HACKER Q&A
📣 bbotond

What happened to blogging about programming?


10 years ago I could spend a weekend binge reading Joel on Software, Steve Yegge, Coding Horror, Peter Norvig's or ESR's articles. I learned a lot from their writing.

I look back at those days as the golden age of programmer writing. Super smart people who wrote very well.

Nowadays I feel like there is simply no new content that compares to the quality of these blogs/web sites. Why is this so? Or am I mistaken and there is a thriving blogging community I somehow overlooked?

  👤 krapp Accepted Answer ✓
> Or am I mistaken and there is a thriving blogging community I somehow overlooked?

Code blogging moved almost exclusively to Twitter and Medium, and a lot of what might have been blog content to Youtube.

👤 tacostakohashi
The same thing that happened to blogging about everything else.
👤 brudgers
In one dimension, the same thing that happened to Dr. Dobbs and Byte. The world moved on.

In a different dimension, blogging has become a "I am too old for this shit." Believe it or not, Usenet used to be good. Now everything requires massive administrative effort for spam and trolling. And SEO'ing because there's so much noise.

👤 s1k3s
Because business took over, and when that happens people are more focused on looking good than being good. There's also an influx of non-tech people flooding the tech world because they want to do business, which diminishes the quality of tech. This is both good and bad, depends on how you look at it.
👤 satyamskillz
Only one reason, Attention span is decreasing.

Too much resources being added every day and month. it is really difficult to filter them. Even google can not do it, when compare the first page result with second page then you will see drastic change in quantity of content.

👤 edimaudo
There are a couple out there but the standards have taken a nose dive.
👤 softwaredoug
It’s harder to trust the random website.

There’s so much automatically generated blog spam, and on so many blogs there’s some annoying pop up about services, or even attempts to hostile takeover of the back button, or paywalls..

I don’t think user attention span is decreasing. People are preferring other long form content like youtube and podcasts. In both mediums, you have more control over the consumption of the content and nobody has figured out how to automate spamming that content out yet.