Blogging Was Always Doomed to Fail

Two years ago, I posted How Google Helped Kill the Indie Web and How It Can Bring It Back. I outlined in 700 words how Google could restore blogging popularity while taking on the social media giants. I hoped someone at Google would read it and discuss it with co-workers. As an old-school blogger that has seen so many trends and technologies come and go, I felt it was a solid plan.

I now see that I was wrong.

Blogging can’t be saved until technology can solve the problem of link rot. Too many sites go away or move pages. This results in broken links. From the Wikipedia:

A 2021 study of external links in 1996-2019 New York Times articles found that 25% of links were inaccessible. In addition, from a sample of 4,500 links still accessible, 13% did not lead to the original content, a phenomenon called content drift.

Links almost always resolve correctly on Day 1. But as the years go on, the likelihood that any given link still works declines.

Social media doesn’t have this problem, because they keep attention on the current. The Facebook post, Reddit thread, or Tweet that went out this week is almost always guaranteed to have working links. The reader clicks a link and it resolves as expected.

This is not true with blogs, because our archives tend to be far more accessible than those on social media. I run broken link checkers here and on INeedCoffee to alert me when a link breaks. I then work to resolve that broken link by finding an alternative source or using the Wayback Machine to find an older copy of the article. I would guess fewer than 1% of bloggers take this effort. As a result, over the years, a typical blog will have more and more broken links. I’m certain that search engines see this as a negative quality signal and respond accordingly.

How many blogs have been abandoned? My guess is far more than are still active.

Ted Talks, NUSI, and 180DegreeHealth

I feel like the link rot problem is getting worse at an accelerated pace.

A few days ago, Ted Talks changed the links on all their content without adding a 301 redirect. I brought this to their attention and was ignored.

Remember NuSi? Gary Taubes and Peter Attia put together a group to study low-carb dieting. I want to link directly to the project, but I can’t. They shut down the website after they completed their work.

Two weeks later and the NuSi site is still offline. I don’t think it is returning.

One of my favorite health bloggers throughout the years has been Matt Stone of 180DegreeHealth. For just over a month the site has been offline (403 error). I reached out to Matt on December 22 to inform him the site was down and he responded they were working on it. It is still down. WordPress is a bloated mess, but it is not rocket science. If it isn’t back up by this weekend, I’ll need to go through all my broken links and clean up those posts. It would be tragic if 180DegreeHealth ended up in the Digital Graveyard.

Why do I take this effort? If I have a blog post that is a response to another blogger’s post and that blog disappears or the page has moved, my blog post has reduced value to the reader. Now multiply that experience millions of times and it becomes obvious that blogging was always doomed to fail.

My Promise

If the day comes that I want to stop blogging or paying for hosting, this site will be made static and archived on a free server somewhere. It will not go away.

UPDATE: I waited until the weekend and 180 is still down. I suspect it isn’t coming back. All my links have been updated to the Wayback Machine. It sucks that we lost such a great site. NuSi is still offline also.