To answer the headline, nothing happened to it. Writing about stuff for writings sake and just to get it out of your head into some form is still very much a thing. That said, it is possible to make (varying amounts) of money writing a blog, and so it attracted a huge number of people who wanted to do that, and as a ready market various "corpo" types sprung up to "feed their dreams" for a small fee. And this is where the disaster happens.
When companies that index the web make 99.9% of their money selling ads on that index, and the index is a place where wannabes ask the question "how do I make money on a blog" ask that question, you gets something not unlike unconstrained algae growth in a badly maintained aquarium of things "popping out of the woodwork" to fill that demand. As a result, if you used that to measure "What happened" you would easily come to the conclusion that nobody does this any more, after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new?
Yeah, that would be a really cool thing but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
Aren't there places away from the conventional protocols where people still blog and the world is innocent?
I'm serious. I came across some of these communities nearly a year ago while reading about solar powered servers. And after I forgot how I found them, I've thought of them about once a month and wondered what the hell is wrong with me for forgetting.
They were incredibly neat and niche spaces, full of very idiosyncratic websites and things that had no commercial point. It was fantastic.
They exist and they're hard to find - but if you find one, you often find a few, and you can follow the chain as far down the rabbit hole as you want.
Of course you have the interesting side effect that you only get linked to them now and then, and often it's almost "invite only" for something that's entirely public.
> after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new? Yeah, that would be a really cool thing...
> but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that [other than ways that cut into their ads] and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
All we have to do is pay for it (and so I ask everyone to):
Wait I thought reddit prohibits using personal API on third party client, that's one of main complain of the protest. Otherwise 3PA will still be running around just with asking each user for their API keys. Of course there are ways to circumvent that (cough, revanced, cough) but of course it's not official and your api key may suddenly be blocked.
> To answer the headline, nothing happened to it. Writing about stuff for writings sake and just to get it out of your head into some form is still very much a thing.
What happened was directing people to websites put up for free with all the information they need doesn't make Google any money, as compared to a bloated POS on SquareSpace that downloads 80 MB of JavaScript to checks notes... render fucking text alongside a few dozen AdSense slots, or, perhaps more commonly, a Facebook group that has six hundred people asking the same questions in a format that doesn't allow going back to actually find the goddamn answers, which also shows ads.
The wide, weird internet still exists, but none of our corporate overlords make shit on it so it gets zero attention in the mainstream.
When companies that index the web make 99.9% of their money selling ads on that index, and the index is a place where wannabes ask the question "how do I make money on a blog" ask that question, you gets something not unlike unconstrained algae growth in a badly maintained aquarium of things "popping out of the woodwork" to fill that demand. As a result, if you used that to measure "What happened" you would easily come to the conclusion that nobody does this any more, after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new?
Yeah, that would be a really cool thing but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
Yes, I'm still mad about it :-)