Blogging died when content creators realized they couldn’t make money from useless content that would entice anyone to return. So they moved to images and video, where the algorithm forces visitors to watch content – a format made so simple that even a goldfish can watch it. Short-form content is, in any case, the ultimate Western disposable culture, and is not intended for use via search.
By blogs, you probably mean copy&paste [1] sites. The ones that are a dime a dozen and can be recognized by headlines like “Top-5 Forum Software for Better SEO (2025)”. They are made solely for ad impressions, not for content. Thanks to AI, more and more of them are being created. No one wants to read them because everyone knows that the “information” they provide is useless. Forums used to offer a more authentic form of information in a way. But that is changing, and AI pollution has reached Discourse too. Questions based on using AI content as primary content are on the rise 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 that Discourse is not very different from WordPress. Both are based on text, 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 doesn’t get a single click 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 significantly based on my way of creating WordPress-style introductions. I create an article-like introduction, which 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 - alarm” 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 has found what they were looking for. So, the problem with my forum is not actually search engine visibility, but the lack of the famous critical mass that generates and maintains discussion, which would provide Google with indexable content, which would bring new traffic in, which would convert at some 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 related 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, fairly established phrases
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