discussion. Instead, if you take it as
| "blogging is no longer hyped and no longer mainstream", you're
| much closer to the truth (in my opinion).
|
| Blogging is dead in the same way that dedicated cameras are dead:
| People still use them for specific use cases and there's a large
| enthusiast community for them, but the mainstream public moved
| on. Of course, especially with blogging, there's also a massive
| filter bubble effect going on; on HN, most people would likely
| agree with the OP, but a teenager (at least in my country) would
| staunchly disagree.
| layer8 wrote:
| The "mainstream public" on the internet in the early 2000s, at
| the height of blogging, was quite different from today's
| internet mainstream, mainly thanks to smartphones. Aside from
| "microblogging" in the form of twitter threads, and other
| alternative formats like YouTube, the broadening of the
| internet mainstream over the past 10 years is probably the more
| significant change.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > the mainstream public moved on
|
| I'd really like to see some good data on this, because it's not
| my experience. I probably read more blogs today than I did 10
| years ago. I see tons of sharing of blog posts and website
| content on social media. It's true that the narrow sliver of
| people making a living as content creators may have moved on,
| but I just don't see that the "mainstream public" has.
| rjh29 wrote:
| That's the filter bubble effect that the OP alluded to.
| cableshaft wrote:
| And if we're just talking certain subjects, like recipe blogs
| for example (and I'll give you paragraphs of my life
| experience above each recipe), those seem to be doing very
| well. I know I access those (and grumble about how much I
| have to scroll to get to the actual receipe) about 2-3 times
| a week when cooking, usually.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| You're "an economist, professor, and sometimes consultant
| with a side interest in computation and finding ways to be
| more productive. Always interested in learning new things.".
|
| The mainstream public is watching the Tide Pod challenge on
| TikTok.
| bachmeier wrote:
| It doesn't seem plausible that the people watching the Tide
| Pod challenge today spent their free time reading blogs a
| decade ago.
| lostfocus wrote:
| It must be fascinating to find the people who are still
| watching the Tide Pod challenge today.
| ChocMontePy wrote:
| The Google Trend of the search term "blog" probably gives a
| good indication of the change in widespread interest:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/I4jLBo0.jpg
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| The graph for 'website' looks similar, so I guess anyone
| here who is a FE dev should look elsewhere.
|
| https://imgur.com/a/ovi3wJ0
| asdff wrote:
| Even the word "google" is on a downslope from a high ~10
| years ago.
| marmetio wrote:
| I suspect that's a bit like concluding that the internet is
| dead because nobody says "surfing the web" anymore.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It's more like concluding that the internet is dead
| because nobody says "internet" anymore. Still, that trend
| for "blog" is probably more noise than signal considering
| the trend for "internet":
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=inter
| net
| marmetio wrote:
| That's a better example than mine. I was trying to think
| of something that also sounded silly, since "blog" has
| always been kind of a dumb-sounding word.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Given the rise in social media, it's unlikely that Google
| plays the same role that they used to. There's also no
| reason to think people are putting "blog" in their searches
| these days either. That would at best be a weak measure of
| blog readership.
| jwhiles wrote:
| Was blogging every really mainstream?
| hadlock wrote:
| I think the process was: 1. blogging 2. paid blogging
| services 3. free blogging services (livejournal, xanga, later
| myspace) 4. wordpress as a next generation blogging service
| (invented by ex-livejournal employees) both free and paid 5.
| walled garden blogging platforms (Facebook had a "notes"
| feature for long format blogging) 6. product and data analyst
| managers realizing long format blogging wasn't accessible to
| mainstream and moving towards 2-3 sentence "posts" and later
| "microblogging" with twitter, vines, periscope etc
|
| Nowadays most blogs are commercial entities ("Websites") that
| cover a fairly narrow topics like EVs or Electric Scooters or
| Photography reviews but personal blogs and websites still
| exist they just don't fit into the microblogging narrative
| and aren't prioritized. People who want to be "influencers"
| are probably not going to start a blog as the immediate reach
| of a blog is measured in hundreds or low thousands of hits
| per month.
| Fricken wrote:
| When the internet was but a trickle, blogging was maintrickle
| darkwater wrote:
| In Internet? Totally. Blogging intended as "reading blog",
| from 2008 to 2015 (roughly, I don't have hard numbers) was
| pretty mainstream in the Internet population of that time.
| Maybe now it's not mainstream anymore just because the
| Internet population increased (again) a lot, and the
| newjoiners are not into reading blogs but rather watching
| photos or (short) videos.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Height of blogging, or at least when it was new and
| becoming "mainstream" (if in fact it did) before Twitter
| microblogging and a recognized publication genre was around
| 2003 or 2005 at the latest I think. You can tell by RSS
| becoming standardized 1998-2001 and getting direct support
| in browsers for a while (Safari could subscribe to RDF
| feeds in HTML meta links in Mac OS (X) 10.4 if not earlier;
| FF probably earlier with plugins).
| darkwater wrote:
| You are probably right, as you grow older you tend to
| lose the feeling of time... or at least, I do :)
| 2007-2008 was when FB really started to be mainstream so
| blogging was "hype" way before that.
| jwhiles wrote:
| In that case, I wonder if blogging stayed the same - and it
| just feels less important because there is so much more
| internet now. The pond grew and it stayed the same.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of it has changed. A lot has moved to other social
| media. Companies have pretty much moved away from
| hosting, much less encouraging, a lot of personal blogs
| on their sites. A food blog, say, is much more likely to
| be a professional full-time operation as opposed to a
| hobby. And so forth. There are still classic personal
| blogs out there. But they're less common.
|
| I still write a lot but mostly have other outlets than my
| personal blog.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, a number of prolific bloggers ended up moving to
| walled gardens like facebook for audiences.
|
| The Oatmeal summed what occurred pretty well
|
| https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
| JD557 wrote:
| I would say even earlier than 2008, at least if my memory
| is not betraying me.
|
| I guess it depends of your definition of blog, but I
| remember Fotolog being incredibly popular circa 2006 even
| when compared to mainstream social networks. While
| Wikipedia says it's a social network, I recall it was used
| mostly for blogging (not so much for social interaction).
|
| And IIRC, when Google acquired Blogger (2003) blogging was
| not exactly a obscure thing, although I don't think I knew
| anyone with a personal blog back then.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah it was earlier than 2008. Corporate blogging, at
| least in many tech circles, was pretty big and companies
| were coming out with social media guidelines by the
| mid-2000s. Journalists and analysts often had personal
| brand blogs on their company sites. And, yes, there were
| personal blogs on sites like Blogger (or self-hosted).
| I'd actually say the 2003 date was _fairly_ early on for
| truly mainstream blogging; I started in 2003 and I won 't
| say I was on the leading edge but I was probably an early
| adopter.
| [deleted]
| masterof0 wrote:
| The final nail in the coffin is ChatGPT, the greatest spam
| generation tool ever made. I imagine bots, SEO gurus, and the
| like are having a great time now.
| jerf wrote:
| If blogging is dead because of AI, videos are not far behind.
| I'm already curating away a couple channels a week on YouTube
| that are pure AI spam, either videos that just steal content
| from others and use AI to drive a collection of clips (which
| will only get more sophisticated) or put a TTS-driven
| monologue over something, where the Text being converted To
| Speech might as well be AI-driven.
|
| And the human videos are already so optimized for The
| Algorithm that a good deal of them might as well just cut out
| the middleman and be written by an AI, for the AI. ("This
| Breaks the Internet - Reacting to Reaction Videos Reacting To
| Reaction Videos". You can see the thumbnail already, can't
| you?)
|
| Yeah, they're behind for now, but all the infrastructure is
| there for this to explode the instant they're not. Video
| operations putting out dozens of crap videos a week with
| nonfunctional "hacks" and all sorts of similar things will be
| in an arms race to pivot to these things and there's no
| chance the video site's moderation will be able to keep up
| with this in the end.
| pjc50 wrote:
| "Dead Internet Theory".
|
| Nobody has to delete the authentic content, they just have
| to outcompete it by many orders of magnitude. Then not only
| is the inauthentic content all over all the possible routes
| you might find content, people stop looking for it
| entirely.
| masterof0 wrote:
| Videos are harder to fake and produce, I would say
| impossible, any of the OpenAI products are unable to be
| creative.
| jerf wrote:
| If you are a YouTube user and have curated your
| experience as I have, open a browser incognito window and
| hit the home page of YouTube fresh.
|
| "Creative" as a criterion for video success is at the
| very least under assault. Looking at what I get, I am not
| quite so cynical as to say it's dead. It's not. But it is
| certainly under assault.
|
| There is also the problem of a small number of truly
| creative content creators getting their content and ideas
| yanked by people armed with AIs who can then completely
| out compete the actual creatives.
|
| This has, to an extent, actually already happened for
| very young child content. Look at "Elsagate":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate but for the
| purposes of my comment here, ignore the disturbing nature
| of the content and instead observe that the content
| obviously had heavy computer generation influence, and
| could only be cranked out more quickly and effectively
| with some rather simple AI.
|
| Like I said, it's not here _yet_ , but the first
| derivative is clearly positive here, and the second
| probably is too. Pure AI content that looks like live
| action is not a prerequisite.
|
| I'm not entirely sure Elsagate itself didn't itself
| source from some AI in some critical manner. It doesn't
| seem to have completely created the video from top to
| bottom, but it looks an awful lot to me like what you'd
| expect an AI writing the scripts, with the feedback
| provided by view numbers, and completely unscrupulous
| humans implementing the scripts for the views, spinning
| off into a hyperoptimized regime for that one goal at the
| expense of all else. And, you know, it basically worked.
| If anything it worked _too well_. The first AI corruption
| of video sites may well be in the past, not the future.
| joebob42 wrote:
| I've never understood the elsagate content. Why are they
| making it? Is it the sort of thing that young children
| find appealing if left alone? I can't understand why that
| would be, and it doesn't seem substantially easier to
| make than the equivalent content without the disturbing/
| inappropriate edge.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Just wait when they'll be able to create from scratch
| credible AI video stars and influencers then put them one
| after another on social media. They will do it, no doubt
| about that: free advertising with no perks/bribes is just too
| tempting.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| With SEO, it is sw writing content for other sw to read.
|
| Google search is increasingly broken. Eventually, we will
| need AI to derive value from the internet by filtering all
| the crap out.
| asdff wrote:
| We had plenty of spam before chatgpt. The spammers clearly
| don't care if it looks like seo spam nonesense. Eventually
| for the fresh internet users of every generation, that will
| be all they know.
| 7speter wrote:
| Did the mainstream public ever really care about cameras the
| enthusiasts care about? Were dslrs ever something the masses
| really wanted? I remember simple point and shoots were a big
| deal.
| Delphiza wrote:
| High-quality blog content, written by people who have a deep
| understanding of a subject that they want to proudly share with
| their peers is pretty much dead.
|
| I built my professional career on blogging from 2004 to 2012, and
| attribute my 'public brand' to what I did then. What I currently
| see is that blog content is generated by corporate PR writers who
| write very good-looking content that covers a topic yet mostly
| meaningless. But it does, importantly, gets clicks and engagement
| from prospective customers. It is far cheaper and easier to get
| English grads to churn out content based on basic content and
| brand themes that to get engineers to write content that they
| believe in. Eventually those dedicated writers will, in turn, be
| replaced by AIs (see copy.ai).
|
| Also, remember that in the early 2000s, technical people had few
| options to show their skills other than a personal blog. It was
| replaced by Stack Overflow (one of the original intentions of the
| platform), github repositorys and other things that are now
| available to show off.
|
| Sadly, the days of technical people or other specialsts (say
| artisnal brewers) creating written content that _a lot_ of people
| see, is largely behind us. Blogging of old is drowned out not
| just by video (as OP suggests, and where corporate writers
| struggle) but by armies of robotic (whether people or AI)
| corporate content generators.
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