Item — HN Reader

I don't think there's a convincing one but I think it's pretty obvious, no?

-These days, people are pretty unlikely to pay just to have a blog when there are tons of free alternatives

-Blogging itself has experienced massive decline with social media & short-form video

-Even if they did want to pivot into a more contemporary model, migrating a stack that old and with that many dependencies would be extremely difficult

Of course it'd be nice to preserve, but I imagine the business was on life support and mainly supported by holdovers and with close to zero new customers.

At some point, you need to close down.

I wonder how much the death of advertising on the open web has to do with it.

I mean, it's funny how things are going. Google, Twitter and even Facebook started with really open websites, but then started closing off more and more of "their" portion of the web. And now their dream has paid off: the open web is more or less gone.

And the winner is (or might very well be) Tiktok and ChatGPT.

Well done, guys. Brilliant strategy. Perhaps you should get a big bonus this year.