YouTube has been recommending a bunch of videos this week where people try to answer the question of blog readership. The question has crossed my mind every so often as it's very rare that I stumble across a personal blog anymore. They almost never appear in search engine results and most of the writers I used to read regularly have long since moved on to other platforms. When Twitter really picked up steam, blogging went by the wayside for a lot of people and the ease of YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram has all but eliminated most people's efforts in crafting long-form articles.
Or so it seemed. According to several of the people on YouTube, blogging is apparently bigger than ever with millions of new articles being published every day. Nobody could provide sources for this data, but a simple Google Search suggested the daily post count on WordPress.com alone was 2.33-million per day. If combined with Medium and other long-form sites, as well as the millions of self-hosted sites out there, it's probably safe to say that there are a lot of blog posts being written and shared on a daily basis. But are these "real" blog posts? Are they automated processes that publish from other sources? Are they blocks of text written by LLMs1?
Does it even matter?
What's interesting about the discussion on blog reading is that most people seem to focus on the writing and not the reading. Just because there are millions of things put online every day does not mean that there is an audience for those words. Looking at my own blog, which I'll admit has gone through a number of changes and droughts since its current incarnation was released in 2006, there are fewer than 10 people visiting the site every day. There are thousands of automated systems every hour, though.
But, again, does it even matter?
The reason I have continued to write is because it often helps me organise my thoughts. Most articles are not published anymore, and a lot are never finished, but the process of putting words down allows me the opportunity to see the sentences that comprise incomplete ideas to see whether they make sense or not. This has become more important over the past few years as I explore new areas of academic study and try to make use of the new information.
Every so often, though, I do wonder if anyone still reads this stuff.
Large Language Models, otherwise known as "AI"