> More users online than ever, and able to get their attention too.

Not really. There are some people walking around with giant teddy bears[0], but that is entirely for show.

[0]https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

That was honestly a really good read on enshittification.

I think the theory that luring the producers by throwing them in my face, is a really good one. And one I haven't though of.

It looks like you got down-voted but I'm not sure why, because you're technically correct.

Rewind 20 years and YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhones, TikTok, Discord and what we think of as the "contemporary Internet" didn't really exist. Google existed, and even back then SEO was a thing and people were talking about not putting all of your eggs into Google's basket when it comes to your business model (which I remember vividly because I started a business in 2003 running a for-profit website that would continue to exist until 2022).

Fast forward to the present and yeah users are opting in to "platforms" that require accounts that keep content within the walled garden. And Google search has declined in quality so much that I and many others don't use it anymore.

But the world wide web, as a technology that is accessible to everyone, that existed 20 years ago still exists.

You can still build a website

You can still create opt-in email newsletters

And there are a lot more people online today than there were 20 years ago, which in many regards makes it easier to reach an audience today than it did back then... even if how you would choose to go about it might differ because of user behaviour.

It's fashionable to be pessimistic towards the tech industry.. and I myself get pessimistic about it all the time.

But when I look back at the fact that I was able to, beginning in 2003, create an online business that allowed me to work from home and feed my family for 15 years at a time before YouTube existed and when the dominant social media platform was still MySpace ... and now I see content creators getting millions of views and some of them are just talking heads in a bedroom ... yeah the world changed but in many ways it's easier to reach people today than it was before this modern era of walled gardens and a google search that sucks.

100% true.

But we are starting to have the first generation that grew up with Google thinking Google, etc was the internet, where as it's not. The culture of creating more than consuming gave way to consuming content and scrolling becoming the default behaviour that was conditioned into users.

Using a platform is one thing, reducing your platform risk by finding the people who will be your supporters is the real purpose of other platforms in other cases... coming to your platform.

As people start to see themselves as a platform, I suspect this will change.

>But we are starting to have the first generation that grew up with Google thinking Google, etc was the internet, where as it's not.

What's weird is how deeply held this view is on HN, by people who should know better.

It's functionally shackled by the terms Google lays out for it.

Anecdotal: My hobby tech blog went from 4k hits/ day (all cold Google search traffic) w/ top Google searches in 2019 to about 60 a day today. I still publish at the same tempo and I believe I improved the quality of the blog, but I suspect these days the search engine traffic pushes eyeballs to the walled garden "social media" apps.

You are no "authoritative" voice. What do you think was all the rage against misinformation about? To give legacy media and advertising customers an edge. All platforms with user voices and ratings were destroyed too. User opinions are bad for marketing.

If any search term is in any way part of any news cycle, you will get the crappiest search results you could imagine and any real content like a blog fitting the topic will be far down the line.

I'm not sure why search engines would push there or where you are learning about seo, etc.

It seems search engines want to know it's real people behind content.

Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?

> Do you post your blog on social media to be found and shared?

It wouldn't do you any good. Social media sites will kill your post if it has a link in it. They don't want you leaving.

I post it to LinkedIn and X, but my logs show very little traffic from those sources.

If Google is relevant to it.

Google's relevance has been changing with alternate means to discovery (perplexity, chatgpt) than their search.

I see more 401s than ever before running a webcrawler I think because of A.I. paranoia.