This is interesting but I don't think it's what "broke the web". What really broke it is that those 20-30 million people who would have made hobbyist blogs or posted to forums are now part of the 200million (twitter) or 2 billion+ (FB) who just post on social media instead. Almost nobody is out there blogging about gardening just cause they like the topic, the new gardening content on the web is all SEO driven
It was the first step. I was there. I first transitioned from totally customized, handmade websites to blogs. And then, from there to social media. The reason was always the same: convenience, as the author explains. Social media were a continuation of what the likes of Movable Type started.
BTW, I wouldn't blame Movable Type per se (I still have fond memories of that tool!) but rather the lack of tools to make the publishing of non-chronological content similarly easy. There was one attempt around 10 years ago: Opera Unite. It was a great idea (IMHO), but didn't last long.
> Almost nobody is out there blogging about gardening just cause they like the topic, the new gardening content on the web is all SEO driven
The reality is almost everyone posting on social media about gardening is doing so because they like the topic. The purely market-driven "influencers" are a minority, although they seem otherwise because they're the ones most aggressively tuning their content for the algorithms. And even then, people who make money from their content can also care about what they're doing.
Yeah that's the distinction I was making--the hobbyists have gone to social media, and the people registering domains and using a self-hosted CMS are trying to make a biz out of it
Although Substack seems to be causing a little renaissance of hobbyist blogging
The ones who actually made hobbyist blogs probably went to youtube because a youtube channel is actually much better than a blog from the pov of the hobbyist.
Of course it's harder to search video than a blog from the pov of someone looking for information but that's not the hobbyists problem.
Optimized for SEO driven possibly, but the question is, is it still useful?
The web still has all kinds of niche content, it just takes a bit of time to find it. Publishing content has diverged a great deal since 1993 and if someone is passionate about a topic, they will share it in a format they like. It might not be a classic blog post, but what matters in the end?
