Over a decade, I've learnt to blog as if no one will ever read my blog posts. With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=minimaxir.com), and even that is going down year-over-year.
However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so it's not a waste of time or a mistake even if no one reads it.
> With social referral traffic now completely dead, the only traffic I get to my blog is when my posts appear on Hacker News
Not being a blog writer, that seems rather crazy to hear with how "social" the WWW has supposedly gotten. WP claims, there's 33 sites "with at least 100 million (monthly) active users". [1]
Top sites are up at multi-1000 million / month. Sure, some of the top sites (Youtube, Instagram, TikTok) are very heavily video based. Yet, it still seems amazing that with that many users there's so little "sharing" in terms of long form written essays or blogs. That the situation was actually better in terms of referrals before there was all the sharing? Now there's actually less organic referral traffic, and Hacker News is apparently one of the best. Walled garden issues? Better fit of the subject matter to readers? Completely videos everywhere? Decline of reading in general?
Compared to somewhere like Facebook that supposedly have 3070M monthly uniques, yet apparently produce almost no referral traffic whatsoever, that's a wildly disproportionate ratio of effectiveness for the audience size.
Edit: Taken another way, in what seems like a pessimistic view. If only 1% of Facebook still read long form writing. And only 1% of those actually decided a post was worthy of clicking on. That would still amount to 300,000 views. That seems like a lot.
I think we have seen a general trend towards centralized platforms on the internet. Where you had many individual niche sites before, now you have a few all-encompassing platforms. There are some exceptions, but I generally find that many of those platforms want to maximize your time on the platform itself. As a consequence, they do what they can to keep you from leaving the platform via a link to some other website.
From my anecdotal experience, of what my close friends share with me via DM these days, sadly it is indeed 95% video, and it is indeed 95% Instagram / TikTok / Facebook / Twitter / YouTube (in descending order). I continue to share with them 75% long-form articles, and 75% personal web sites / mainstream media web sites.
I actually looked a bit yesterday, and checked FB particularly to see what the situation was, and maybe have my own anecdotal take.
At least part of what I found was that there did not seem to be much actual discussion. It didn't really even matter whether it was a video, a text article (like making food), or an event. A huge percentage of "conversations" ended up being nothing more than notification references after the first 20-50 comments. It was really rather surreal to look at. I hadn't logged on in a while.
Initially, I couldn't even tell what was going on. Comment after comment where people just stated someone's name and then someone replied with someone else's name. In most cases, once the back-and-forth name reffing started, all actual conversation died quickly.
It's technically "sharing", since they're notifying FB members of being mentioned somewhere. Yet it doesn't really go anywhere externally, and very quickly kills off all further discussion in thread.
Yes, I see that all the time on Facebook too, top-most 10% of a thread is actual comments, bottom-most 90% is "Friend McFriendface" name reffing. It's quite annoying.
I agree with the detachment part but when I write about technology, books, ideas/ thoughts, etc. I generally find it 'easier' to imagine as if I am talking to someone in front of me and write in a conversational style. I liked that a couple of my favorite fiction writers used this style and sort of followed it.
However, the process of writing a blog post forces me to invent new workflows and is in itself very educational, so it's not a waste of time or a mistake even if no one reads it.