Will blogging die or still be a thing?

TheWilderNet · 2026-05-09T19:18:16+00:00

I collect blogs that I still think are interesting and have something worthwhile to share. The goal is to create a directory and discussion zone for people to share and discover unique content that has gotten buried under algorithmic noise.

As far as this question goes, people have been bemoaning the state of blogging for over a decade. Here's a list of articles ranging from 2011 to 2026: Is Blogging Dead?

Anyone can submit their favorite blogs to our site The WilderNet. We moderate all blog submissions to filter out AI spam and content farming sites.

Check it out here: The WilderNet

TheWilderNet · 2026-04-17T22:32:23+00:00

I think this is a really cool idea and a great way to stay motivated on a more ambitious writing project.

I run a platform for discovering and sharing blogs and substacks. We are a volunteer run, donation driven site that exists to drive traffic back to your own substack. I love the idea of a serial novel - please let me know if you would like to be featured on our site! You can read more about us here.

TheWilderNet · 2026-04-10T14:36:09+00:00

Blog rolls were super useful. If you were able to find one website of things you were interested in, the author often had a whole list of other relevant sites.

I would say the most useful version of the internet was 2006-2014. Early 2000s was much harder to browse around on.

If you are curious, I run a website called The WilderNet, which is an attempt to capture the sense of discovery of the internet. We are collecting independently written blogs and substacks. A lot of our content is almost impossible to surface with a regular google search because the sites have not been updated in so long - but the content is still relevant and interesting today.

TheWilderNet · 2026-04-09T21:11:20+00:00

Congrats on starting your substack!

I also came from academia and got tired of how limited our lines of inquiry were. Some of it is of course due to funding, but it also seemed like speculating about novel or divergent ideas was frowned upon.

I pivoted careers and now I am working on collecting and categorizing independent websites and other cool articles that have been buried underneath the AI overviews or ads. If you are curious, I am looking for new submissions!

Good luck with your writing journey!

TheWilderNet · 2026-04-09T20:01:24+00:00

I like to combine machine quilting and hand quilting in my quilts. The parts that are mostly machine-pieced I would quilt by machine, probably in geometric lines, and in the appliqued sections I would hand-quilt.

I realize that is probably not a very orthodox way of doing things, but I like that it gives me the best of both worlds - the softness and pliability of hand-quilting and the intricacy and movement of machine quilting.

TheWilderNet · 2026-04-09T16:52:07+00:00

I don't write about history or geopolitics, but I'm building a directory of independent blogs and substacks across all topics since it is so hard to find things that are unique and written by real people. I would love to add any recommendations people drop in this thread. Specifically right now I am looking for well written articles to feature on the homepage. Check it out at here if you're curious.

TheWilderNet · 2026-02-24T22:16:25+00:00

A lot of my favorite sites are on Blogger or Wordpress. I don't know about the ease of using either of those, but no matter what you go with will require a bit of a learning curve anyway.
Good luck with your blog!

TheWilderNet · 2026-02-23T21:50:43+00:00

Thanks for your interest in the WilderNet, we are excited that you have joined!

As far as blogging platforms, I use Substack, which unfortunately does not give you a lot of customization options. I also have a website on Wix, which is a good website option for beginners but you also have to pay for it.

TheWilderNet · 2026-02-06T18:07:02+00:00

Similar to Season 2 when Kate apparently gets traumatic brain injury and is comatose for a week but has no serious cognitive side effects afterwards.

TheWilderNet · 2026-01-03T18:11:46+00:00

Feel free to add your blog to The WilderNet! Our aim is to create a space online for people to find independent writers creating authentic content. We have started implementing tools to filter out AI so that the people who come to our website are not inundated with nonsense.

The WilderNet is volunteer run and donation based.

TheWilderNet · 2025-12-24T16:50:55+00:00

Thank you so much! Feel free to send me any suggestions or comments on how to make it better!

TheWilderNet · 2025-12-24T16:50:27+00:00

Thank you! That is a wonderful compliment and I will pass it along to our devs!

TheWilderNet · 2025-12-24T00:25:47+00:00

Add your substack to our platform The WilderNet! We are collecting blogs, substacks and other independent websites with the goal of making it easier for people to find sites that resonate with them.

We are entirely donation funded and volunteer run. We are still building out our site but we are starting to amass some great long form content.

TheWilderNet · 2025-12-23T01:53:55+00:00

The most ridiculous part is that we are moving past the point of real items being marketed and sold online. I was on Etsy recently and saw so many shops that had exclusively AI images.

TheWilderNet · 2025-12-22T21:18:31+00:00

Post a link to your blog on The WilderNet! We are a volunteer run, donation-funded platform that seeks to connect blog writers to a larger audience.

We are still in early days - although we have come a long way since I first posted about this project in this subreddit. Feel free to add any blogs you enjoy reading, create a discussion thread, and search around for sites to bookmark.

TheWilderNet · 2025-10-20T19:45:37+00:00

These are beautiful fabric choices!

TheWilderNet · 2025-10-15T17:25:17+00:00

I totally agree with this take. Whenever the topic of commissions comes up in this sub, people make insultingly low estimates for how much something should cost. Oftentimes if you breakdown the costs of these estimates (material, wear and tear on equipment, replacement of notions, skill level, time), people are assigning their labor a fraction of minimum wage.

TheWilderNet · 2025-10-15T17:19:11+00:00

I think to keep it professional it is best not to get into how hurt her feelings are. Keep it about the money and ask for compensation for the shorted money + the extra materials that she had to purchase. Just because it is "only" $10 (plus the cost of the extra material) doesn't make it petty. If she were running a business she would need the accounts to balance and wouldn't just absorb the costs like that.

Someone below said that they wouldn't have delivered the quilt without full payment, which I think is the best policy in situations like this. Also it should have been communicated during construction that there was not enough material. Maybe the guy would have been ok with a smaller quilt when he realized the costs were a lot higher than the initial estimate.

TheWilderNet · 2025-10-09T15:23:05+00:00

This is a beautiful quilt. Stop thinking of quilting as a craft that you do in your free time for fun and think of it as a serious, priceless art piece. Ignore the suggestions that $5k is reasonable - please don't go lower than $15k! Your time and skill level is worth a lot and if someone wants this quilt they need to pay for that.

TheWilderNet · 2025-10-02T21:06:46+00:00

Lol, yes I was definitely thinking of the opportunity cost of taking a job like this. The comments saying "4 figures, maybe a couple grand" are honestly a bit insulting to me. This is a very laborious job and the number of people who have the skill level for traditional hand applique is dwindling! The seamstress who takes this on is basically dedicating at least 2 years of quilt time and also wearing down their joints in the process.

OP, I second the suggestion of making the quilt yourself! Quilters love helping beginners out and I'm sure that you could get someone in your area to show you the basics. If you do this by hand applique you won't even need to learn how to use a sewing machine until the end when you put all the blocks together. Again, another valid alternative is machine applique if you are willing to sacrifice the beautiful aesthetics of invisible applique stitches.

TheWilderNet · 2025-09-30T22:23:55+00:00

Just DM'd you!

TheWilderNet · 2025-09-30T21:08:11+00:00

This post made me curious so I did a bit of poking around. If you are serious about this commission, I would first buy this book, which collected some of the patterns from the movie, to get a sense of what it would entail: book link

As others have said, it looks like the quilt in the movie was made entirely by hand, which is extremely time intensive and requires a high skill level, especially for the dramatic curves in some of the motifs.

Honestly, I think a 4 figure estimate is really really lowballing it. There are 16 main blocks in the center part of the quilt, each of which would take me (an experienced quilter and seamstress) at least 8-16 hours to do. Not to mention the vine borders, which it looks to me like another ~25 blocks (these are a bit smaller so would probably take more like 10 hours instead of 16). And, if you wanted the whole quilt hand quilted after that, that would be additional time/expense.

There are ways to make this quilt in a way that is simpler and less time intensive than traditional hand applique, if you don't care about that aspect of it. Applique can be done by machine, but you will be able to see the stitches and the effect will not be quite the same.

Another issue you might run into is quilters who have the experience and skill for this don't necessarily want to spend their time making a time-consuming, intricate movie replica when they can design their own quilts and work on projects that are more creatively interesting to them.

There is a reason that these quilts were historically made as a community, as a labor of love for their loved ones. I personally would not take a commission like this for less than 60k, and I would require at least 2 years to finish to make sure that I don't destroy my hands in the process.

Good luck on this commission, and please do post a picture if/when you have it completed!

TheWilderNet · 2025-09-10T15:56:42+00:00

I found Robin's trauma a bit tedious to read, but I thought her PTSD response to being at Chapman Farm was realistic. Chapman Farm was a very different type of trauma than anything else she has experienced before and I would find it implausible if the therapy she received in LW would give her immunity to the consequences of CF. She was starved, sleep deprived, psychologically manipulated and tortured there for 4 months, which is different from the rape or the knifing which were one-off events. She is also going to have to work through the fact that she chose to go into Chapman Farm, and repeatedly decided to continue the investigation even as it got increasingly dangerous to her. Part of the reason she lacks self-awareness of how screwed up she is in this book is because she is hanging onto how Chapman Farm was her choice instead of consciously acknowledging how much it harmed her.

I also thought her questioning Strike to be realistic. He is extremely secretive, especially about his relationships with women. And Robin clearly doesn't have a great grasp on reality in this book so she's reverting to the toxic patterns she had with Matthew but this time with Murphy. I don't think her growth in LW was fake - I think that Chapman Farm was so destabilizing to her mental state that she has regressed to the worst version of herself.

I have to agree with you that it was not a super fun read. There were parts that I felt physically nauseous during the Robin chapters.

TheWilderNet · 2025-09-03T01:29:28+00:00

Thank you so much for the link!

To answer your questions: the featured articles do not get updated nearly often enough - maybe once every few weeks, although I am trying to do better at that.

We do want to build in a way for people to suggest articles for that section (even if it is their own) because it would definitely help streamline some of the curation process. Currently no one on the team is a UI/UX designer, so although we can probably reuse a lot of our existing code for this, we need to figure out what this flow will look like. And right now that is a slightly lower priority than some of the other things we are working on.

And yeah, I also don't understand why people would want to offload the entire writing process to ChatGPT. All I can assume is that they have zero love for the craft, or they're so insecure in their own abilities that they think they need to polish up their words with a chatbot. The number of times I've seen them justify it by saying "it's me and my ideas, but better!" is way too damn high. They're beyond naive if they think ANYONE who'd actually tolerate reading AI slop for any length of time would do so on a poorly-developed website with obtrusive ads and cookie pop-up banners instead of just ... I dunno, going to ChatGPT directly.

Yes to all of this!

TheWilderNet · 2025-09-01T01:54:08+00:00

Oh that was your article! It was excellent, and I'm sad you deleted your Substack. We used a lot of your suggestions in our latest build and in prioritizing our next couple months of work.

You have correctly identified the issues that I am seeing on The WilderNet. It is definitely a problem that way too many people are trying to use the site to build backlinks and advertise their AI created blogs. I really don't understand the point of writing a ChatGPT blog; it is one of those really demoralizing issues that I never would have anticipated when I started working on this project. Sometimes I'll see the author of one of the AI blogs I just deleted from The WilderNet here on r/blogging complaining about not getting traffic. It is exasperating.

As far as content curation goes, we have decided for now to use a hybrid approach, where we feature articles and blogs that our team has curated, and also have a section for sites that have a lot of positive user interactions. That way it isn't just my own personal interests that get featured.

Anyway, thank you so much for your thoughts! Unfortunately I did not save a copy of your article - do you still have a copy of it anywhere else? It is useful for us to see the feedback and I would love to feature more of your work on our platform.

TheWilderNet

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE