Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

Are personal blogs actually “back”?

• Strong disagreement on the premise: some say blogs never left; others see no revival in their traffic or circles.
• Several long‑time bloggers report major search‑driven traffic collapse in the last ~5–10 years despite steady posting.
• Others see healthy ecosystems: lots of active blogs, RSS subscriber growth, and renewed interest as social platforms “enshittify.”
• Some argue that because blogging is inherently a niche activity, calling it “back” in a mainstream sense is misleading.

Discoverability, search engines, and social media

• Many blame modern search for sidelining personal/niche blogs: commercial “EEAT” sites, content farms, and LLM‑generated slop crowd out individuals.
• Social referrals are also weaker: platforms algorithmically suppress outbound links and keep users inside feeds.
• Counter‑movement tools mentioned: RSS, personal feed readers, Kagi Small Web, Marginalia, Cloudhiker, Wiby, indie blog directories, and HN itself.
• Old patterns are resurfacing: link blogs, blogroll‑like “outlinks” pages, webrings, and POSSE (post on your own site, syndicate elsewhere).

AI scraping and its impact on motivation

• Many see LLMs crawling blogs, ignoring robots.txt, and rephrasing posts without attribution as demoralizing “free labor.”
• Some explicitly cite this as a reason not to blog or to hide content (basic auth, hostile layouts, private/onion/Gemini setups).
• Others argue plagiarism long predates AI, the business model may be unsustainable, and human readers seeking connection aren’t replaced by bots.
• Debate around “AEO” (optimization for AI answers): skeptics question the point if readers never click through.

Why blog at all? Personal vs professional benefits

• Repeated reasons to start/continue:
  • Organize and deepen one’s own thinking; “teaching to learn.”
  • Build a long‑term archive for future self.
  • Sharpen written communication, especially valuable at senior/staff levels.
  • Provide a portfolio for hiring managers; some report jobs and clients directly from blogs.
  • Share narrow expertise (e.g., Linux creative workflows, obscure hardware) that genuinely helps others.
• Monetization views diverge: some treat blogs as funnels for courses/consulting; others reject money as a goal and write purely for personal satisfaction.

Platforms, formats, and culture

• Substack is seen by some as the new personal‑blog hub; others see it as paywalled, opinion‑heavy, get‑rich‑quick and already degrading.
• Many prefer simpler, non‑enshittified setups: static site generators, GitHub/Codeberg Pages, Bearblog, Neocities, write.as, self‑hosted HTML+CSS.
• Video platforms (YouTube, TikTok) are described as the de facto “blogs” for younger generations, largely because they pay and have built‑in discovery.
• Cultural frictions: fear of harsh online criticism; pressure to monetize every hobby; tension between long‑form blogging and short‑form social posts.

Niche blogs, forums, and federation

• Several argue that every blog is now “niche,” and that’s a feature: smaller, focused, human sites versus generic feeds.
• Interest in federated niche communities (NodeBB, Lemmy, ActivityPub forums) as complements to individual blogs and replacements for Reddit‑style platforms.