[HN Gopher] If I could bring one thing back to the internet it w...
___________________________________________________________________
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
(2020)
Author : artkulak
Score : 560 points
Date : 2021-09-20 09:38 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tttthis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tttthis.com)
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| Yea I want the "readability" of blogs (nice text, little JS and
| no tracking) and the "discoverability of "reddit"
|
| I can pick any topic/genre and just go find the appropriate
| subreddit. Sort by "Top (month,year,all time)" and immediately be
| served with "good content"
|
| Just "searching" for any topic on Google can quickly lead you
| down a rabbit hole of SEO-focussed-thin-content !
| savingGrace wrote:
| What is lobsters?
| singh_ wrote:
| lobste.rs
| stevoski wrote:
| I have a feeling the author of this post wasn't an active blogger
| themselves when the heyday of personal blogs ended. I blogged
| actively from 2008 to about 2015. Through some luck, I had a good
| sized audience right from the beginning.
|
| Sometime around 2012 or 2013, the amount of time the average
| person spent on social media got high enough that it became their
| default time sink. People simply stopped interacting with
| personal blogs in the way they used to.
|
| Writing blog posts every couple of days was fun when every new
| post would get a few comments from regular readers. But quite
| rapidly those comments simply stopped, and instead almost every
| comment was blog spam.
|
| In my opinion, it had nothing to do with the blogging platforms,
| and everything to do with the rise of social media.
| HermanMartinus wrote:
| I know it's platform specific. But the Bear trending page has a
| decent few good blogs on it: https://bearblog.dev/discover/
| ElectricMind wrote:
| People start with "hey I love this topic. Let me write about it
| and I don't care what anyone else think or fame or money"
|
| *1-2 years later success
|
| Same people "Let me write something so I can milk the cow. I stop
| writing about code but instead how to make cheese from the milk
| which I am about suck from the cow organically"
|
| As soon as your "passion" becomes "full-time" job , it is over.
| Any way I have to find my cow. Cioa
| sschueller wrote:
| Wow, I guess I am really old. I can remember the time before
| blogs. This is like "If I could bring one thing back to the
| internet it would be instagram" to me.
| firepoet wrote:
| Curious.. what would you bring back?
| throwawaaaaay17 wrote:
| Substack is driving a blog renaissance. A ton of high-quality
| niche blogs popping up everywhere.
|
| See, for example, https://antonhowes.substack.com/ (I'm not
| affiliated with the writer, though I am considering switching
| from free to paid)
| pixelgeek wrote:
| Well it is for professional writers. I think that the initial
| wave of blogs lead to a lot of people getting work as paid
| writers and now Substack is helping those people build their
| own market outside of the declining magazine and newspaper
| industries.
| brabel wrote:
| Why would I use this instead of my own domain and a website
| hosted for free on Netlify or GitHub Pages?
|
| I can get quite a lot of views by posting my latest posts to
| the relevant forums (HN, Reddit, programming forums)... if
| there's any advantage I am not seeing, I actually do want to
| know.
| rchaud wrote:
| You'd go to Substack if the endgame was to develop a paying
| audience. Views alone don't pay writers' bills.
| brabel wrote:
| Ah ok, but when I talk about blogging in the sense we're
| talking here, I think of it mostly as a non-professional
| activity as it used to be... just people sharing their
| thoughts/knowledge.
| Torwald wrote:
| > Why would I use this instead of my own domain and a website
| hosted for free on Netlify or GitHub Pages?
|
| Email subscriptions made easy enough for a non-techie
| audience to subscribe.
| kowalevski wrote:
| some blogs that are available on domain etc have form with
| email subscription (for example by using Convertkit
| service). i did this on my blog website.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Substack is free for the author vs. Mailchimp etc. f
| dilap wrote:
| I follow a bunch of people on substack. Things I've noticed
| as a reader:
|
| - It's both an email newsletter and a very nicely designed,
| clean web page
|
| - There's an easy-to-use payments system (I pitch in a few
| bucks to my favorite blogs). The writer can control on a per-
| post basis how much extra content paid subs get -- whole
| post, whole post but no ability to comment, or just a preview
| of the post.
|
| - They've actively recruited excellent writers, offering them
| contracts with minimum $ guarantees.
|
| There's nothing mind-blowing about it, but it's really well
| and tastefully done, which is more than you can say about 99%
| of the commericial web offerings.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| I agree with the high-quality niche part, but the same was said
| about Medium in its early days. They're on borrowed time like
| every other SV funny-money-funded company.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| The problem with Substack (and Revue) is their publisher
| policy. The moment you turn on payments, you either bend to the
| ambiguity and _only_ get your income from them, or you risk it
| with a Patreon or an online store for a purpose that isn 't
| well-served by a newsletter.
| schemescape wrote:
| My biggest motivation for starting an independent blog instead of
| posting on Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium, etc. is that I want to
| have possession of the content that I create.
|
| Even if it's possible to get data back out of the big platforms,
| I wouldn't be surprised if it's in some proprietary format that
| is difficult to later reuse.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Working on launching a blog right now. The value prop is that it
| is guaranteed to make you smarter, each piece is a literary
| composition, and it is the best time and value for money you are
| likely to get that day.
|
| What we do with language online now is what we used to do with
| code in the 80's. We're still in the shitty 8-bit game stage of
| public discourse, Twitter is internet Tetris. Like code, good
| writing isn't just what it represents, it's what it does.
| brm wrote:
| I'd bring back David Karp
| codingdave wrote:
| Their about page talks about using reddit to post hate speech,
| then just link to it from their blog, to get around censorship on
| blogging platforms.
|
| I honestly cannot tell if this author is wanting that because
| they are truly passionate about freedom of speech, or if they are
| feeling personally stifled in expressing their opinions.
|
| Either way, this post feels like an attempt to say they want a
| blogging platform where they can post whatever they want, whether
| it be NSFW content, hate speech, or anything else.
| rchaud wrote:
| It was weird how the latter half of the post seemed completely
| detached from the first.
| starf wrote:
| Who here used to read "salami tsunami"? I think his name is Dusty
| Scott.
| george3d6 wrote:
| blogs are more alive than ever.
|
| they make up a smaller % of the internet, but that's because the
| use-base has increased.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Plenty of well-written, insightful and contemporary blogs on the
| Gemini network.
|
| Get off the web and into some other part of the internet.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Blogger has not been shut down:
|
| https://www.techrolet.com/2021/06/why-google-will-not-shut-d...
|
| I blog. Here's a view from the other side:
|
| It's nigh impossible to make money blogging. People hate every
| means that exists to monetize it.
|
| People hate ads. People hate SEO content with affiliate links.
| People hate content paid for via a content mill. Etc.
|
| If you do something original, they accuse you of being a shill or
| making things up etc and few people leave tips or kick in a few
| bucks via Patreon.
|
| You want to see more blog writing from original voices?
|
| Be willing to tip or support Patreon if they are looking to
| monetize it. Good writing takes time and practice and if you
| aren't willing to pay people, eh, quit your bitching. Wanting
| good writing for free is an expectation of slave labor.
|
| Don't be a creeper. There have been far too many people whose
| interest in my writing is lurid, overly personal and unhealthy.
| It's impacted me, my life and my writing and mostly not in a good
| way.
|
| Share the blog writing you think is good. Repost it somewhere.
| It's extremely hard to self promote. Many places have rules
| against that or which strictly limit it. Even where it is
| allowed, people act all judgy if you are self promoting. It has
| more credibility if someone else promotes your work.
|
| Engage constructively. Comments or reader interaction is
| enormously important for fueling the mind's ability to figure out
| what to say next on the topic. (Don't use this as an excuse to be
| mean and then claim "You asked for feedback!")
|
| I have no plans to engage with anyone who decides this comment
| somehow constitutes an invitation to be attacked, insulted and
| told how I'm somehow doing something wrong and it's my fault I
| can't make this work.
|
| It's not my fault. This is just one of those things where the
| world is currently broken and most writers are making a pittance.
| trwhite wrote:
| I think Posthaven ticks a lot of these boxes. I never really
| anyone talking about it on here but it's been around for an age
| and I don't have anything to fault about it.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I was lucky to be part of the early blog sunrise around 2000. I
| was even more lucky to have a blog that was picked up, recognized
| by the likes of Macromedia, Adobe, and linked by a lot others. I
| believe there are a few references from few entries in Wikipedia
| and few other well known websites.
|
| When Google Adsense was a thing and fun, I had it running on my
| site for quite a long time. There was a time when I supported my
| Startup with the income from my blog. A few of my years in Mumbai
| was just living off of the income from my blog.
|
| 20+ years now, I just have my blog as a record and archive for
| all the fun, stupid, silly, and nonsense that I wrote. Now, I
| write for myself and perhaps for my kids to browse around in
| future and, may, laugh. I have no comments, no analytics, nothing
| at all now.
|
| I can understand the new generations loathing the likes of Blogs,
| Emails. However, I look at them as a digital record of my life.
|
| For instance, I stumble on people online and then I reply back to
| the email thread we had in 2005. How nice is that?
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| No, blogs are still here. The casual blog readers are gone.
|
| Now there are a thousand good static site generators and free
| hosting in github page, vercel and netlify, publishing a blog has
| never been easier, at least for the people dare to call
| themselves hackers.
|
| However, the mass has moved on to social media to sink their idle
| time. The question every blogger should ask themselves should be:
|
| Am I writing because I have something to say, or just to sound
| important to people I don't even care about?
| fsckboy wrote:
| blogs were the beginning of the death of the internet: content
| based around a person is basically celebrity culture, and the
| pressure is on to crank something out regardless of whether the
| celeb has anything to say.
|
| the slashdot/digg/reddit/hn model is better (though as a
| microcosm of blogging, the slashdot editors were too personality
| driven as well)
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| I think the internet evolved around and past blogs. They still
| exist, but much more entertaining forms of content, which use a
| lot more data and tech to host, have come to dominate. Think of
| the percentage internet mind-share web blogs had in 1995 vs.
| 2021, this seems to be mostly what folks are nostalgic for. Now
| there are hundreds of online news sources, hundreds of forums and
| games and billions of hours of video content.
|
| The old Internet, the way it used to be, will survive in its
| niche, but we can't kid ourselves that 99% of people want to read
| technical blogs.
|
| And even so, while I'm in that 1%, I find blogs overly
| simplistic, too focused on self-help, DIY, end your
| procrastination, here's why my chosen tool/kit/library is the
| best -- these are profoundly uninteresting. Every time a Paul
| Graham post rockets to the top of HN, I roll my eyes. Out of all
| the writing and profundity of the history of civilization, this
| is what we worship?
| peter_retief wrote:
| I blog for myself and host on a linux box under my desk. Really
| just a place to store my images and ideas.
| kaetemi wrote:
| Or just bring them back into the Google search results...
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| The under list of web sites under 1Mb (https://1mb.club/) is a
| great resource if you're willing to spend the time browsing
| there.
| gavreh wrote:
| https://diff.blog is also a pretty good discovery resource,
| I've found.
| pantulis wrote:
| Of course social media hit blogs hard on its day. I miss the
| times when a blogger would publish how bad her morning went,
| pictures of his new dog, or how great was the latest TV launch.
| This is basically all gone to social media.
|
| But I also think that the coffin in the nail was given by people
| like myself subscribing to too many sites that provide RSS feeds.
| Seems like a good idea, having all that info in your newsreader,
| but after all The Verge, Hacker News and a few other media can
| dwarf any personal blogs so your reader basically is infoxicated.
|
| The best way to discover blogs is... also reading blogs.
| q-base wrote:
| I used to love photo-blogs. Not just single images like IG and
| the like, but just random photo-blogs where the people who took
| the pictures share a bit of thoughts/stories behind the pictures
| no matter how trivial. My biggest inspiration back in the day was
| probably Jon Olsson before he started video blogging instead.
|
| So I have started doing so myself and really enjoy the process of
| putting them together and sharing just because it is the kind of
| content I like to consume myself.
|
| If any of you have good recommendations on photo-blogs then
| please let me know. I will sure try some of the search-engines
| and discovery tools shared in this thread already.
|
| And for shameless self-promotion here is a link to where I will
| post going forward:
| https://jesperreiche.com/category/photography/
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| There's a lot of repetition, e.g. 'nowadays'. 3 uses in one post.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| There's medium. But medium is a horrible mess. There's Dev.to
| which is at least usable and something I will visit.
|
| There's a couple of problems with blogs.
|
| - Sometimes I only want to subscribe to an author's certain
| topics
|
| - There's still no good RSS reader; I use feedly, but its load-
| time puts me off it big time (I've tried plenty of others)
|
| - The tendency to sign up for walled garden platforms rather than
| platforms, or simply use normal websites, that federate well
|
| - The practical death of web rings for discoverability
|
| I've been thinking about the last point more: I don't really want
| to submit to a search engine's algorithm; I want someone's
| curated recommendations.
|
| Once I've have those curated recommendations I want something
| that lets me aggregate and interact.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| > There's still no good RSS reader; I use feedly, but its load-
| time puts me off it big time (I've tried plenty of others)
|
| If you want a fast, in browser RSS reader I don't think
| anything can beat mine in load time: https://airss.roastidio.us
|
| I recently have a show HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28585353
| veidr wrote:
| Yeah blogs are still here, BUT: (like email ( _sob_ ) and
| telephone-calling (hooray)) a lot of people that once did blog
| don't anymore.
|
| Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years"
| sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I
| just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok
| cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits".
|
| I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-curated NetNewsWire
| RSS feeds for 20+ years, and blogs never went away, RSS never
| died, Google Reader getting googled didn't really matter, etc.
|
| And there are probably technically _more_ blogs now than ever
| before.
|
| But still, the blog kinda died, in the sense that it would be a
| lot more surprising to learn your friend's 80-year-old grandma
| has a blog today than it would have been in 2011.
|
| It went from an increasingly-mainstream thing to a decreasingly-
| mainstream thing.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years"
| sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I
| just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok
| cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits".
|
| Most blog-entries were never much more than that anyway,
| especially since the free blog-services started appearing and
| setting up a blog was effortless. There is a reason why Twitter
| were named micro-blogging-service in the beginning. And the
| other side was blogging being a primitive form of social
| network, till better social networks appeared. So it made sense
| for people who were more interested in the social aspect to
| moved to the optimized services.
|
| > I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-curated
| NetNewsWire RSS feeds for 20+ years, and blogs never went away,
| RSS never died, Google Reader getting googled didn't really
| matter, etc.
|
| In both cases, the hype died down, and was replaced by other
| hypes. The remaining people use them now for the dedicated
| reasons where both can shine their best. But the danger remains
| that loosing support will long term lead to them dying for
| real. In case of RSS it's already happening slowly. Though
| blogs are more resistant to this, as your blogging does not
| depend much on external support, as long as you do not care
| about money or reader-stats.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart
|
| or worse, a 10/ sequential message "magnum tweetus"
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Yes - and all the people the author remembers with nostalgia
| are probably on Twitter now, doing more or less the same thing
| but with worse quality overall. Twitter gets a bad rap because
| of the hive mind (and it deserves every bit of that
| reputation), but there are tons of just normal people on there
| talking about their lives. In a way, Twitter made blogging much
| more accessible - most people couldn't sit down and write a
| 500-1000 word post, even one or two a year, but they can tweet
| every detail about their day, their projects, what they're
| thinking about and so on.
|
| Of course, it's not the same as a blog. I think the length
| "requirement" of a blog made it so only people with the time,
| dedication and skills (or lack of self-awareness) would keep
| them going, so if you were reading an established blog a bit of
| selection bias was at play. On Twitter you can tweet garbage
| day in day out and still be on the platform for years. Heck,
| you'd probably gain a significant following.
|
| I might be coming off as a Twitter fan or something but just to
| be clear: the site is cancer. It's impossible to stay on for
| longer than a year and not have your brain melt off by how it
| works, and they're becoming more and more closed and
| restrictive by the day. It's a shame because there's clearly
| something about the site that interests a mass audience, but I
| wish there was a service that was like Twitter but better. I
| know Mastodon exists but outside specific niche audiences it's
| never gained traction, but I hope it does take off eventually.
|
| Maybe the same applies to Facebook/Instagram/Other major social
| media provider as well, but I don't have any experience with
| platforms outside Twitter and Reddit so I couldn't say.
|
| Edit to expand on something: I mentioned that Twitter is
| interesting to mass audiences, and that's actually more
| important than you'd think. Speaking personally, before I went
| on twitter, I don't think I'd ever consistently read content
| posted by women. It's a natural result of being in a male-
| dominated industry and following male-dominated interests. On
| Twitter, though, because there were so many people of all walks
| of life I quickly followed a lot of interesting women who
| posted great content: women who were activists, historians,
| academics, homemakers and so on. That really was why I stuck
| around for so long on Twitter despite how awful the site is,
| and why I think any serious contender has to appeal to the
| normies, so to speak.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yes, I think is a need for some platform that provides
| blog+microblog on your domain, and that automatically forwards
| the content to social platforms so that you get the best of
| both worlds:
|
| 1 - owning your blog is too big of a barrier of entry, there is
| a need for a platform: look at the success at medium for tech
| writers, despite that we hate it.
|
| 2 - we need the return of the domain name based blog. This
| helps with independence, censorship, and the like. You can
| always move from the platform, and the platform can claim they
| can't censor you since it's your domain, so DMCA should be sent
| to you directly.
|
| 3 - this platform should do blog + microblog. You don't always
| have something long to say, announcement, though and quick tips
| are very well suited to tweets. But only this format leads to
| quality deficiency. Being able to write a big article easily is
| equally important.
|
| 4 - forwarding all posts to your social networks is essential.
| Yes, your blog should be the original source (so you get ref,
| credit, independence and not the duplicate content ban from
| google). But the discovery problem cannot be solved easily, and
| those networks already exist.
|
| EDIT: unrelated, but I love phone calls. I mean, I hate doing
| them, but I love having the ability to do them. It's a
| universal reliable tech, it works in the country side, it works
| when the wifi is down, it works well in the car, and I don't
| have to have the app du jour installed or insist that the other
| party does.
| tablespoonsruby wrote:
| blog+microblog on your domain, and that automatically
| forwards the content to social platforms
|
| Micro.blog does this!
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Not really, it does not provide a blog feature, only a
| bridge.
| tablespoonsruby wrote:
| It absolutely does provide a personal blog, you just have
| to pay $5/month.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I missed that, their offer tamk about wordpress.
| veidr wrote:
| I do think the ability to do phone calls is waning, though.
|
| I've made 4 phone calls this year: to a buddy, to my wife, to
| an old friend, and to my fax/voicemail provider (JConnect)
| which decided to terminate voicemail service on the phone
| number I've used since the 1990s. (So I may be part of the
| problem I am describing -- that number didn't ring any
| device, it only accepted voice messages and faxes, which it
| forwarded to me via email.)
|
| Of those 4 phone 2021 phone calls:
|
| 1.) My buddy no longer has voicemail on his phone, and a
| recording just told me he was not available and to try again
| later. (Head kinda exploded.)
|
| 2.) My wife also no longer has voicemail! How tf did that
| happen? No idea but it was 2 months after the above call so I
| was less surprised.
|
| 3.) My old friend is old-school (hence the phone call), and
| still does have voicemail -- but it was full. I assume
| because he never checks it.
|
| 4.) JConnect support's touch-tone B.S. support system did
| disconnect me a couple of times, requiring that I call them
| back... but it did eventually connect me to a support rep who
| helped me cancel my account. But: only because they are the
| kind of asshole company that engages in the common-but-
| should-be-illegal practice of letting you sign up on the web
| but only cancel by phone, as a method of retaining
| "customers" who no longer want their product.
|
| So n=1 sample, might not be typical, etc. but I suspect the
| phone is getting less universal and less reliable over time.
| orndorffgrant wrote:
| You should tell your old school friend that their voicemail
| is full. At least with my carrier, I can only have like ~20
| voicemails sitting around. I listen to every voicemail I
| get but my voicemail inbox filled up and I didn't realize
| it was full for years (there was no notification or
| anything). To make space I had to actively go delete
| voicemails. Of course, deleting them just sent them to a
| "deleted" folder, which I had to go clear as well.
| buildsjets wrote:
| You should realize that some people intentionally allow
| or cause their voicemail to fill so that callers can't
| leave additional messages.
|
| I certainly do. I have no intention of EVER checking my
| voicemail, so why would I want to leave callers with a
| false impression that their message will be heard?
| handrous wrote:
| Spam's ruined phone calls, like it ruined email. No
| coincidence those are the two worst ways to reach me.
| Email's almost exclusively for receiving messages _that I
| 'm expecting_ from machines, now (password reset, order
| confirmation, whatever). It's not even any good for
| unexpected notices from machines, let alone communication
| with humans. Sure, I could migrate to another address and
| it'd be more usable for a while, or I could spend a
| Saturday crafting rules to fix my inbox, but why bother?
| 99% of what I care about comes in via WhatsApp or (less
| often) text.
|
| [EDIT] Except for work. My work email is still sorta
| useful. But in part that's because it's much newer. It's
| also getting more and more junked up with garbage, without
| active management and rule-setting.
| distances wrote:
| I agree that phone calls are waning, but I don't personally
| see the connection to voice mails. I never liked the
| concept so I've never left a voice mail, nor have I ever
| enabled it for myself. In my opinion voice calls can only
| get better if answering machines and voice mails die out.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Hmm, how do you deal with unknown numbers ?
|
| I never answer those on the first go - only if they left
| a voicemail or a text message...
| distances wrote:
| I live in Germany and for whatever reason I have
| literally never received a spam call here. I can go
| months without receiving a single call these days. I'm
| not exactly sure if spam calls are not a thing here or if
| I've just been lucky. But yeah I see how that can lead to
| different preferences when it comes to voice mail.
| saurik wrote:
| Is there anything that is getting _more_ universal
| /reliable? (God it isn't Twitter, is it? I hope not.)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Those people are probably all accessible through some
| messaging app. But "universal" and "reliable" aren't the
| correct names for that.
|
| Twitter is getting more and more universal, but reliable
| does not apply.
|
| I guess no, we are living through a breaking of
| communications.
| pixelgeek wrote:
| > forwarding all posts to your social networks is essential.
|
| I've been talking to businesses for years about this same
| thing. Using a blog as a way to broadcast to social media but
| keep the blog/site as the main source of information for your
| audience.
|
| And it never works because it is far too simple to just use
| social media directly and even if you don't, your audience
| still comments on social media and so your discussion remains
| there.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| > your audience still comments on social media and so your
| discussion remains there.
|
| Discussion should remain on social media. This avoids the
| problems of moderation and spam that plagued blogs.
|
| > it is far too simple to just use social media directly
|
| Yes to succeed the blog platform should be super easy to
| setup and to link.
|
| There are benefits that can then attract people:
|
| - if you have several social accounts, on the same or
| different platforms, then having a centralized way of
| publishing on all of them is a nice perk
|
| - social media platform impose a lot of rules, but on your
| blog, you can do whatever you want. So for problematic
| content, you can tease on social networks, and bring people
| on your blog for the real uncensored thing.
|
| - the source of truth that the blog would be is a fine
| touch in this era of fake news
|
| - you can add paid sections to the blog and make money
| directly with your biggest fans
| pixelgeek wrote:
| I got distracted by all of the other great comments on
| this thread and made a mess of my point.
|
| What I was trying to say is that I think that ultimately
| social media will eat your traffic and blog. I think that
| the peril of using social media to promote your own
| content is that you will ultimately depend on social
| media.
|
| I think that the best route to take is to find a way to
| promote your content without it.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| It's possible, but the alternative is to depend on google
| for traffic, which is an abusive relationship at this
| point.
|
| At least if you have are on several platform, there are
| multiple entre points for your content. And your blog
| would allow you to offer things that the platform don't,
| like code snippets, easy media download, or something
| more innovative.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > but on your blog, you can do whatever you want
|
| Not if it's on a platform - see part 2 of GP's ramblings.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| With your own domain name and branding, maybe we can play
| a different game provided the platform is willing to
| forward complaints to the user and step back.
|
| After all, I'm responsible for my vps content, not my
| hosting. What's the difference ?
| SPBS wrote:
| > look at the success at medium for tech writers
|
| I feel like medium doesn't even care about tech writers --
| don't people still have to host github gists for code
| snippets? The biggest middle finger to tech bloggers, and yet
| they keep flocking to the platform.
| nabla9 wrote:
| (Notice how HN content has huge number of links to blogs).
|
| Best thing about blogs at the beginning was that they were not
| mainstream. They were specialized and interesting.
|
| When they were mainstream in the internet only short period
| between internet becoming mainstream and social networks and
| platforms gaining popularity.
|
| Today blogs are back in the golden age of not being mainstream.
| It's easier to find quality content by following them and their
| links to other blogs.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Blogs were never mainstream _when_ they were a healthy
| ecosystem. Before search engines, the only real way to find new
| blogs was to follow links from other blogs -- either people
| talking near each other, or webrings, or whatever. This was
| swell, and served as essentially a perfect defense against
| outside abuse. If we 'd kept that model then we wouldn't really
| have trouble with spammers and scammers.
|
| Google downloaded all that curation effort and then claimed we
| didn't have to do it anymore, and that we just need to "be
| indexed", but that opens the door for spammers and scammers,
| and there's no fix for it. Without curation, blogs are no
| better than strangers on a street corner.
|
| I think the only way to restore the health of the blog
| ecosystem is to go back to webrings, except with an RSS
| accumulator added^, so that we can follow everyone in a webring
| and report abuse to the webring curators.
|
| ^ OPML subscriptions would be a workable model, except that
| many feed readers only support "import OPML one-time", not
| "poll and refresh".
|
| EDIT: It isn't sufficient to implement RSS or OPML support. The
| missing piece is webrings that curate their membership lists,
| with a human sanity limit of 25 or 50 sites per webring. That
| was a real limit back in the day, but it's still worth keeping
| to keep humans honest. You can't _replace_ this effort with
| technology, but you can _support_ it. We just choose not to,
| because search is lazy and somewhat effective, and so blogs
| suffer.
| conductr wrote:
| I'd agree but from a different perspective. I never used RSS
| and didn't care about following any particular blogger.
| However, blogs were a constant top hits for successfully
| getting answers/info on things I was searching for. I would see
| the same blog as my search on a topic expanded. Eg, I recall
| learning rails back around v0.7 and there was not many docs
| around and only a few bloggers. I didn't care about the rest of
| their blogs, but when I saw theirblog.com in my search results,
| I knew they had authority on the matter.
|
| The platform effect means there's just less quality content and
| it's more difficult to surface.
| stared wrote:
| Setting a blog is easier than ever: Medium has a close to zero
| barrier of entry. With all its criticism here, it helped many
| people start blogging in the first place.
|
| I don't know if bloggers turned to Twitter, TikTok, and similar
| goldfish attention span media. (Maybe. I don't have data.)
|
| I think it is more likely that high-quality blog posts drown in
| the sea of tweets. More people do the latter, and the cost of
| doing a single one is orders of magnitude lower than writing
| even an average-quality blog post.
| diskzero wrote:
| I agree with the ease of use, but I won't author or read
| Medium articles anymore. I am sure Medium feels that it is
| providing a valuable service by providing a platform for
| authors to monetize their content. I would prefer to pay an
| author directly and have no desire to support a service that
| sits between me and the content provider.
|
| I realize I am being utopian, but providing a facility like
| Medium that uses open standards, allows bloggers to blog and
| doesn't skim profits should be a public service.
| capybara_2020 wrote:
| There are more blogs out there today. But with a focus on SEO
| the quality of blogs has dropped.
|
| To meet some arbitrary SEO goal like, longer articles do better
| we have people filling in the top 1/3 with unneeded filler.
| Then we have companies trying to plug their product in a "10
| best tools for X" article. Even if their product is crap for
| that feature, along with the content mills, the quality has
| dropped.
| ypcx wrote:
| Yep, "SEO" killed the internet. As have "Accept Cookies"
| prompts, "Do you want notifications" prompts, "Subscribe to
| our newsletter" prompts and "Why are you leaving our page"
| prompts. Content farms, click-bot-like farms, fake-review
| farms. The free internet is dead.
| adventured wrote:
| Blogs today are just being hosted on Substack instead of Movable
| Type installations (circa the early 2000s) or Blogger and
| similar. The platforms play a game of never ending musical
| chairs, the winners change, the game doesn't stop.
|
| It makes sense blogging would see an integration move, that
| blends up some social media, email list, blogging, etc activities
| (social media, images/video/sound, email lists, text
| blogging/writing, pick a few and blend them). It's extremely
| obnoxious for the average person to attempt to do all of those
| things separately.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Bring back the readers that read blogs and pay for them (through
| ads) and there will be blogs again.
| pixelgeek wrote:
| The audience quite simply isn't there any more. And I think ads
| are part of the problem. You get into that system and the next
| thing you know you are plotting out SEO strategies.
|
| I think that the micro-payment systems that were discussed ages
| ago would be a solution but the investment money went
| elsewhere.
| dSebastien wrote:
| Over the years, I collected hundreds of RSS feeds. It all started
| with Google Reader, then moved all around the map. I remember
| Feedburner, tt-rss, ... Finally I stuck with Feedly.
|
| Like many others, I hoarded feeds and consumed articles at
| random. I enjoyed using StumbleUpon to discover new sites on the
| Web, it was fun and I miss that vibe.
|
| I used to explore my feeds every single day. I would pick 5-10
| articles, print them out at work (oops) and read those during my
| train commutes. I learned a ton that way.
|
| At some point I hit Feedly's free tier upper limit (800 or 1K
| feeds?) and stopped caring. Over time, I completely stopped
| checking the feeds and just let it go. I migrated over to Twitter
| and started following people rather than blogs; which has
| interesting benefits compared to just looking at articles through
| a feed reader: social interaction!
|
| As the flood of content keeps getting worse, I feel like it's
| harder and harder to find the interesting content, which is
| drowned by the long tail. I feel like we need better means to
| curate content collaboratively (a delicious 2.0? :p). Wonder what
| exists out there that isn't focused on a specific niche.
| cdnsteve wrote:
| Blogs should not be reliant by search engines, we need a better
| way to build trusted networks between content authors where tech
| Giants are not required.
| mattmcknight wrote:
| "But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago"
|
| Yet I still use it?
| jaimefjorge wrote:
| It seems to me that the problem described is less one of
| discoverability and more one of lack of content. Regardless, this
| gave me the idea that it would be generally interesting to have
| authenticity unbundled from Google. If you could create a subset
| of Google with the honest, transparent, human
| blogs/posts/websites, etc then you could search from content from
| those sites. It could be less news aggregator and more search
| engine untainted by money or robots. I'm thinking opt-in domains,
| with a small community selecting the domains/blogs. I'm sure this
| is not new. But I surely earn for a more authentic internet.
| nabla9 wrote:
| They never went away. There are more of them and they are better
| than before.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Can we maybe have a self-promotion thread? I'm at asemic-
| horizon.com
| TOGoS wrote:
| Sure, why not.
|
| Rarely updated, but I write about gridbeam and software at
| http://www.nuke24.net/plog/. If you like reading about
| people's dreams, on the other hand,
| http://www.nuke24.net/dlog/
| makach wrote:
| Blogs are great, and I still read a lot of blogs. Quite a few of
| them I learn about from this site.
|
| But the gold is really in the commment section. There is so much
| _quality_ content and so much insight that I am not worried about
| the development of the internet. It is still a great place to be.
| asicsp wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23205588 ( _May 16, 2020,
| 614 comments_ )
| SPBS wrote:
| The top comment:
|
| > You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!
|
| > You may write a few more posts, but it's always the same
| story. A lot of work goes in, but not much comes out.
|
| I never understood this sentiment. Who cares if no one is
| reading? You blog because you have something to express on the
| internet, not because you're seeking attention from others.
| Content creation for the sole purpose of views is _incredibly_
| superficial.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I do think there's a middle road. I do indeed think it's
| incredibly toxic to write for the reactions, but at the same
| time, it's extremely lonely to find your only readers are the
| bots that probe for compromised wordpress installs.
|
| It's great to have a community of sorts. I've found that in
| gemini space, there's a small number of active bloggers that
| run in the same circles and occasionally make replies on each
| posts they feel interesting (because almost virtually all
| pages are static, almost no comment fields).
|
| It's not so much about the attention as it is about the sense
| of community and belonging.
| dvdkon wrote:
| The goal might not be to maximise "views", but if nobody
| reads it, why bother? No need to be popular by whatever
| metrics, but with no readers you might just not publish at
| all. (Unless you see writing itself as valuable in itself.)
| krapp wrote:
| The vast majority of blogs during the "golden age" of
| blogging went almost entirely, if not entirely, unread. In
| hindsight, I don't know why people bothered, but they did.
| I blogged on my own domain for years and I don't think
| anyone read any of it, but I still enjoyed it.
|
| Of course a lot of blogs were hosted on services like
| Blogger or Livejournal (which I also had,) and being able
| to create networks and friend/interest groups definitely
| increased visibility, but even then most things went unread
| and uncommented on.
| foxfluff wrote:
| Maybe views are not the _sole purpose_ , but isn't it a bit
| depressing to think that no-one ever reads or cares about
| what you put up? Surely you want someone to witness that
| expression and perhaps even engage with it.
| fjfaase wrote:
| I totally agree. I have been writing on the internet since
| 1995 and I do not care about the number of visitors, because
| I primarily write due my urge to write and record my life.
| Most of what I write is just trivia about what I did. It
| primarily serves as my memory and it is interesting to look
| back on what I did a few years ago.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| my kids should "dad, look at me" before they do anything. the
| desire for external validation runs deep. If no-one hears a
| tree falling, does it make a sound?
| user-the-name wrote:
| Why would you write, if not for other people? Unless you are
| just taking notes, that is the entire point of writing: To
| present your thoughts or knowledge to other people.
| notJim wrote:
| Aren't blogs just called substacks now?
| EGreg wrote:
| Well, you're in luck. Wordpress powers 42% of the Web!
|
| I'm sure much of that is blogs, right?
| pixelgeek wrote:
| I actually wrote about something similar to this a while ago on
| my own blog
|
| https://lolbat.github.io/zacblog/post/the-peril-of-social-me...
|
| (Ignore the original clickbaity headline)
|
| The TLDR for those that don't want to read it is that the blogs
| that are out there writing technical content have to compete with
| a lot of content farms and SEO farms and so they have to resort
| to the same tactics to show up in search results.
| billiam wrote:
| Like every service in the history the Internet, blogs were great
| for the first few years, then got ruined by the uncontrolled
| nature of the medium, which is why we liked the Internet in the
| first place. Yes, I know, nothing new and lovely is being
| invented now, it was all great before, but honestly is it worth
| pining for a web page that took five minutes to read and was
| discovered by link trees rather than a tweet you read in 5
| seconds that is discovered for you by a crappy algorithm?
| athenot wrote:
| The way I see it, it's a bit like photography, which started as
| an expensive hobby, then got more and more mainstream with film
| processing shops all over the place. Then digital photography
| entered, first as low quality then with rivaling quality. Anybody
| who wants can now take high quality pictures, and almost everyone
| will occasionally produce a stunning photo; yet not everyone is a
| photographer. And that's ok.
|
| As the internet grew, blogging became a popular format to write
| long form and publish it. There was a golden window where search
| was still new and hadn't yet been gamified, and before the
| platforms providing what _veidr_ here called quick dopamine
| hits[1].
|
| Seeing blogging expand and at the same time be instantly
| searchable was great... but didn't last.
|
| Eventually a whole group of users wanted the benefits of exposure
| of their thoughts & content, without the hassle of writing long
| form. And I would say, for those users, social media is indeed
| the perfect medium. Those who _do_ write in long form can still
| do so, it 's just that discoverability has somewhat taken a step
| back.
|
| I contend that it's not a huge deal, as a long form fosters a
| more thoughtful pace instead of rewarding instant gratification.
| Links between blogs do help with discoverability, it just that
| it's an organic process that takes time. Of course, the upside is
| once a blog is discovered, one can easily go back and read the
| previous articles.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592479
| raspyberr wrote:
| Like everyone else responding, I think there's so so many blogs
| and personal sites around. Once you start looking and actually
| exploring the internet you'll find plenty. There's been a bit of
| resurgency with "indie web", digital gardens, etc. If anything
| there's probably more blogs now than there were before.
| krapp wrote:
| > If anything there's probably more blogs now than there were
| before
|
| There's more _everything_ than there was before. Despite
| popular opinion, the rest of the web didn 't shrivel up and die
| when Twitter, Facebook and Youtube got popular.
| agent008t wrote:
| Do you have any evidence for that? The message boards/blogs
| that I frequented a decade ago are all either gone or are a
| lot less active than they were before, and certainly have a
| lot fewer users. So it's not just activity per user that has
| gone way down, but the number of users as well.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Discord killed off a lot of forums that survived Reddit.
| This is especially true for forums where chat threads were
| the most active.
| Giorgi wrote:
| One should keep in mind that explosion of blogs came because of
| the adsense, nowadays getting into adsense is extremely difficult
| and other monetization options do not make sense. Bloggers need
| motivation.
| susam wrote:
| Well, blogs are still very much there. I began blogging in 2006
| and I still continue to write blog posts, mostly to take notes,
| share my thoughts, etc. I still follow my favourite bloggers via
| RSS feeds. I don't think the culture of blogging ever went away.
| The blogosphere along with its tag clouds are still very much
| there.
|
| I think what has changed in the last two decades or so is that a
| lot of new users have come on the Internet and this new
| generation of users spend most of their time in walled gardens
| thereby making the bloggers look like a small minority.
| vlkr wrote:
| I think many (personal) blogs were killed by social media. You
| don't blog about your last weekend anymore, you just post some
| pictures on instagram or in your whatsapp groups.
| giansegato wrote:
| Which means - whether we like it or no - that social media
| were and are superior products when it comes to this specific
| use case, otherwise people won't be using it.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| What do you mean by "superior product"?
| piaste wrote:
| They fulfill the same desire with less effort.
|
| Most people didn't blog in order to produce great art or
| advance human knowledge. Those who did, they tend to
| still blog.
|
| But most regular Joe bloggers just wanted to share ideas
| or experiences with other people, connect with them, and
| hear _their_ ideas and experiences. Writing a 500-word
| blog post was just the means to start a chat in the
| comments section. For them, Facebook or Twitter do it
| better.
|
| I remember when Tumblr started (it didn't have a specific
| culture yet). Some of my blogging friends opened a Tumblr
| just to share links and pictures, and kept to WordPress
| for long-form posts. Eventually, they quickly started
| spending more times in link exchanging and commenting on
| Tumblr than on WP.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Inferior products prevail all the time. The free market is
| far from perfect. Especially when one product exploits
| negative externalities.
| giansegato wrote:
| I don't think our average Carl will use a blog instead of
| Instagram to share his thoughts.
|
| Yes, inferior products prevail from time to time,
| especially when those negative externalities you mention
| help consolidate a dominant position.
|
| But social networks do not charge money. People are free
| to open as many blogs as they want. If they didn't when
| they were raging in the early 2000s there must a reason.
|
| Reality is complex, especially human motivations. But to
| argue that blogs are a superior for the mainstream public
| to share themselves to an audience is a bit
| intellectually unfair.
|
| Like... distribution?
| tharne wrote:
| > Inferior products prevail all the time. The free market
| is far from perfect. Especially when one product exploits
| negative externalities.
|
| Exhibit A being the QWERTY keyboard most of us are typing
| on right now.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| Only if you think within the structures of a particular
| ideology based on the notions that people are rational
| actors and that the market produces the most effective
| solutions for any given use case.
| kajaktum wrote:
| Killed or just appear pale in comparison? How many traffics
| were there for blogs in before 2010? Its not like people
| suddenly don't have anything interesting to share.
| [deleted]
| bserge wrote:
| You also post a 2500 word article on Twitter, apparently.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Some strategies to find good blogs that have worked for me:
|
| * Starting with university departmental websites
|
| * Starting from records of "shop talk" industry conferences (e.g.
| Practice & GDC for games, as opposed to "fan service" cons like
| PAX)
|
| * Looking up the people who worked on some games / products I
| really like (e.g. found Michael Brough's blog this way)
|
| * Exploring GitHub and similar for interesting repos and looking
| up their main contributors (an interesting side observation
| you'll also end up making if you do this is how many of the best
| projects are essentially done by one person - i.e., 85%+ of the
| commits are theirs and they are clearly the main/sole driving
| force. Not really a surprise but cool to see nonetheless)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Ah, the irony of this being itself a rambling blogpost ending on
| the front page of HN...
| SMAAART wrote:
| Evolution of offline information networks:
|
| Printing press -> Radio -> Television
|
| Evolution of online information networks:
|
| Blogs -> Podcasts -> Videos
|
| What is interesting is that:
|
| 1. Podcasts > Videos since they can be consumed in more places
| than Videos
|
| 2. People love and consume long forms podcasts (>1 hour)
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| The issue with podcast--which I absolutely love--is one of
| discoverability and distribution.
|
| Blogs can be easily indexable and searchable while podcasts are
| definitely not.
|
| Also, the vast majority of podcasts rely on 3rd party services
| to distribute their content on podcast apps.
|
| Which makes the entire infrastructure a lot more fragile than a
| simple self hosted blog IMO.
|
| They're still an awesome medium though, especially for long
| conversations.
| TOGoS wrote:
| Don't know why sibling is dead; perfectly good points about
| discoverability of podcasts. To which I reply: I have had
| success discovering podcasts when they had transcriptions on
| the page. Google for some words, hit upon page, say "I can't
| read all this now but hey there's a link to audio", download
| the entire series, transcode to 16kbps Opus using ffmpeg, put
| it on my phone, listen in the car.
|
| (The two examples I have in mind are
| https://www.psymposia.com/podcasts/plusthree/ and
| https://www.organism.earth/library/document/conversations-
| on..., which would suggest that posting transcriptions with
| your audio is something that occurs to people after consuming a
| certain quantity of mushrooms, or maybe it's just that the
| stuff those people tend to say happens to match stuff I'm
| googling for. Something something "hierarchical power
| structures".)
| d3vmax wrote:
| There used to be a blog search which listed the top 100 blogs, it
| was called technorati. The current version is not a blog search.
| I used to have a blog that taught people how to create their msn
| spaces and add features to it. It used to be No. 5. I slowly
| stopped blogging around 2008. Most people moved onto SN for
| casual posting as the barrier to maintain is low. Serious
| bloggers are still there.
| jppope wrote:
| For those of you looking for blogs you can find new ones here:
| https://refined.blog
| fleddr wrote:
| Blogging will not return to its former glory when you think it's
| a blogging platform problem. It has absolutely nothing to do with
| the product.
|
| What happened is mobile. People consume the vast majority of
| digital content via their phone, therefore short form content
| wins. Tweets and 5 second videos, not lectures. Besides the
| content being short form, "engagement content" wins. Say
| something stupid, controversial, rude...you win. You'll get seen.
| Your reasonable and balanced take....crickets.
|
| The other thing that happened is that the internet got a lot more
| crowded. Which basically means that everything gets gamed. All
| eye balls on 0.001% of content and no eye balls on 99.999% of
| other content creators.
|
| Even in what little remains of blogging, everything is gamed.
| Have a look at blogging platform Medium. Every single category
| and topic is spammed with low effort garbage, burying genuine and
| more serious authors. The genuine reader can no longer find their
| jewels, and the genuine author considers it all pointless now.
|
| No blogging platform can fix any of the above problems.
| jefftk wrote:
| This post has several misconceptions and mistakes:
|
| _Never any locking them out because you noticed suspicious
| activity or anything bogus like that and making them provide
| personal details. That is abuse of trust and abuse of people_
|
| This misses why companies do this: to prevent account hijacking.
| It sucks to be locked out of your account, but it also sucks for
| someone to steal it. Various companies have made mistakes here,
| and some amount of false positives will happen with any detection
| system, but going all the way to "do not protect accounts" is not
| going to give a better experience for users on balance.
|
| _no one is writing them because there 's no platform for them_
|
| Why not https://wordpress.com, or one of the many sites that
| hosts WordPress?
|
| _Blogger was shut down by Google years ago_
|
| Blogger is still running: https://blogger.com
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service)
|
| _Nowadays people won 't share content simply because they don't
| trust the internet to share content to it. You have to provide
| for them to be anonymous and protected forever, which means
| letting people create accounts easily with just an email or
| something similar ... They have to be able to blog without
| thinking someone is going to bring it up and file it away forever
| and maybe they won't get a job because of it, or their tyrannical
| government will think they're an agitator and attack them or an
| adversary will use it for selective characger defamation
| sometime._
|
| This just isn't something that a blogging platform is going to be
| able to promise its users. Defending against countries is really
| hard, especially when your users are doing things that are
| (wrongly) against the law in those countries.
| solarengineer wrote:
| How do you all discover blogs?
|
| I used to discover blogs via the Yahoo Directory, blog rolls
| (where we mention others' blogs as external links to follow up),
| Live Journal's listing, and cross-referencing of blog posts.
| Google search used to surface blog posts too.
|
| Now it's all on Medium - where I don't grudge those who want
| reliable hosting+discoverability and want to get paid for
| content, and where Medium charges for this. But I dislike that
| the content is "locked up" at Medium. I don't quite know how to
| explain this dislike, and I welcome any points of view that might
| help make this dislike go away.
| chenmike wrote:
| I don't think you have to justify or challenge your dislike for
| Medium. It's pretty reader-hostile. I get why authors write on
| it but I personally click away every time I get hit with the
| paywall.
| quakkels2 wrote:
| I like to start with a blog I already know and like, and then I
| use a tool I built to spider the RSS feed to find links to
| sites that also have RSS feeds. I figure that if I find a blog
| interesting, they'll probably link to other blogs that I'll
| find interesting. The tool is hosted on heroku:
| https://rdengine.herokuapp.com/ I give a rationale for it here:
| https://quakkels.com/posts/rss-is-wonderful/
| Tomte wrote:
| From other blogs. People link to other blogs all the time, and
| every few weeks I find a gem this way.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| typically in the comments sections of other blogs, when someone
| links them. Slatestarcodex, Ecosophia, and Charles Eisenstein
| are my current favourites.
| nxpnsv wrote:
| I have discovered many blogs reading HN...
| s_dev wrote:
| Yeah -- off the top of my head:
|
| danluu.com, plover.com, ciechanow.ski, essays by pg and many
| others have very high quality writing and are insightful.
|
| I don't accept there is a shortage of blogs.
| ant6n wrote:
| there's a shortage of blog reading, meaning theres less of
| an incentive to write.
| flybrand wrote:
| I've got one topic that gets a lot of referral traffic, and
| then people follow the other more rambling personal
| stories. Twitter and YouTube drive a lot of traffic too.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I had the same experience. Have a few very popular posts
| that rank quite high even on Google (with absolutely no
| SEO bullshit done to them) but they represent maybe 5% of
| what I wrote about.
|
| People find me through those posts and end up sticky
| around for the more personal/rambly stuff.
| azhenley wrote:
| I find blogs by periodically asking my friends for suggestions.
| I recently made my list of favorites:
|
| https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/favblogs.html
| JacksonGariety wrote:
| Check out my blog: https://hegelsbagels.net/
| Lex-2008 wrote:
| probably worth mentioning this HN thread: "Ask HN: Favorite
| Blogs by Individuals?" with 273 comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302195
| xwdv wrote:
| I'm wondering if bringing back an ancient technology, _Web Rings_
| , would solve this problem of blog discoverability a bit.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Just like last time : I'm pretty happy with the many _high
| quality_ blogs we have these days.
| specialist wrote:
| Just gimme a RSS news reader UI for my family, friends, and
| fellow geeks I follow.
|
| Call it blogs, myspace, friend feeds, listservs, whatever.
|
| Banning newsfeeds (algorithmic outrage machine) would probably do
| it. Moots most of the gamification and engagement toxicity.
|
| Then if virality remains an issue, nerf the gamification and
| engagement features. Retweets, shares, likes, and other bullshit.
| chovybizzass wrote:
| no way man, webrings
| hownottowrite wrote:
| Google doesn't get enough credit for destroying the blogging
| ecosystem. It was a masterful stroke of evil on many levels.
| jamesvandyne wrote:
| Blogs like the author is looking for still exist (I write one at
| https://jamesvandyne.com) and there's heaps more on
| https://micro.blog.
|
| Blogs that aren't SEO fluff to get adsense money just don't
| appear in the search results. Discovery is the real issue.
| Finding these blogs independently or outside is nigh impossible.
|
| I've been thinking it might be fun to make a GeoCities-esque
| neighborhood directory site that you could add your blog to help
| with discovery. But could you (I) change my habits to stumble
| upon sites in the neighborhoods instead of opening HN/Twitter?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I have written a few thousand blog articles in the last 25 years,
| but that flow has gone to zero since what writing time I have has
| gone to writing books. I miss blogging but there is only so much
| time in life and deciding what not to do is important.
| butterisgood wrote:
| I kind of miss the days when people had servers and ".plan" and
| ".project" files that folks could read via finger servers.
|
| We used them in college, but I guess folks would need shell
| accounts on unix systems to do that today?
|
| I miss lightweight internet stuff. Maybe gemini will bring some
| of that back?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
| Matthias1 wrote:
| I know Gemini has encouraged me to start a blog.
|
| Of course it's possible to blog over HTTP. (I mirror my gemlog
| to my website.) But it's so much more enjoyable to write and
| browse in an ecosystem that's designed for it.
| koeng wrote:
| How do you mirror the gemlog to HTTP? I've found a lot of
| methods for like active proxies, but I'd really like
| something that could create a static site from my gem text
| files.
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| Medium, in an attempt to monetise blogging and give financial
| incentives to writing with paywalling, has absolutely damaged my
| perception of blogging. It was the perfect platform, and so nice
| to find interesting blogs and articles that only wanted to share
| information and stories.
|
| But then it started eating away the blog platform space, and then
| took all that hostage with paywalls. There's not that many
| companies I really dislike, but Medium is starting to be up there
| in the list.
| pixelgeek wrote:
| I think the blog space was dead prior to Medium showing up.
| Medium seemed to be a way to try to get the better writers
| still out there into a single space. Then they realised they
| had to pay all those folks and killed the site with their
| paywall.
| [deleted]
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| The second part is about trying to make a platform that isn't a
| platform. Platforms are bad ! Don't use them !
|
| (Yes, I know about Substack - I guess it would be more accurate
| to say that platform inevitably get bad over time, as the public
| companies that create and/or buy them are driven by short-term
| profit first and foremost.)
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| I consume most of my techy stuff here on Hacker News, and
| occasionally I come across a blog I like, and so subscribe to it
| using an RSS reader browser extension.
|
| Here are the blogs I'm currently following (one of them is mine):
| <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <opml version="1.0">
| <head> <title>Feed Subscriptions</title> </head>
| <body> <outline text="wingolog" title="wingolog"
| type="rss" xmlUrl="http://wingolog.org//feed"
| htmlUrl="https://wingolog.org/"/> <outline text="A
| Programming Blog" title="A Programming Blog" type="rss"
| xmlUrl="https://www.davidgoffredo.com/feed"/>
| <outline text="Probably Dance" title="Probably Dance" type="rss"
| xmlUrl="https://probablydance.com/feed"
| htmlUrl="https://probablydance.com"/> <outline
| text="Edward Snowden" title="Continuing Ed &#8212; with
| Edward Snowden" type="rss"
| xmlUrl="https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/feed"
| htmlUrl="https://edwardsnowden.substack.com"/>
| <outline text="Beyond Loom Blog" title="Beyond Loom Blog"
| type="rss"
| xmlUrl="https://beyondloom.com/blog/rss.xml"
| htmlUrl="http://beyondloom.com/blog/index.html"/>
| <outline text="apenwarr" title="apenwarr" type="rss"
| xmlUrl="https://apenwarr.ca/log/rss.php"
| htmlUrl="https://apenwarr.ca/log/"/> <outline
| text="Writing - rachelbythebay" title="Writing - rachelbythebay"
| type="rss"
| xmlUrl="https://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml"/> </body>
| </opml>
| shoto_io wrote:
| Content marketing, medium and twitter crushed blogging.
|
| The first two are about the reputation of blogging and the third
| about lower levels of entry for most people. Sad but true.
| rchaud wrote:
| Medium and Twitter siloed blogs into a 'recommended for you'
| type of delivery medium. Blogger was agnostic in that regard,
| it only showed your content, and the blogroll was set by the
| user.
| wolpoli wrote:
| > Now it says there are 40,000 but you only get 10 or 20 pages of
| results you can get to, all basically corporate and lame.
|
| This is a very serious issue with search engines today. Search
| engines falsely claim millions of matches, and not only does it
| do nothing to help us narrow down the millions by grouping or
| suggest additional keywords, but we can't actually get to the
| results. Do these results even exist? Are search engines
| basically precomputing results for keywords and it can't go
| outside of them anymore?
| lincolnq wrote:
| In the last few months, for some reason, my (completely
| unmaintained) LinkedIn has started to top search results for my
| name -- over my regularly updated personal website and blog (at
| lincolnquirk.com) when you search for my name on Google. The same
| has happened with a friend of mine whose blog is far more popular
| than mine. It's incredibly frustrating.
| criddell wrote:
| Why do you think that is? I'm thinking LinkedIn may be
| considered more authoritative or trustworthy than a personal
| blog. How is google to know that your blog is actually your
| blog?
|
| I've recently noticed more people writing on LinkedIn (which
| might just be my impression and not true) and I wonder if
| that's part of the reason?
| pixelgeek wrote:
| I think that is part of a plan by LinkedIn to try to be more
| of a social platform
| paulpauper wrote:
| Substack is the new blog. The problem most bloggers face is no
| traffic and readers. The failure rate is so high, I can
| understand why the medium overall has declined in popularity. I
| think videos and podcasts are easier to get traction and there is
| more money.
| tinyprojects wrote:
| I've built a service that lets you create a micro-blog from a
| paper journal: https://paperwebsite.com/
|
| It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on
| the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the
| "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about.
|
| Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in -
| the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still
| love them though.
|
| Here's my blog if you're interested:
| https://daily.tinyprojects.dev/
| slightknack wrote:
| I vote that we add our blogs / other good blogs we have come
| across as children on this comment. I'll start, here's mine:
|
| - https://slightknack.dev/blog
|
| Here are some others:
|
| - https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com
|
| - https://www.gwern.net/index
|
| - https://danluu.com
|
| - https://tonsky.me/
|
| - https://lemire.me/blog/
|
| - https://waitbutwhy.com/
|
| - https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/
|
| - https://blog.codinghorror.com/
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I collect links to small and notable websites here. It's like
| 90% blogs:
|
| https://memex.marginalia.nu/links/bookmarks.gmi
|
| I think we've gotten curiously bad at linking to other
| websites in the last 20 years. It's really bad for
| discoverability. I don't know why it is, it's like everyone
| goes "oh, i've got a precious visitor at last, better not
| link anywhere so they'll stick around forever!"
|
| I think if my website contains interesting links, it makes
| people more likely to come back later, because they associate
| it with good feelings of discovery, and not bad feelings of
| being trapped.
| [deleted]
| nickjj wrote:
| I have one at: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/
|
| I've been at it for over 6 years and there's around 350
| posts. It's a mixture of written blog posts and YouTube
| videos. The general focus is on building and deploying web
| applications as well as dev environment tweaks. Basically
| everything I encounter as a developer.
| asicsp wrote:
| Here's mine: https://learnbyexample.github.io/ (mostly about
| regex and cli one-liners)
|
| Here's some lists of blogs (mostly programming oriented):
|
| * https://jvns.ca/blogroll/
|
| * https://blogsurf.io/blogs
| criddell wrote:
| I think https://micro.blog is worth checking out as well.
| Manton Reece has done some really great work trying to
| support the indie web.
| scary-size wrote:
| Here are mine:
|
| - https://franz.hamburg
|
| - https://www.project-daily.com
|
| Some blogs I follow via RSS (using the awesome NetNewsWire
| app):
|
| - https://brendangregg.com
|
| - https://brandur.org/
|
| - https://ferd.ca/
| Digit-Al wrote:
| I'll bite and submit mine. Las year, during lockdown, I read
| the Rolling Stone 100 greatest metal albums list. As I was
| stuck at home most of the time and had nothing better to do I
| decided to listen to all 100 albums and write my thoughts on
| each one. I originally posted them to Facebook, but as
| Facebook is a crap environment to write longer form content I
| wrote each one into a text note and pasted it to Facebook
| when I had finished writing it. When I had finished I thought
| it would be good to put them into a blog so it would be
| easier to revisit them later if I wanted to.
|
| https://www.pandelon.co.uk/blog
| fsflover wrote:
| https://xnux.eu
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I dont regularly follow blogs as often as I should, but I
| always recommend this one to people interested
|
| https://iquilezles.org/www/index.htm
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I remember reading your 8-bit MMO post a few years ago and
| loved it, and frequently come back to it when I feel like a
| project is running out of control
|
| Love the look of paper website as well, right now I use
| bearblog but I would like to use paper a bit more
| d3nj4l wrote:
| As a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters
| because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who
| only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an
| audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust
| are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is
| unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it
| very, very difficult to find good blogs I can read about those
| interests.
|
| I think that shows there is a problem with blogging that goes
| beyond just the medium. Consider that blogging is a decentralised
| ecosystem, so you have no central place for discovery outside of
| Google specifically and search generally. Being on the top of
| Google is an attractive proposition because it means many
| eyeballs and lots of ad revenue. Therefore it is natural that
| many new blogs exist to game the search engine, hence the term
| "blogspam".
|
| Some of the same incentives exist with large social media sites
| as well, but on Twitter and the like if you mute/block enough big
| people and follow only those you care about, your feed will
| eventually become clean enough to look at every day. So I think
| it is much more important to solve the _discovery_ problem with
| blogs if you want them to get more traction.
| cavalcade119 wrote:
| I get the Thinking About Things newsletter [1], which focuses
| on sending out articles by lesser known blogs. I don't know how
| they do it but they seem to know about all the fascinating
| blogs before they make it big. It's been a great way to
| discover interesting but not sponsored, SEO'd-to-death content.
|
| [1] http://thinking-about-things.com/
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _only write faux-insightful SEO 'd content as a way to build an
| audience to sell snake oil to._
|
| I really wonder, is the money from ads good enough that
| publishing content like this profitable, even with all the
| blogspam competition?
| pixelgeek wrote:
| Given how many sites there are that do it I would say 'yes'.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I'm working on a hypothesis that there is something I call the
| "AM radio effect," which, roughly speaking, is "As
| communication technologies progress in comfort and convenience,
| the older generation will become dominated by hucksters who try
| to take advantage of those who cannot or will not switch." It's
| my explanation for
|
| - what happened to AM radio as FM, satellite, and podcasting
| came to dominate the American driving experience
|
| - what happened to landline telephone as point-to-point
| communication became dominated by cellphones, smartphones, and
| increasingly non-phone-voice-network audio and
| videoconferencing technologies
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if blogs suffer the same problem in the
| era of microblogging and centralized microblogging services.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What happened to landlines?
|
| What I witness was that innovation stopped. For instance
| landlines could have been upgraded to support text messaging
| (just as they use a modem to send caller ID they could use a
| modem to send and receive texts.) Cordless phones, answering
| machines and such could have all gotten better but they
| didn't.
|
| Most irksome, landlines don't support deliverability features
| such as STIR/SHAKEN so if you live in a place where cell
| phones don't work you might have trouble getting people to
| pick up when you ring them.
|
| That's different from AM radio which, driving across upstate
| NY, I came to the impression that the only program you could
| expect to get reliably was the Rush Limbaugh show. If you
| were lucky around sunset you might catch a black power show
| from Philadelphia...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > What happened to landlines
|
| The majority of incoming calls on landlines now are people
| trying to scam the callee. [https://www.inc.com/bill-
| murphy-jr/almost-half-your-phone-ca...]. And the majority
| of AM radio content now is low-audience long-tail content
| (or mass-commodified syndicated content, like Rush
| Limbaugh) that is a medium for pushing low-quality bulk
| advertising for questionable products.
|
| To expand upon the hypothesis (and this is half-baked and
| incomplete, so take it with several grains of salt): as
| technology evolves, people move to more comfortable / more
| convenient technology. AM is not comfortable or convenient;
| it's interfered with by too many EM flux sources in the
| modern world. Landline is not comfortable or convenient for
| the reasons you noted relative to modern alternatives.
|
| The people who do not move off these technologies are
| various flavors of captive audiences: people who can't buy
| FM radios or don't want to adopt new stations / find
| content in new locations, people who can't use a cellphone,
| etc. As mainstream content creation leaves these channels,
| the vacuum is taken over by hucksters trying to take
| advantage of these captive audiences. The incentives to do
| so are lack of alternative content and a "softer" target
| audience (easier to fool, especially since these
| technologies were once mainstream and trusted so many of
| their users still believe they are, even after the
| hucksters have taken them over). I have relatives who still
| believe "They wouldn't call me if they didn't have business
| with me; how would they know my number?" And I still have
| relatives who believe AM news radio is news.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I thought people got spam calls on cell phones too.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| They do. I believe it's less common than landline spam
| right now, but more importantly: people see it less
| because modern smartphone (really, modern smartphone
| phone apps) have features to do aggregate spam-signal
| detection and sharing. A phone number that originates a
| lot of calls that people flag as "spam" eventually gets
| picked up in Google or Apple's top-level filter and
| preemptively flagged as "Probably spam" when they call
| other people.
| coliveira wrote:
| You misunderstand blogs: you can find the good ones only by
| personal referral or by actively trying. If you have to search
| Google, then you'll, by definition, find only the ones that are
| optimizing for search engines. There is no way to solve this
| problem, and I think the same is true for other forms of social
| interaction.
| grifball wrote:
| Can you recommend a good blog then?
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| https://nullprogram.com/
| kowalevski wrote:
| btw does anyone have invite to lobste.rs? i have technical blog
| (not great but i try to improve it) and i'd like to share
| content on lobsters to have feedback.
| ngngngng wrote:
| I'm new to this, but looks like you need to start in their
| irc chat and get to know people to receive an invite.
| #lobsters libera
| varrock wrote:
| I've always wanted to blog because I love to write. However,
| I've been very hesitant to do so because of exactly what you
| described: the grind culture. I've felt immense pressure to
| make every post academic, but I realized that the blog should
| be for me first and foremost. In fact, my first blog post ever
| is describing the purpose behind my blog and _why_ I started
| it. It will help keep me accountable.
|
| However -- I do wonder about this hypothetical: my blog (for
| whatever reason) blows up. Would I start to feel pressure to
| deliver content that starts trending towards "grind culture"?
| Or would I still be able to blog _for me_? I'm sure this is
| what some other content creators have faced before, especially
| in the YouTube community. If anybody has had this experience,
| I'd be curious to hear what you did.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| This is some serious premature optimization you are doing.
|
| The fact is nobody is going to read your blog post about why
| you are starting a blog, so you are basically just writing it
| for yourself. Which is fine - but you need to be aware that
| if you are writing for yourself there is basically a 0%
| chance your blog will ever get any amount of traffic.
|
| So keep writing for yourself and leave it at that but don't
| stress about problems you aren't going to have and calling
| yourself a content creator
| varrock wrote:
| I understand, which is why I mentioned it being a
| hypothetical. Maybe I shouldn't have used myself as an
| example. It's not something I'm worried about. I've only
| shared the blog with close friends. That's my intention
| moving forward.
| mattlutze wrote:
| If you'd like to blog and write, maybe just write for
| yourself, don't put any trackers on it, don't put any ads on
| it.
|
| The grind culture thing comes from people trying to make
| money off of their blogs. So, don't do it for the money :)
|
| If you get to a point where your hosting provider comes
| knocking because you're generating too much traffic, you'll
| have a good inflection point to determine if there's some way
| to get the blog to pay for its own hosting without you having
| to change your approach (tip services are cool for this).
| ikr678 wrote:
| Unfortunately, if you are quietly producing quality text
| content on a topic and not monetising it, someone else will
| steal it.
|
| I've seen this a few times in very non-technical domains,
| eg Fishing hardware and ceramic glazing.
| https://www.alanhawk.com/reviews/reviews.html has
| frequently had content stolen and republished on seo gamed
| listicle sites or used verbatim in youtube videos.
| _dwt wrote:
| From experience, no, but your 5th-least-favorite post may
| somehow make it to the front page of HN over many more
| interesting ones, where it will be nitpicked to death by some
| guy who thinks the solution to the world's problems is XSLT.
| That can be a tad demotivating.
|
| The content marketing / grind thing - as far as I can tell,
| those people are born (decanted?) that way. It's a whole
| other value system.
| sysadm1n wrote:
| > Being on the top of Google is an attractive proposition
| because it means many eyeballs and lots of ad revenue
|
| Hence the proliferation of 'splogs' or Spam-Blogs. Also in
| terms of social media, most people who experience a viral
| blogpost that spreads like wildfire throughout the net,
| invariably try to recreate that past success. It's the sole
| motivation of clickbait and sensationalist articles. More
| eyeballs, more AD revenue and also fake Internet Points in
| general to be had.
| fallat wrote:
| I feel like web rings really resolved this issue.
| kasbah wrote:
| Metafilter and some hand-selected sub-reddits may fill that
| need for non-tech fields.
| mabub24 wrote:
| > I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of
| them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-
| insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell
| snake oil to.
|
| My way around that is to pay. I find paid newsletters/blogs
| tend to evade SEO crap, for good reason: no one actually likes
| writing or reading that shit. Also, usually by forgoing the SEO
| crap they can focus on niche topics and content because they
| focus on retaining subscriptions.
|
| The subscription also allows the writers to be more human for
| lack of a better description. They actually use their voice
| when writing instead of the generic SEO salesman pep, and they
| feel more comfortable with offering their real opinions and
| views.
| [deleted]
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I've found the opposite: Switching to a paid/subscription
| model has ruined some of the writers I previously enjoyed.
|
| When they wrote for fun, not profit, the writings came out
| whenever they had something interesting enough to share. Now
| that it's for-profit, the content is forced to come out
| faster and more frequently with posts that feel unnecessarily
| long to justify the cost. One author I previously enjoyed for
| well-researched topics that debunked popular opinions has
| been firing off un-researched posts with claims that can be
| debunked in 30 seconds of Googling.
|
| The topics feel like they're being chosen to produce the most
| interesting teaser (to convince non-subscribers to subscribe)
| or SEO juice. It feels like the clickbait factor went way up
| overnight.
|
| Much of the magic of the past blogging era was that people
| were writing because they wanted to, not because they were
| fishing for clicks or subscriptions or pandering to future
| employers with every word. The move to paid takes some of
| that away.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| I don't even think a good chunk of what's at the top of HN is
| anything other than "SEO'd content". The quality is definitely
| diminishing in recent months.
| omegalulw wrote:
| > faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience
| to sell snake oil to
|
| This cracked me up good lol. Btw, another big problem is people
| writing "blogs" as if they were experts without having
| expertise e.g. machine learning medium articles making wild
| unsubstantiated. It's so misleading, especially because ML is
| already not particularly rigorous due to black box models.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Or, with a slight rewording:
|
| > I've come to dread the internet and social media because so
| many of is written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-
| insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell
| snake oil.
|
| It's the nature of the attention economy and ubiquitous ad
| tech.
| wibagusto wrote:
| The problem with social media sites is their algorithms are
| focused on profitability. If you follow a local restaurant and
| then move to another city they will push ads and show content
| tied to your geolocation (which makes sense--not saying that's
| bad per se). But _they_ dictate what you should see and when.
|
| With blogs it used to be about the RSS feed, which had one job:
| to nudge users when new content is available. But ultimately
| users (or news aggregators) had control over what the algorithm
| does.
|
| The problem with blogs as pointed out is content discovery. How
| can content be discoverable without commercial interests?
| Social media platforms make content discovery simple and
| effective. On top of that, the barrier to entry is low--a two
| or three step on boarding process which is free (as in beer)
| to-boot.
|
| Anyone know of good content-discovery platforms?
|
| Podcasts are interesting because multiple platforms support
| them so they exist somewhat in the borderland. Might be an
| interesting case study being podcast discover ability vs blogs
| vs social media.
|
| All that being said, I think we simply have to go beyond the
| first page of search engine results to find the good stuff. Not
| finding stuff is a form of laziness when we are used to getting
| a quick info-fix on Wikipedia. But standardized P2P protocols
| might be nice too--good incentive for a crypto currency?
| schemescape wrote:
| I wish there was some way to "undo" my contribution to a site's
| advertising revenue when I start reading and discover the page
| is just SEO garbage (e.g. when I see a sentence that starts
| with "many reviewers noted that ...").
| Nextgrid wrote:
| This is a "feature". There's so much content out there whose
| sole purpose is to drive advertising revenue, either with
| complicity of the brand being advertised or incidentally (as
| targeting is never 100% reliable, there's always a bit of
| "leakage" where an ad would be displayed next to irrelevant
| or content that the advertiser would normally object to - at
| scale that leakage is money someone can capitalise on).
|
| A lot of people rightfully mention that we lack a proper
| micropayments system for the web and while that's true, I
| don't think it's the _only_ problem. A lot of people's
| careers and companies are built on this parasitic model where
| they don't actually provide any tangible value and only
| profit off leftover scraps, which wouldn't be sustainable in
| a completely paid-for model because the end-user doesn't
| actually get any value out of it and thus would never
| willingly pay money for this "service".
| FiggyPudding wrote:
| Some of these comments seem to support that LBRY thing that
| was on HN again recently if using it for blog docs instead
| of videos
| coldpie wrote:
| Install an ad blocker and use direct payment to fund ethical
| business models.
| goatkey wrote:
| I really enjoy The Browser[0] newsletter for this reason. They
| find very very good articles that often also end up on the
| front page of HN. I've found a lot of great new blogs /
| magazines this way. --- 0: https://thebrowser.com/
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| "Most books should have been an article, most articles
| should've been a tweet."
|
| Blogging just for the sake of blogging is what caused their
| decline in the first place. If the blogpost can't be easily
| understood within first few lines, it's a wasted opportunity.
| The a reason Morgan House, Derek Sivers are still relevant.
| dude4you wrote:
| What are your interests? I know a shitload of good blocks.
| dsr_ wrote:
| The way to find good blogs is to start by asking technical
| questions in whatever subject you are interested in.
|
| If you want to read about barbeque, you need to start with a
| technical question about barbeque; if you want to read about
| Greek history, you need a question about that.
|
| Eventually you will find somebody knowledgeable who is writing
| about that subject. They will in turn link to others, or
| comment on others, and so forth.
|
| Discussion groups and forums and such are useful.
| leetcrew wrote:
| great advice, and I'd add that it doesn't even have to be a
| particularly intelligent question. I found bret devereaux's
| excellent blog by googling "game of thrones historical
| accuracy" and got far more than I expected.
| ipaddr wrote:
| There are specific content bloggers and life bloggers.
| Someone may have a great bbq post but the blog is filled with
| other subjects. The people who write only about bbq usually
| are part of a sales funnel process.
| maskros wrote:
| Discussion groups and forums used to be useful, but now
| they're dying out and being replaced by undiscoverable walled
| garden facebook groups and discord servers...
| godshatter wrote:
| This, pseudonymous de-centralized discussion groups and
| forums, is what I would pick as the one thing I would like
| to bring back to the internet. There used to be a forum
| about everything, each one it's own community, most of
| which didn't require ties to a real-world identity.
|
| I'm sure they exist, but they are really hard to find.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| And what's frustrating is that you can't even search those
| facebook groups (AFAIK).
| pixelgeek wrote:
| By design I would suspect. Facebook is an informational
| black hole. Even the referrer links from there are
| useless.
| lol768 wrote:
| Yup - it's actively hostile to anyone trying to visit
| anonymously: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/
| 151591/facebook-...
|
| (Never mind the overlays which take up about a third of
| the viewport height and beg you to login / sign-up -
| Twitter have started doing this recently)
|
| Discoverability is deliberately hampered by the lack of
| pagination and reliance on infinite scrolling.
| pers0n wrote:
| Big forums can cost a lot of money to run and managing the
| spam can be a mess these days. Not only that the boards
| that have enough proper tools to deal with the spam aren't
| free. Sure there are plugins for some forum software that
| fix a few things, but often you have to install 6 plugins
| and that still isnt enough, plus then you have to do
| updates and hope it doesnt break those un-official plugins.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Even blog comment sections are overrun with spam links.
| pixelgeek wrote:
| This was my immediate response. The number of forums
| available has plummeted. And as @maskros says, they are all
| in private Facebook groups now. Private because no-one
| wants their personal life trickling into their Facebook
| feed in case someone from work sees it.
| api wrote:
| The Internet is a dark forest. As soon as there is money to
| be made or power to be gained by exploiting something, the
| barbarian hordes will burn it to the ground unless it's
| behind towers and walls.
| brentis wrote:
| Came here to say forums. Niche areas of information which
| no social media platform can begin to compete with.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I'm experimenting with a once every other month newsletter
| using Revue + the Twitter integration.[0] Tweeting is about the
| only way I've found to get views on stuff I write nowadays, and
| Twitter's analytics say I get tens to hundreds of profile views
| a month. Now there's a big signup button on there that pre-
| fills the email address.
|
| I have a theory that 99% of blog posts could fit in a tweet's
| worth of text or a short thread. Most things that need more
| length probably don't need SEO-friendly length (500+ words) and
| are better bundled up in a traditional newsletter. And the
| stuff that _does_ need that length can just be the main part of
| the newsletter.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/ViewfinderFox /
| https://newsletter.viewfinderfox.com/
| adrianN wrote:
| The lack of central discovery is one of the main appeals of
| blogs imho. I don't want to discover blogs via a directory. I
| want to discover them through links from blogs I already read
| or recommendations from friends.
|
| I think blogs started dieing when they optimized for maximizing
| their audience instead of being locations where people write
| about stuff that interests them without an expectation of
| "making it".
| kixiQu wrote:
| Handmade directories, like blogrolls, are a sweet spot IME: I
| keep mine at https://maya.land/blogroll.opml (human or
| machine-readable) and I've found a huge portion of what's on
| it via other people's recommendations.
| eddieroger wrote:
| I actually think I would like a directory, because I fear the
| link-only propagation method would lead to echo chambers. But
| then how do you have a trustworthy directory, and how does it
| not also become an echo chamber. Reddit could almost be that,
| but clearly they don't have a handle on being not-an-echo-
| chamber yet.
| anovikov wrote:
| Isn't this the whole people of blogs today? "Write something
| Google bot will like reading"
| dsr_ wrote:
| You're taking a tool -- a chef's knife -- and telling us that
| the point of it is to open packages from Amazon.
|
| Sure, you can do that. It will even work for that. But the
| tool has many, many more uses than that.
| AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote:
| This isn't it at all.
|
| The blogs are in a race to the bottom in terms of quality
| because there is huge incentive to write for long-tail SEO
| rather than humans.
|
| This is a lot closer to tragedy of the commons.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| I have installed a Chrome extension to remove certain "data
| science" blogs from my search results because they just
| dominate, but allow posts from practically anyone. I'm not
| interested in the teachings of a data virgin on machine
| learning.
|
| I have muted and blocked accounts on Twitter as well because of
| that: people clearly never having touched real data talking
| about ML projects, recommending libraries to manage lifecycle,
| etc. All that "audiencing" doesn't suit me, especially when
| it's clearly BS with no value, not even an entertainment value.
| rchaud wrote:
| The UX/UI area is just as bad. It's nearly impossible to find
| authoritative discussions outside of conference slide decks,
| which aren't ideal for reading as standalone documents, as
| they only have bullet points.
|
| However there is no shortage of useless "app redesign" case
| studies from complete amateurs. And it's always the same ones
| too: Starbucks, Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram and Spotify.
|
| How about a public health website? Or a university
| application system? Or something "boring" that's much more
| realistic for a case study than a billion dollar corp's app?
| Jugurtha wrote:
| It's one point I make whenever I get the chance to talk
| with students who ask me on how to work on portfolio to
| demonstrate skills. I tell them to try and solve a problem
| for real and make a product. They'll learn so much more
| than playing house. Databsases, the language, front-end,
| sales, getting users, killing hypotheses, product design,
| product management, prioritization, making tradeoffs, etc.
| lonk11 wrote:
| Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is hard.
| And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust. Everyone
| wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know that
| others won't waste your attention?
|
| To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com that
| cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link
| you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be
| a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this link before
| you. When you downvote - your connections to those who upvoted
| become weaker.
|
| The strength of your connections to other feeds and users
| represents how useful their content recommendations have been
| to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how
| likely their future recommendations will be worth your time
| (ie, trust that they won't waste your time).
|
| The content is ranked according to the connection weights - so
| you get information from the sources that have shown to be
| content curators for you.
|
| I did a Show HN recently for this project that has more
| details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643
|
| [1] - like my comment here tries to draw your attention to my
| hobby project.
| erklik wrote:
| > Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is
| hard. And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust.
| Everyone wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know
| that others won't waste your attention?
|
| > To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com
| that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a
| link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which
| could be a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this
| link before you. When you downvote - your connections to
| those who upvoted become weaker.
|
| > The strength of your connections to other feeds and users
| represents how useful their content recommendations have been
| to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how
| likely their future recommendations will be worth your time
| (ie, trust that they won't waste your time).
|
| > The content is ranked according to the connection weights -
| so you get information from the sources that have shown to be
| content curators for you.
|
| > I did a Show HN recently for this project that has more
| details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643
|
| > [1] - like my comment here tries to draw your attention to
| my hobby project.
|
| I find this so interesting. OP complains about people
| constantly trying to sell him something which is why he was
| turned off of blogs. And what happens? Someone tries to sell
| him something for his problem of too much selling.
|
| Ah. What a world. Solution to too much selling is more
| selling.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| LinkLonk is free, _and_ it solves the problem. I 've only
| used it for about 15 minutes, because in that time it fed
| me enough interesting stuff that I overwrote (and then
| closed) the tab.
|
| This isn't somebody trying to sell something. It's somebody
| trying to help.
| rfrey wrote:
| Alternative framing: Solution to someone's problem is to
| propose a tool one has built that helps fix it.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| HN is a place full of people working on solutions to
| problems shared by a lot of people on HN, so it's common
| and normal to to offer that thing up to someone with the
| same problem.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Pretty sure there's an xkcd for this.
| iainctduncan wrote:
| This is a really nice idea. If I may make a suggestion,
| scrolling down takes a lot of scrolling because each link
| takes up so much vertical screen space on account of really
| big whitespace gutters, size of the thumbnail, and the
| general layout. I wind up being able to see only 3 on a
| screen compared 16 on HN! I would be much more likely to
| adopt this regularly if you changed the layout to pack more
| previews in to a vertical screen of space. HTH
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| > The strength of your connections to other feeds and users
| represents how useful their content recommendations have been
| to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how
| likely their future recommendations will be worth your time
| (ie, trust that they won't waste your time).
|
| Your intention is noble, but this is still based on network
| effects and a positive feedback loop. I doubt you can beat
| the social medias in their own game.
| naravara wrote:
| I don't think trust can be reliably built with elements of
| gamification like this. The deal with gamification is that
| people learn to game it out, which erodes the kinds of
| sincere or honest interactions you're trying to cultivate.
|
| In the olden times blogs earned trust by cultivating a
| reputation. The reputation was earned by having an audience
| that trusted them and recommended them. Cross-linking content
| to other blogs, guest blogging, being included on a blogger's
| 'blogroll,' etc. were all ways they expanded their audience.
|
| It was slower and had much less reach, but it also focused
| more on "building an audience" rather than "driving traffic."
| We, fundamentally, don't trust content, so mechanisms that
| operate on validating atomized bits of content are going to
| fall flat. We trust people and institutions. If you want to
| build trust it has to work on the agents producing the
| content rather than the content itself. Segmenting content up
| into atomized bits is what creates the erosion of trust in
| the first place. It's something timeline driven social media
| feeds do specifically because it makes it difficult to parse
| genuine buzz from advertising, which makes the ads more
| effective. But that's the opposite of trustworthiness.
| lonk11 wrote:
| > If you want to build trust it has to work on the agents
| producing the content...
|
| LinkLonk's algorithm works that way. It builds trust in
| sources of information (including users who rate content).
| And it does not and will not try to understand the
| individual pieces of content.
|
| Unlike the social media feeds that are powered by black box
| neural networks, LinkLonk's algorithm is transparent. You
| know how your interactions with it will be interpreted. I
| hope that this transparency will help build trust in the
| system and in the sources of information you are connecting
| to.
|
| Yes, bad actors will try to game any system to gain the
| attention that they don't deserve. I'm not claiming that
| LinkLonk is game-proof, but I think it has better feedback
| loops and incentives than other systems such as popularity
| based ranking (please don't take it as a challenge).
| lupire wrote:
| I hope you are inspired by your experience today, seeing
| that all the negative criticism of your project is so
| weak. Keep up the good work.
| nnutter wrote:
| This is sort of a perfectionist perspective. Search engines
| use the same "gamification" and suffer the same problems
| you're "predicting" but that doesn't mean you don't use
| search. It does mean it's an arms race between the engine
| and the abusers. Weighting the agents instead of the
| content is no different than a popularity contest and is
| essentially an "appeal to authority" (or a lot like cancel
| culture). Just because someone has weird opinions about X
| doesn't mean they can't be brilliant about Y. If you ranked
| the content then their X content can sink and their Y
| content can rise. The problem with Twitter, etc. is that
| their incentives are not as aligned with their users' goals
| as we would like. Probably the best part about blogging was
| that it wasn't centralized and so wasn't subject to one
| person's definition of what those trade-offs should be.
| But, of course, now we're trying to discuss fixing one of
| its weaknesses without losing too many of its strengths.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| I used to hate canned tuna in the past but I love it now!!
| Your mechanism doesn't account for this!
| BlackFly wrote:
| I like the idea. I have a sort of feature request premised on
| the assumption you end up having weights attached to the
| index to determine the priority of output. Could you make
| these weights exportable?
|
| In that way, you could have curated content. Like if I find
| someone that has really similar interests to me I could
| import their weights and see the web via their
| prioritisation. Similarly, (countering a problem I always
| have with google search bubbles) I could explain to my friend
| how to navigate to a site I found via search if they import
| my weights.
|
| Edit: being able to manually modify my own weights would
| probably be helpful as well to decay sell outs.
| lonk11 wrote:
| I had an idea similar to this as well - to help people
| kickstart recommendations for their friends. I'm thinking
| of creating a personal url for each user (e.g.,
| linklonk.com/u/lonk). If someone upvotes that url - they
| establish connections to the sources that user is connected
| to.
|
| When you want to introduce someone to LinkLonk you could
| share with them your personal url.
|
| As for decaying sellouts, wouldn't downvoting the content
| they upvoted do what you want?
|
| By the way, every time someone you are connected to upvotes
| something, your connection to them becomes slightly weaker.
| So if you simply ignore recommendations from sources with a
| lower signal-to-noise ratio (or high volume) - their
| recommendations will eventually fade away from the "For
| you" page.
| habibur wrote:
| We need a standard API to subscribe to blogs on other sites,
| that will appear on our blog feed as news feed -- like how
| facebook or tweeter feeds work. RSS is too personal, too much
| outside the flow.
| diskzero wrote:
| _RSS is too personal, too much outside the flow._
|
| I have no idea about "too personal" mean, but the only
| reason you would consider RSS "outside of the flow" is due
| to the concerted effort by Google, Twitter, Facebook and
| Apple to reduce support. Even Mozilla(!) has been involved
| in removing support.
|
| RSS is a perfectly good, tested and usable mechanism.
| Coming up with yet another syndication mechanism would be a
| huge waste of time and effort, most likely resulting in
| insignificance.
| epc wrote:
| Like OPML? http://opml.org/
| diskzero wrote:
| OPML could be part of a solution for authoring blogs that
| then can publish using RSS. It is an interchange format
| for outline with attributed text.
| aembleton wrote:
| I don't understand how RSS is too personal. An RSS feed of
| a blog is usually the same for all readers of the blog.
| tablespoonsruby wrote:
| Maybe they mean that since there are many different feed
| readers a person could use, a blog can't have a "Click
| here to subscribe via RSS" link? Most feed readers will
| have a bookmarklet for 1-click subscribing, but the blog
| owner doesn't have the ability to make a prominent "call
| to action"-style button.
| mawise wrote:
| I didn't get that comment either. I've doubled-down on
| RSS for this purpose in my side-project Haven[1]. Write
| your own private blog, share it with people who can then
| subscribe with personal http-basic-auth RSS links (or
| view it on the web), and I've recently built in (still a
| WIP) a feed reader so you can create your own facebook-
| style news feed of anything on the web or things your
| friends write privately on their own Haven.
|
| [1]: https://havenweb.org
| lolinder wrote:
| RSS _is_ a standard API to subscribe to blogs. Maybe what
| you 're suggesting is that more tools are needed to make
| RSS more accessible to lay people?
| gwenbell wrote:
| Possible the only thing about [blogs](http://gwenbell.com/#GBnQXV
| aaT2CggWpq0hfqlqjePhu9m1jULjBHxMF...) that changed is the shape?
| fsflover wrote:
| Blogs are still there. Try search engines which discourage
| cluttered web design to find them:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764
|
| and
|
| https://wiby.me/
| m-i-l wrote:
| You can also search personal websites on
| https://searchmysite.net/ - kind of like wiby.me, but searching
| whole sites rather than individual pages, a little more
| transparent about what is in the index (e.g. queries to list
| all indexed domains), and with a moderation layer.
| tenkabuto wrote:
| For mobile users, I couldn't see the search form on the
| website until I enabled "Desktop Mode"/"Desktop site" in my
| mobile browser. Cool site and helpful!
|
| (I just emailed the site about this.)
| hyperstar wrote:
| How long has wiby existed? Does it only show pages that have
| been submitted explicitly?
| fsflover wrote:
| > How long has wiby existed?
|
| HN history goes as far as 4 years ago claiming it's "new":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15394126.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Both are very good for finding blogs about topics like diet,
| exercise, mindfulness and other topics which have been SEO'd to
| death on the major search engines.
| hbn wrote:
| Wiby has been my new tab page for a few months now.
| Occasionally if I'm bored, i'll hit the "surprise me" button
| and dig into some weird obscure web page on a very specific
| topic. You can find some neat stuff!
| ms123 wrote:
| Have a look at https://nightfall.city and https://smol.pub. Both
| were created to scratch this itch.
| mikewarot wrote:
| A lot of the bloggers I read back in the day would now be called
| influencers, and the attention they fed on moved to other
| platforms, like Facebook, etc. Writing a good blog post takes
| time and effort, and what's the point if nobody is going to be
| around to read it? We all need that dopamine hit to keep putting
| in the effort, don't we?
|
| >But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago,
|
| That was a shock to read, as I last posted to my blog there
| recently.
|
| However, Blogger isn't dead, I still post stuff there from time
| to time on my personal blog.[1]
|
| I tried to make a more coherent case for capabilities based
| security in Capabilities Digest[2], back in 2015
|
| 1 - http://mikewarot.blogspot.com
|
| 2 - http://capabilitiesdigest.blogspot.com/
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| Blogger is so underrated ... great platform. In my opinion the
| most valuable free service from Google after Search.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I went self-hosted about a year ago (again) using ghost and
| commento. So far I love it. I've been writing online since the
| first web pages and I started blogging around 2000 or so. (I
| think)
|
| The demise of blogging and the crap that is social media are both
| due to the same combination of two factors: zero friction to
| create content and instantaneous, perhaps wordwide feedback on
| whatever you create. Serious writing just isn't designed to work
| in this kind of world. You'll be drowned out by emotionally-
| manipulative crap and then people will build engines to churn out
| even more crap faster that's even more manipulative. I love the
| future, but my vision of the future of VR/AR/brain interfaces is
| something along the lines of getting instantaneously angry or sad
| at something and wanting to talk about it before you're even
| consciously aware of what you're angry or sad about. The words
| will come later and are besides the point. (Which is just like
| our brains work)
|
| Because of many innovations, printed text is simply too easily-
| manipulated and dispersed by technology to survive in any fashion
| similar to what it used to. I don't know what the answers are,
| but I'm experimenting. Because of social signaling, my blog is
| ad, pop-up, and tracking-free. I'm mixing in new formats with
| weekly video called "Nerd Roundup" where I just shoot the shit
| about tech stuff. I tried twitch and a couple of other new
| delivery platforms. I do have e-publications, but I do my best to
| downplay the idea of anybody buying them who are not serious
| about the topic. In short, my current strategy, like George in
| that famous episode of Seinfeld [1], is take whatever most people
| are doing and invert it. There might be a space there to make
| some kind of progress. I'm not sure. It's worth trying.
|
| I know that we need more people reasonably talking about various
| topics and doing so in-depth, and I know we're getting less and
| less of that.
|
| 1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697744/
| pixelgeek wrote:
| > The demise of blogging and the crap that is social media are
| both due to the same combination of two factors: zero friction
| to create content and instantaneous, perhaps wordwide feedback
| on whatever you create. Serious writing just isn't designed to
| work in this kind of world. You'll be drowned out by
| emotionally-manipulative crap and then people will build
| engines to churn out even more crap faster that's even more
| manipulative.
|
| I spent the better part of a half hour trying to find a blog
| post a read about a month ago that talked about this very
| thing. It was one of the reasons why I stopped writing my old
| blog and moved to one where I effectively ramble on for my own
| amusement.
|
| I think that this is one of the biggest changes in the web in
| some time. Content is being produced for search engine
| placement and social media aggregation. Once someone hits a
| site and the ad loads the content has done its work. The author
| of the piece doesn't care if you found it interesting or
| informative. That is irrelevant. They got your click.
|
| Facebook and Google exacerbate this issue by owning the ad
| services that these sites use. It is a closed system that just
| feeds on itself.
| pelasaco wrote:
| The title misses the (2020). This was already well discussed here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23205588
| rchaud wrote:
| Here are the "blogs" I've discovered recently:
|
| 1) Random side hustle site about making weekend planners and
| selling via Kindle Direct Publishing. Found on a search for
| "Affinity Publisher 5x8 template"
|
| 2) Website Builder Report: A site that does "reviews" of website
| builders, e.g. Squarespace and has a convenient coupon code for
| each site being reviewed. Found on a search for "static file CMS"
|
| 3) Plausible Analytics, which has stumbled upon the ultimate HN
| bait - criticizing Google Analytics. Found on HN, because where
| else would this appear?
|
| Seems like people aren't interested in writing words on the
| Internet unless they expect to get paid from it somehow.
| pixelgeek wrote:
| > Seems like people aren't interested in writing words on the
| Internet unless they expect to get paid from it somehow.
|
| Google dramatically changed how content was found and also how
| much there was. Since Google has a effective stranglehold on
| online advertising they have become the effective "tastemaker"
| for the internet. If Google thinks it is popular then people
| write SEO focused content on that subject and that is what
| shows up when you search since those sites also host Google
| ads.
|
| Search engines are also not very good. The model that made
| sense for the pre-Google internet doesn't really produce
| meaningful result anymore
| daitangio wrote:
| Facebook rulez, until years ago, I discovered I cannot say what I
| want (respecting people, for sure): some words are not permitted
| in groups name, and even some posts can be flagged as
| "inappropriate" by some AI.
|
| I understand why Facebook need to do it, but sometimes it limit
| my expressiveness (I am Italian, and my language has a very huge
| set of synonyms and nuances of terms).
|
| So I have kept my Blog alive and kicking in the last _20 years_
| and it is my place where: - I can write what I want and I take my
| responsibilities - NO one can ban me from by blog - Users can
| comment and I _decide_ the moderation rules. And yes I own my
| site comments. - No advertising I do not want. My pages are super
| fast - Nice printing capabilities - I can link other blogs
| /article I like - I store images on my own, to avoid to loose
| external image links. - I get tracebacks in comments.
|
| On the downside: - Video bandwidth can be a pain if you do not
| want advertising on it - I must pay for it (but for 5 bucks /
| month it is a good deal for the freedom to say what do you want).
| - I got less traction in respect of Facebook.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Because I feel the same way I make a blog post a month, but
| discoverability is a real problem for blogs. Google doesn't take
| kindly to them.
| design-of-homes wrote:
| I started writing a blog in 2007 and continued writing fairly
| regularly until 2013. The subject of my blog: the design of high
| density housing. I am not an architect, but I developed a passion
| for the subject and wrote blog posts based on the books, papers
| and news I consumed.
|
| Why did I stop? Simply because hardly anyone was reading the
| blog!
|
| At first, I convinced myself I was writing for myself and an
| audience was not important. But over time, I came to realise
| that, although the size of the audience was not important to me,
| the interest and engagement of readers did matter (especially for
| a blog with a very niche topic). Hardly any readers commented on
| my blog posts (which was important to me).
|
| Today, there are lots of corporate blogs writing about their
| products, and there are single author bloggers trying to
| establish their "personal brand" - whatever that means! The
| writing style is often inflated, formal, corporate-sounding: in
| short, simply bland. What rarely comes across is the unique voice
| of the writer. And that's a shame.
| gallerdude wrote:
| I just started a new blog [1].
|
| I can't explain why, but the whole thing is kind of terrifying. I
| don't want to become one of those blogs you find that have 300
| articles since 2008. The kind of blogs only have 1 or 2 comments
| on each post, screaming into the void what's going on with their
| life.
|
| Because of this fear, the only way I ever did write something was
| basically to force myself to have something posted by the end of
| the weekend. But now I have the same fear again, so I'll probably
| have to do the same thing.
|
| [1] https://www.museum-on-the-coast.com/
| nly wrote:
| One thing I love about (most) blogs is that every post has a
| timestamp.
|
| Nothing worse than finding a useful article online, particularly
| with facts and figures in them, with no bloody timestamp
| mkr-hn wrote:
| A weird advice worm ate its way through the blogosphere in the
| late 2000s and early 2010s that made people think that if
| content was "evergreen," it didn't need a time stamp. The
| reality is that even the best advice has a context of time and
| place, and translating it forward requires knowing that
| context. Some people still follow that advice, or don't even
| know about timestamps and just grabbed the first theme they
| liked that didn't have them.
|
| For example: so much advice in photography that gets repeated
| without thought is from a time when automation wasn't very
| reliable, or from the early transition to digital. So new
| photographers end up being miserable in full manual when they'd
| learn faster with a little computer help, or they burn $2000 on
| a lens they aren't skilled enough to use when their modern $50
| kit lens is sharper than almost any of the legendary film-era
| lenses that didn't have to contend with 20+ megapixel sensors
| revealing all their flaws. Any blog post from the 2000s on the
| subject would have been mostly right back then, but without a
| timestamp, it's hard to know where it fits.
| JacksonGariety wrote:
| I write the best philosophy blog: https://hegelsbagels.net/
| elzbardico wrote:
| video and podcasts killed blogs. When we figured out it the
| spoken world has truly dismal bandwidth compared to reading, it
| was already too late, blogs were dead.
|
| Also, SEO trickery completely drowned the honest blogger, not to
| mention rampant plagiarism from the same SEO farms.
| pixelgeek wrote:
| > Also, SEO trickery completely drowned the honest blogger, not
| to mention rampant plagiarism from the same SEO farms.
|
| Well it makes it impossible to find any good information about
| a topic.
|
| I wonder if stackoverflow would be as popular if there weren't
| 101 content farm articles for every subject you want to search
| for.
| waspight wrote:
| So for the one that still blogs. Are you anonymous, not anonymous
| but with a pseoudonyme or not anonymous at all?
| marcodiego wrote:
| I like the way blogs are written today. If a take care not to
| find them through google, I can even reach some good ones. A
| large proliferation of blogs has detrimental effects when
| searching. Except for SEO aberrations, currently only people who
| have really interesting things to say about a subject have
| incentives to write blogs and that is how things should be.
| pixelgeek wrote:
| Interesting that there has been no comment on the impact of
| social media on blogging. I had a blog to chronicle my gaming
| hobby for over a decade and I gave it up recently because the
| audience for that type of blog has disappeared.
|
| Most of the people that would read non-technical blogs have
| changed their browsing habits to mostly consume content on
| Facebook. Most commercial content has moved to social media.
| Forums have disappeared for the most part. My hobby, and I
| suspect a lot of hobbies, have moved on to social media. As an
| example, the local tabletop gaming community here at one point
| had four distinct forums and a large number of hobby blogs. All
| of that is now on Facebook.
|
| I think you can see the impact of that on the decline in Blogger
| support and Wordpress' move to include more tools and support for
| 'professional' bloggers. Wordpress is more and more a platform
| for those SEO huxsters.
|
| Blogs aren't going to come back to the internet until the
| audience for them comes back and that won't happen until social
| media, especially Facebook, is no longer capturing that audience.
| waltbosz wrote:
| I too hearken for access to the Internet of ole.
|
| When content was _real content_ , and love was poured into every
| keystroke.
|
| I spend the occasional free mental cycle pondering the reasons
| for the downfall of Internet quality. It's hard to put a finger
| on any one exact reason.
|
| The tttthis.com article reminds us that blogging platforms which
| lowered the barrier to entry for Internet publishing helped usher
| in all sorts new interesting voices and ideas.
|
| Perhaps it was the monetization of blogs which attracted the
| publishers of low quality. Once gold is found in the hills, more
| people come exploring.
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