Lee J

blogs.perl.org recently turned 10 years old. I was curious about the level of traffic so grabbed all of the post URLs and meta information to create the lists below. These are accurate up until the posting of this post (excluding this post):

• Total Posts: 8,091
• Total Posts (2016 Onwards): 2,595
• Total Unique Authors: 676
• Authors With Only 1 Post: 246

Most Active Authors (All Time):

• byterock - 604
• jt_smith - 442
• ovid - 382
• sawyer_x - 304
• brian_d_foy - 227
• steven_haryanto - 160
• yuki_kimoto - 153
• ron_savage - 148
• joel_berger - 132

Most Active Authors (2016 onwards):

• byterock - 417
• sawyer_x - 138
• yuki_kimoto - 93
• dean - 72
• mohammad_s_anwar - 69
• melezhik - 66
• zoffix_znet - 65
• ovid - 59
• neilb - 55

Most Active Months:

• 2012-07: 163
• 2010-08: 134
• 2012-04: 128
• 2011-10: 121
• 2014-03: 121
• 2013-02: 119
• 2012-05: 118
• 2012-03: 117
• 2010-07: 114
• 2011-11: 111

Total Post Count By Year:

• 2009 - 116
• 2010 - 1,023
• 2011 - 1,094
• 2012 - 1,274
• 2013 - 1,006
• 2014 - 983
• 2015 - 542
• 2016 - 535
• 2017 - 459
• 2018 - 664
• 2019 - 395

I haven't bothered going back pre-blogs.perl.org (i.e use.perl.org, which this site essentially replaced[1]), and I don't think the figures show us anything surprising; there are myriad reasons for the drop in traffic that can probably be explained by one or more of the following:

• It reflects the general patterns we see elsewhere in the Perl ecosystem
• Perl has long since passed the Plateau of Productivity
• In other words, there's little new anymore to blog about
• Long form blogging about technical subjects is a large investment of time
• blogs.perl.org is a frustrating thing to use (I end up posting most stuff on my own blog, as do others).
• Short form is now reduced to the shortest form: twitter
• Partially related to the above two: blogging in general is massively fractured

The last one is probably the most interesting argument. I pay little attention to facebook, linkedin, twitter. Medium is trying (and failing?) to eat up all the blog content. irc.perl.org is a ghost town, reddit is reddit, ironman rusted, what else have I missed? Probably loads.

I hesitate to use the phrase "echo chamber" as it doesn't seem accurate, it's more like we're in a dozen or more smaller echo chambers. Anyway - I don't think you can claim to be in a echo chamber if nobody is actually saying anything, which appears to be the inevitable end state given the above figures. This is merely an observation, I'm not appealing for change. And If I were appealing for change then it would probably be of the type: write less often, but more.

[1] use.perl.org is difficult to get info out of now, it's basically dead. A lot of content is lost - what happens when blogs.perl.org enters the same state?