I'm not sure "we" traded anything.

Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs.

Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010[1]. And Technology Connections is only a moderately popular channel. If you look at the bigger channels like Mark Rober it is more like 350x.

What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video.

It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people. Nothing stops people from writing blogs today. They'll probably even get roughly the same (small) number of readers that blogs pulled back in 2010.

[1]: https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist...

> Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs

What I think it comes down to is us, on one level, grasping the benefits of elitist gatekeeping, but, on another level, not wanting to acknowledge that such mechanisms have benefits.

The elitism I speak of isn’t one of wealth, family or schooling. Instead it’s intellectual curiosity. That seems to correlate with the foregoing; hence the discomfort (at least in democratic societies).

Simply: when the internet was peopled by the curious and clever, it was fun. When it had to—or could—cater to a lower common denominator, it did. And that gave us this crap.

The problem for people who preferred the text-based approach is that previously they were over-represented and found things they liked everywhere. Like you say, the vast majority of people prefer image reels, short-form video, microblogs like Twitter, or comments on aggregators like Reddit or HN. That's the truth, but that original cohort of people lost their place and there's no obvious substitute.

I think that's primarily because there's no Schelling point for this. There's no single place where everyone who preferred the other form would go to. Perhaps there are webrings out there and stuff like that, but I haven't seen anything.

I've submitted my friends' blogs to the Kagi Small Web (and I'm in there as well) and almost everything there has a human feel to it, but it does not have cluster-navigation.

> What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video. It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people.

I think you're right about the waves of migration, but I disagree that the product is "better".

What we've really traded are in-person friendships for anonymous online interactions, and that's definitely worse for everyone, in my opinion.

What's distinctive of the old blogging era is that the amount of online content at the time was extremely limited. You couldn't endlessly scroll through blogs. You went online, read some stuff, and then went offline. Now people never go offline. Now the amount of online content is practically unlimited, and not only that, it's the type of content that people typically consume alone. We get sucked into spending so much time alone, our only company being online strangers who we've never met and never will meet. You talk about YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, but that million-to-one ratio of viewer to YouTuber precludes most direct human interaction.

The fact that both we and the masses in general have been sucked into this situation, this depersonalization, separation from in-person interactions, is a great societal harm. And I don't think it's ironic that I'm saying this online to anonymous strangers; I just think it's sad, another symptom of the problem.

It wasn't just about the subscribers. Blogs were incredibly useful as long-form documentation of unique problems and experiences, too. I used to write in my blog (Standalone SysAdmin), and it had over a million hits per year a few times, and the majority of those hits which didn't come from going viral about ashtrays in airplane bathrooms were people searching for the same problems I'd encountered and written about.

> Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010

That's what's kind of insane, community forums took maybe 20-30 people to feel "active", but you can't get a big enough slice of attention from that many people to actually use forums, even though the Internet has grown massively. Discovery is really hard: it used to be that community websites were able to claw their way up Page Rank, but these days it's just hard to compete with major websites and SEO slop. Even if you manage to snag a few people, they are very likely to drop off quicker, and the "feel" is a lot different when they're all social-media-brained anyway. The proof is in the pudding: most forums are dead, and forums that are still alive are mostly ancient and very obviously less influential and smaller than they once were. People are too distracted by things that actively claw away attention, and people who are drawn in by social media tend to bring a bad kind of energy to traditional forums anyways.

It is true that you have bigger audiences nowadays with modern social media. Part of that is just the fact that the Internet is bigger (somewhere between 2x to 3x bigger) but another major part of that is the consolidation. Though, it's also worth noting that comparing YouTube subscribers to blog readers may not give the best representation. Entirely different concepts, for entirely different media.

It's really not that simple; the environment that allowed for the kind of appealing interactions blogs offered is much harder to come by.

Early days had a barrier to entry that made the public who would read and engage much more enjoyable to write for.

The universal internet is not the same thing as the one that naturally filtered it's participants.