
Excerpt from this article:
This is the “mommy Internet” now. It’s beautiful. It’s aspirational. It’s also miles from what motherhood looks like for many of us — and miles from what the mommy Internet looked like a decade ago…
But the biggest stars of the mommy Internet now are no longer confessional bloggers. They’re curators of life. They’re influencers. They’re pitchwomen. And with all the photos of minimalist kitchens and the explosion of affiliate links, we’ve lost a source of support and community, a place to share vulnerability and find like-minded women, and a forum for female expertise and wisdom.
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The death of the mom blog has something to do with shifts in how people consume and create on the Internet. Blogging on the whole has fizzled as audiences and writers have moved to other platforms. And parents with young children have made the transition along with everyone else — although their hours are somewhat more erratic. In 2016, Facebook (which owns Instagram) reported that new parents are especially active “in the wee hours,” starting their first mobile visits as early as 4 a.m. By 7 a.m., 56 percent of new parents have visited Facebook on their mobile devices.
Some bloggers use social networks to push people to their websites, but more and more, Instagram or Facebook is the destination. Mom bloggers “used to be able to easily reach their audience through search, RSS feeds or newsletter updates,” notes Elizabeth Tenety, a former Washington Post colleague who co-founded the website Motherly, “but now that their core audience is trending towards hanging out on their phones — and by extension social media sites like Instagram and Facebook — the digital environment overall is less of a fit for those types of blogs.” The shift to shorter posts and an emphasis on likes and hearts has changed the tone and content of what moms find online: more pictures, fewer words, less grit. The personal-essay industry has absorbed some of the fare that used to appear on mom blogs, but reading a viral post that shows up in your Facebook feed is very different from following a particular blogger.