Generally speaking there are plenty of blogs that get linked in places like here. Blogs just don't have comment sections hosted on their own as much anymore.

Having discussions happen in separate places is also interesting, because the HN convo and some subreddit convo will be different, for example.

There's a lot more mainstraeam stuff but I think niche communities still exist. Glibly, we're not a part of most of them on account of having gotten older. Or we are a part of some, but there's plenty we're not seeing.

This need not be a unsolvable problem, and that one has to retreat places like HN relying on a single moderator(good, but doesn't scale).

One can also rely on timelines/feeds being based on Distributed moderation - A user selects moderators or custom-algorithms who they find valuable. The moderation can be along different dimensions like accuracy, interest, or aligned with some political view.

There could a moderator whose style is to purely check the soundness of the reasoning without taking any position on the issue itself. This can lead to improved standards of discussion.

A key issue is how to reduce the energy required to moderate - typically a moderator evaluates the quality and rely on networks of other moderators each handling smaller domains.

Current discourse encourages users to sort into strongly polarized groups, whereas more nuanced feeds in social media can lead to coalitions which don't neatly align with the standard fault lines. Platforms like Polis actively encourage common points of agreement across different groups.

All scaling issues solved.

If you want to talk about the garden gnome liberation front you must believe they need to be rescued.

Blogs were always effort to set up and maintain, even if you were just going with one of the hosted platforms rather than self-hosting.

And comment spam was certainly an issue but, firstly, systems for dealing with that became pretty good. And then, outside of major news sites - I'm thinking particularly here of BBC's HYS, but the same applies to other news sites - and other sites with very broad interest bases, you didn't tend to get loads of nasty or toxic comments on blogs. Plus, the moderation tools were - as previously mentioned - pretty decent. A lot of the bigger news websites did close comments, but I'm not so aware of this being an issue with blogs which were often more focussed around a particular community or interest anyway... just publicly available.

I don't think the quantity of people online in itself had anything to do with the "death" of the blogosphere. It's just that most of those people don't read or write blogs. And it's become harder to find blogs and other long tail content because search results are now so heavily skewed towards paid results and commercial entities who invest huge amounts in SEO.

FWIW I also think you're probably going a bit far with the moral pronouncements on those 7 billion people: neither you nor I have any real idea what the vast majority of them are actually like as human beings. Moreover, I'd suggest that writing off most people as "[not] very good" or branding a critical mass of them as "spectacularly awful" - and especially when you're speaking from a position of ignorance - is exactly the kind of rhetoric that's landed us with this grim tribal culture that permeates large areas of online - and offline - life.

https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/

Average age is 16 on Discord, average time spent per day is less than 10 minutes, so it's being used as a messaging service (but connected to a greater gaming-type ecosystem). 90% of servers are less than 15 members. 30% of teens use it, which is significantly higher than the rest of the population.

I don't really have anything concrete to point to for my general feeling about American society slowly moving into a post-social media phase. Tiktok falling into relative unuse with most Americans except Hispanics is probably a main point of data. There hasn't been anything emerging to replace it besides (according to studies) the more cordial YouTube, which you cannot really say is a social media site. It is the most widely used of all of them, though, something like 94% penetration.