The Second Golden Age of Blogging
&gt; Such people think, because they don’t know many institutionalized professionals who still blog, that blogging must be dead. What they don’t realize is that the credibility premium historically enjoyed by professional institutions is plummeting toward zero. This fact is so obvious to younger Millenials and Zoomers that it goes unremarked, undebated, because it is already baked-in to their reading&#x2F;watching behaviors.<p>The idea that traditional news media is losing credibility to blogs has been around since at least the 2004 US Presidential Election, which is when regular people starting discovering blogs.<p>The web was a lot less populated then, and large sites did not attempt to crowd out smaller sites by generating SEO-optimized content by the metric ton. Bots didn&#x27;t pollute commment sections to the point where organic communities left out of exasperation. You could create a blog and be reasonably certain of developing an audience. The idea of AOL-style walled gardens seemed deeply outdated.<p>FFWD 10 years, and now the vast majority of internet activity occurs in walled gardens, be it FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, YouTube, Twitch, you name it. People don&#x27;t even bookmark sites anymore, their muscle memory causes them to open Reddit or FB and just mindlessly browse.<p>So you start a self-owned blog in 2020. The only way to direct traffic to it is to also post on all the other walled gardens, because that&#x27;s where the people are. That sounds like a lot of addtional work just to get eyeballs on a page.