Why I am starting a blog in 2026

As we start a new year, I have decided to finally create and publish my personal website, as well as attempt to maintain a blog (what you are reading now). In this first post, I want to talk about why I am choosing to start a blog when blogs as a concept are declining in popularity.

There is no shortage of content on the Internet. On the contrary, with the proliferation of social media platforms and LLMs, I feel it is relatively uncontroversial to suggest that the Internet might have too much content. In recent months I have seen a growing sentiment that search engines have gotten worse in an effort to steer users towards AI-based alternatives. Perhaps, instead, the Internet has simply gotten harder to search.

It has certainly become harder to access information as a user. Blogs & forums have historically been treasure troves of information, especially when the content was posted by a subject matter expert. Nowadays, more and more expertise is being locked up in walled gardens, such as Discord servers or even traditional social media sites like Twitter/Facebook/Instagram. Content on these sites generally receives little to no indexing by search engines, and may not be possible for humans to access without creating an account.

A related trend I have seen is that users invest far less effort in learning or researching how to solve their problem. For several years I provided active support in my Discord community for Minecraft modding. It is important to note that mods primarily appeal to a younger audience, and so the user behavior patterns I saw there may not translate to the Internet at large. Still, I noticed a trend of newer users lacking initiative to look for existing solutions to their problem or at least collect as much useful information as possible for the person helping them. It is tempting (and easy) to blame them, the environment that neglected to teach them this skill, or various other factors. But again, perhaps the problem is much simpler: can they even readily find the info we expect them to?

Discord forums offer a search feature, but it is rather simplistic, and relies on user posts to have clear and distinct summaries. The classic paradigm of searching for information breaks down in an era of unprecedented complexity in the tools and world we use & live in today.

I would like to propose that perhaps blogs, for all their faults (lack of peer review, ephemerality) do a good job of solving these problems. Blogs are rather easy to index and search. They are typically public sites that require no authentication to access. Each post tends to focus on a single topic, and today’s LLMs offer a potential path to SEO for authors without time to write explicit keywords and summaries. I may be wrong in this proposal, but at the very least, the information I choose to publish here will not be forgotten so easily as in a random Discord server. :)

I don’t yet know what topics will be a focus on this blog. Most will likely be more technical rather than philosophical like this, but it really depends on my time and interest. If this sort of content interests you, consider checking back in for a new post in the future!