In the eighth year of operation of Sweet House, talk about the past, present and future of Chinese blogs.

Timeline of Blog Rise and Fall

The first wave of blog craze can be traced back to around 2005. Sina Blog was one of the most popular blog platforms at that time. Taking advantage of the operation strategy of stars, it gave birth to a number of celebrity blogs like Han Han and Xu Jinglei.

While watching the stars, netizens have opened accounts on such platforms as the blog bus and Sina Blog, and knocked out their first blog. At that time, the blog platform even provided a relocation tool to facilitate users to migrate articles from other platforms to the platform, and compete to attract this group of users who love writing.

In April 2012, a space was upgraded. The official explained that the new interface is simpler and easier to use, but forced upgrades and lack of functionality are also criticized. Some bloggers began to worry that if the platform was suddenly shut down or changed, their efforts in blogs would be wasted and they would look for more stable and independent blog solutions instead.

An independent blog is a blog running on an independent domain name and network host, which is equivalent to a separate website. As early as 2005, the Chinese Blog Annual Conference brought together well-known bloggers in Shanghai to discuss the development of Chinese networks. In 2009, China Mengbo was published, which included many well-known blogs, showing the power of grassroots discourse.

I also participated in the most glorious years of independent blogs. In 2013, I founded Tianxinwu and operated under the independent domain name (tcxx. info). At that time, a random article had tens of thousands of views, a continuous stream of netizens came to comment, and webmasters communicated happily in numerous small circles.

While independent blogs are popular, mainstream blog platforms gradually lose popularity. According to the data of China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of June 2014, the utilization rate of blog platform in China was only 19.3%, no longer a mainstream application. In November 2018, NetEase announced that it would permanently close its blog business, and another blog platform disappeared in the torrent of the Internet.

However, around 2016, the popularity of independent blogs gradually declined. It is a challenge for webmasters to maintain server overhead or insist on content updates.

Why Blog Decline

• With the popularization of digital equipment and the strengthening of bandwidth, the threshold of audio and video production has become very low, and viewing has become more and more convenient. Compared with words, people prefer more direct sensory stimuli to fill the fragmented time.
• In this fast-paced Internet world, netizens tend to ingest fresh information anytime and anywhere on the mobile end. For blogs with thousands of words, the content update cycle varies from a few days to several weeks, which makes them cumbersome and lagging behind.
• Netizens are eager for timely interaction and feedback on attention, and social media just fills this need. The like function reduces the cost of making a statement infinitely, while the hierarchical structure of comments makes communication more orderly.

Reasons for adhering to independent blog

At the time when the mainstream blog platform was closed and abandoned in the past, there are still bloggers who have operated independent blogs up to now. What is the reason for everyone to persist? For me, the main points are as follows.

1. Record life and express insights

In the early webmaster circle, many bloggers were born in technology. Hold had to buy a domain name, configure DNS, build a server environment, deploy a blog engine, and so on. But text sharing should not be limited to the technology circle. Everyone can record their life and express their feelings. In this impetuous society, in the face of the fragmented content of the Internet, it is a very valuable thing to calm down and connect thoughts.

2. The data is completely under control

Many We Media platforms have restrictions on the editing and publishing of articles. For example, the Princess article can only be modified once and is limited to N characters after it is sent. For example, the headline needs strict text review before it can be launched. In contrast, independent blogs are easy to migrate, are not afraid of restricted access, update content at any time, and support customized appearance and functions. The webmaster has the greatest control over the content presentation mode.

3. Sharing spirit of the Internet

The Internet was born to connect with each other, but we media platforms restrict each other, and we media accounts play a lot of private domain traffic, closing information on islands. Independent sites are included in search engines, and hyperlinks link high-quality content together, so that bloggers who are willing to share can make friends with their writings. This is the meaning of the existence of the Internet.

What happened to the independent bloggers

The craze for independent blogs has spawned many well-known blogs and sparked many grassroots webmasters. Over the years, everyone has taken a different path.

• Some bloggers turned to entrepreneurship, such as Junyu Wang, the founder of Pea pod and Qingmang, Ji Shisan, the CEO of Fruit Shell and the founder in the line, and Wen Xin, the co-founder of Lanting Jishi.
• Some bloggers make profits through blog traffic. Lu Songsong expanded a series of businesses around, including IDC, soft writing, promotion and marketing, paid communities, and so on. The Moonlight blog has been transformed into a team operation, with the main income coming from the advertising space in the station.
• Wangyue, Mou Changqing, ZAC, Shuangye and other webmasters actively lead online topics and organize offline activities by using the popularity and contacts accumulated by blogs, and have great personal influence in the community.
• Many webmasters of that year stayed in the technology Internet industry, and continued to output valuable content as we media.

Last year, I tried to do the computer science popularization series of "Sweet Talk Technology", and accidentally found that the reading amount of the text collation was no less than the video explanation. Zhihu, a text based sharing platform, has maintained high traffic and user volume so far. I think that as the most basic carrier of language communication, text is still an efficient choice for knowledge sharing, and it will still be needed for a long time in the future.

In the past 20 years, there has always been such a group of people who carefully record and sincerely share the changes of the Internet. Perhaps the blog era will never end, but will continue to evolve into new ways. The creators of words have always been there, and our audience has also been there.

(Thanks for the guidance of Shuangye and Wangyue!)