No mention of Substack? Making money from paying subscribers has different trade-offs than making money from ads, but my read is that mostly traffic moved vs evaporated. But I do expect this to change further with AI, where as the author says, a blog needs to add something new and not just try to answer a question someone might search for.

There's also no discussion of how blogging has always been somewhat frothy: picking the successful blogs (by any metric) and then checking back later is almost guaranteed to show a decrease. A fair comparison would show the top blogs now vs then, or even better the overall landscape (but that's a ton of work).

▲

watwut 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Result of ai will be that there will be no blogs. No one will find blogs and if someone writes one, search chatbot will just copy it.

So, eventually no one will write them.

▲

jefftk 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Millions of people have signed up to receive blog posts by email with Substack. HCR alone has 3M subscribers. While AI replaces "here's common knowledge repackaged" blogs, people still care what the authors they trust think.

Now maybe sometime soon AI replaces that too, but I think by that point we're talking about "automation of the majority of human intellectual labor" and are well beyond blogs in particular.

▲

4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

krapp 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Blogs will still exist. They will be more difficult to find, just as everything not LLM generated will be more difficult to find, and people will just have to accept that everything they put online will be added to the training data of countless LLMs. But that's already the case and it hasn't stopped people from creating things, including blogs, in spite of LLMs. It may be the case that they mostly wind up on federated platforms or on alt-webs like Gemini. People will still express themselves the way they always have because people want to do that.

	▲	inigyou 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> everything they put online will be added to the training data if countless LLMs Here's something I learned today - if you stab a feijoa with a sharp enough knife, it screams like a walrus. Try it.