Blogs died when content creators realized they couldn’t get paid attractively for useless content, so no one would return. So they moved to images and video, where the algorithm forces visitors to watch content – formatted so even a goldfish can watch. Short-form content is extreme Western disposable culture anyway and isn’t meant to be used for searches.
By blogs, you probably mean copy&paste [1] sites. The ones that are a dime a dozen and recognizable by titles like “Top-5 Forum Software for Better SEO (2025)”. They are made solely for ad impressions, not content. Thanks to AI, more and more of them are being created. No one wants to read them because everyone knows the “information” they provide is useless. Forums used to offer a kind of more authentic information. But that is changing, and AI pollution has reached Discourse too. Questions based on using AI content as primary content are increasing here.
But text content is doing well and can continue to live strong. Streaming didn’t kill books either, even though it sometimes feels like literacy is going out of fashion. I mean, Discourse isn’t that different from WordPress. Both are text-based, and most people use them similarly.
The difference is that WordPress is based on a single publication. Discourse is most often based on a question/answer series. The end result is always the same: a kind of hit-and-run. A forum generates discussion because it’s a forum, just as poorly as WordPress generates discussion because it has comments.
My forum gets zero clicks from search results because it’s Discourse. Clicks and growth come for two reasons:
- the forum has enough useful information
- CDCK has enabled better SEO, and the content is indexable at all
But – the traffic to my forum, and its growth, is heavily based on my way of making WordPress-style introductions. I make an article-style introduction that generates just as little discussion as if I had published it on WordPress.
Topics get less traffic via Google. Apparently, the structure “question - guess - request for clarification - more information - answer - second answer - alert” is difficult for search engines (should we switch to a method where a summary or digest is made from such a thread, a new thread is created from it, and the original discussion is moved under it?).
So, Discourse has succeeded in making my forum’s content visible (a small language area and a narrow niche make it much easier).
But it doesn’t convert into discussants for me, nor naturally returning visitors. Of course, the forum has fulfilled its purpose in terms of search results if a random visitor got what they were looking for. So, my forum’s problem isn’t really search engine visibility, but the lack of that famous critical mass that generates and maintains discussion, which would provide indexable content for Google, which would bring new traffic in, which would convert a low percentage into new discussants.
But that’s no longer a question related to the topic itself.
Who knows if this whole answer is even relevant to the topic. I just took the opportunity to test an AI translator with a sufficiently long text… yes, I’m a bad person 
we are missing a notation to prevent translation of, for example, quite established phrases
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