alt Hacker NewsBlogging as medium is thriving despite AI and LLMs. It has moved to Substack + Twitter and newsletters, and away from Google and Facebook as a source of traffic generation. Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now, and also combined with Twitter monetization. This didn't exist 5 years ago.
There are way more blogs now compared to 2013, and much longer and technically proficient writing compared to the terse blog posts that dominated 1-2 decades ago. Even major media sources such as the NY Times The Atlantic are copying the substack contrarian style that is thriving now.
Replies
"Easily making six figures on Substack" is doing a lot of work there. But I agree that, if you're seriously looking to make money, Substack is probably a better avenue than having a blog someplace.
> Many people are easily making 6 figures on Substack now
How many though? I get the impression it's really just a very small subset at the top, with a very long tail making almost nothing.
What’s the slash dot of the current era or blogging?
I’m skeptical that it’s out there and robust because I think hn would be the obvious answer and yet it’s not as if small bloggers are dominating the charts here.
I am skeptical that there is any single author where I would be interested in the majority of their output. Perhaps I’m the outlier and other people find authors where they want to consume ~all.
Regardless it seems to me that all of these sole proprietor subscription models are contingent on being generally interested in that person‘s average output whereas the past was faceted meta-aggregation over all producers which I think made it work.