[HN Gopher] Bring Back Personal Blogging
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Bring Back Personal Blogging
Author : alexzeitler
Score : 101 points
Date : 2023-01-01 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| paulpauper wrote:
| Isn't this what substack is? Substack writers making huge money.
| Even non-famous people getting hundreds of paying subs.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > The biggest reason personal blogs need to make a comeback is
| a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.
|
| By "personal" they probably mean that you control the platform.
| That would imply a self-hosted blog. To be honest, it's not
| really clear what they mean when they say personal (they use it
| in a few different ways in the article, but never give a
| definition) so that could be wrong. But, if the above is true,
| then that rules out Substack.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Yeah, it's weird that this article doesn't mention Medium or
| Substack which, for all of their faults, are just Web 2.0
| monetization-ready equivalents to the Web 1.0 sites it mentions
| (their list also misses Xanga and LiveJournal, a real
| oversight). And Tumblr for popular microblogging that's not
| Twitter.
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| But does monetization affect the content of blogs?
|
| I must admit that I really enjoyed the flavour of old school
| blogs where a person would just put some interesting ideas
| out there without ads, pop-ups asking for subscriptions, or
| product pushing. They'd built something cool or learned
| something new and wanted to share. They were excited about
| it, which translated into interesting reading even if the
| subject was really quite niche.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm sure it does. For starters, it means that your
| newsletter probably has to come out on a consistent
| cadence. It probably also has to be fairly narrowly
| focused. Nothing wrong with wanting to monetize--though the
| sort of success mentioned upthread is almost certainly an
| outlier--but you're going to need to pick a topic area,
| have a marketing strategy, etc.
| gigatexal wrote:
| What Twitter and others solved with micro-blogging was discovery.
| There was nothing wrong with personal blogs. Sure, they had a bit
| more setup than just signing up for Twitter and typing out some
| 140-word screed but they were perfectly capable. Blogspot and
| others made it free, you needn't even have a domain and yet
| people still went to Twitter to build their "brand" (I hate that
| phrase) and get "discovered" and then get the sales funnel going
| to send "fans" (also gross) to their paid newsletters, podcasts,
| books, etc., all of it facilitated by the algorithm and Twitter.
| CodexArcana wrote:
| Some kind of discovery protocol for blogs RSS feeds would be
| nice. Maybe BlueSky will fill that void. There probably are
| services already doing something like that, but it still puts a
| central authority in control of the discovery.
| [deleted]
| alehlopeh wrote:
| It seems weird to accuse social media of killing the personal
| blog, especially by waxing nostalgic about the early web. You
| know what else didn't exist back then? The Verge. Notably the
| author chose not to post this article on their personal blog.
| CodexArcana wrote:
| You're just accusing him of participating in the "society" he's
| looking to amend and improve which just dismisses his entire
| post.
|
| You could try engaging with the content intellectually.
|
| His points about owning your content down to where it's hosted
| is a valid message worth engaging with.
| dimmke wrote:
| Something I hate about stuff like this is people who work for
| media publications assume everybody else on the internet is like
| them. It reminds me of the Gawker days. They're all blue
| checkmark types and assume the world's discourse, the true
| "zeitgeist" is on Twitter. It's incredibly myopic.
|
| Now that Twitter is crumbling, they're looking for something
| else, which is fine. But I wish they'd have the self awareness to
| acknowledge that Twitter never truly was what they thought it
| was. All social media networks have a niche. Twitter's appeal was
| to journalists/'mediarati' and people who want to be (or are)
| important in some way. It wasn't this ubiquitous thing that
| EVERYBODY used.
|
| Some of us got off Twitter like 7 years ago and have been
| blogging ever since.
| rpgbr wrote:
| It's been a while that nobody in media thinks "everybody" is on
| Twitter. What I hear and witness (being myself part of the
| media) is that the most powerful, influential people use
| Twitter, which is... kinda true? As a major evidence, let's
| remember when the US spent four years being led by a Twitter
| addicted, decisions made on Twitter.
|
| I hope Musk's disaster put an end on this, though.
| mr90210 wrote:
| Your words tasted like coffee. Very well put!!!
| sourcecodeplz wrote:
| I think blogs are great but social media should not be ignored.
| It is a great source of traffic for your blog.
|
| You CAN have it all. It's ok to have a facebook, twitter and
| instagram account. You are just giving up too much potential
| exposure for not participating in social media. It's nice to get
| comments on your blog, but people need to find it first.
|
| If you don't want/need/crave exposure, you could just use your
| blog as a personal space. One that you can look back to in 5-10
| years, like a journal.
|
| Personally I use my blog to bookmark things that I find
| interesting (like a personal archive). Sometimes I don't just
| save the link to the site I want to bookmark, I copy-paste the
| whole contents of the page into my site (because the site could
| disappear). If you are worried about copyright et all, just make
| your blog private.
|
| Private blogs ARE A THING, if you didn't know.
| tjpnz wrote:
| It's perfectly possible to run a blog that isn't optimised for
| social media users or private. The kind of exposure I could get
| from those sites is also the kind I can do without, I don't
| think I'm alone in holding that belief either.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I share when I write a new article but I don't have comments
| on my site for the reasons you mentioned. Too much negativity
| from places like Reddit, Twitter, HN is bad enough without
| having to moderate comments on your own site too.
| bnt wrote:
| So many tech sites call for boycott of Twitter (see Engadget) yet
| they actively post on Twitter to their massive audiences. Put
| your money where your mouth is and delete all your corporate
| Twitter accounts.
| lapcat wrote:
| > So many tech sites call for boycott of Twitter (see Engadget)
|
| Citation please?
| theshrike79 wrote:
| I'd happily subscribe to mastodon.theverge.com just to avoid
| Twitter.
| aliqot wrote:
| Verge was amazing, but slowly seemed to drift in the
| direction of being the Vice of tech news. I remember watching
| a "how to build a PC" video that I was convinced was parody
| but was actually serious.
| justindirose wrote:
| I agree. The Verge used to be a top tier tech publication,
| but now many of their articles come across as unnecessarily
| angry to me -- especially since their recent redesign.
| greesil wrote:
| Vergecast is both informative and entertaining.
| bnt wrote:
| So many great Youtubers were demonetized for making fun of
| that Verge PC build video.
| smitty1e wrote:
| I still have a personal blog.
|
| However, blogs were essentially a seminar where people could get
| caught up on topics that had escaped them elsewhere in their
| education.
|
| Now that one is caught up, there seems little to add.
| saperyton wrote:
| I've found that a great way to discover new interesting blogs is
| the Thinking About Things newsletter [0]. They were on hiatus for
| a while but seem to be back now. I've gotten some great reads
| from them.
|
| [0] https://thinking-about-things.com
| JSavageOne wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment of the title but this is a terrible
| article that doesn't go into any depth and adds nothing to the
| conversation.
|
| > The decline of Twitter
|
| What evidence is there that Twitter is declining? If anything it
| seems Twitter usage has increased under Musk.
|
| > (I swear, if I see anyone tweeting out 4,000 characters, that
| is an immediate block)
|
| How can someone talk about the need to bring back long-form
| content while simultaneously saying they'd block someone who
| writes long-form content? Doesn't make any sense to me. I've
| always thought the Twitter character limit was stupid as it
| eliminates the ability to write long form content on Twitter, and
| I'm happy Musk is finally going to eliminate this artificial
| restriction.
|
| There will always be a place for blogging, but the problem with
| it is lack of discoverability and conversation (sure you can add
| a comments section, but most people won't take the time to
| register for an account on your site just to write a comment on
| your blog post). Ultimately people write to get read, and social
| media gets more eyeballs.
|
| I don't think blogging will ever be more than a niche thing due
| to this lack of discoverability. Solve the discoverability
| aspect, and you've basically reinvented web 2.0 social media
| fleddr wrote:
| I personally started blogging in 2001 so I feel qualified to
| inject some opinions.
|
| Whilst the early blogging scene was cool, we should not glorify
| it too much. Even then it wasn't mainstream. Most people did not
| blog and the few that did were mostly unsuccessful.
| Centralization was a thing from the very start. "Blog rolls"
| would ultimately aggregate into a few winning bloggers, whilst
| the rest gets near-zero traction. Just like the influencer model
| of today. It seems codified into the internet, the extreme
| inequality of distribution of attention. So I frown upon terms
| like "golden ages".
|
| There was no golden age. It didn't really work well back then for
| most people and in today's radically different landscape even
| more odds are stacked against you.
|
| Discovery is even more of an issue than before, there's basically
| no mainstream platform/app to discover blogs. Not even Google
| Search delivers. That puts blogging into the enthusiast sphere,
| same as it always was.
|
| Due to saturation and dumbed down mobile phones/apps, engagement
| will be underwhelming and razor thin. There will be little
| engagement and most of it will be shallow.
|
| If not toxic. The one thing I do remember as vastly better were
| comments/conversations. People were far more relaxed, reasonable,
| open-minded, less polarized. Having a comment section on almost
| every site was common, not so much anymore.
|
| Similarly, the changed landscape of extreme polarization online
| means you have to weigh your words very carefully. Best to blog
| about something extremely boring/neutral.
|
| None of this suggests that you shouldn't blog. I'm just saying
| there will be no blogging revival as it never was a mainstream
| tool and in a world with the masses now online, even less so.
|
| "Twitter threads just don't do the trick -- and neither will
| Elon's alleged plan for allowing 4,000-character tweets (I swear,
| if I see anyone tweeting out 4,000 characters, that is an
| immediate block)."
|
| Not getting this self-own. You block a person forever for the
| single act of posting long form content, which likely will be
| visually presented in a truncated way? And one writes this in an
| article making the case for the return of blogs?
| superkuh wrote:
| Blogs never went away. It's just that all the vast majority of
| the new web users, a number that completely overwhelmed the
| existing population, went straight into the walled gardens of
| megacorps. They still haven't become aware of the web at large
| (partly because web search sucks now). But their perceptions
| don't effect that the fact blog users and readers still exist.
|
| I think the real title of this article should be, "Introduce
| Personal Blogging to Smartphone Users".
| jseliger wrote:
| Right: https://jakeseliger.com/
|
| Anyone who wants to do personal blogging, can. There are few
| things with lower barriers to entry.
| klelatti wrote:
| Looks good. What's the Wordpress theme you're using?
| csande17 wrote:
| Looks like they're using https://themify.me/themes/elemin
| klelatti wrote:
| Thanks!
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Doesn't help that Google often de-ranks non-corporate content.
|
| They used to ensure a mix of results: some blogs, some forum
| posts, some reviews, some videos. Now it's just the bigger
| players.
|
| If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is entirely
| their own website and their own social media properties. Even
| Wikipedia is toward the bottom of the page...
| ljm wrote:
| I remember when Google said their results wouldn't include
| adverts, but now out of maybe 12 results on the first page, 8
| of them are ads or some kind of sponsored result.
|
| It's more of a search engine for adverts now than it is a
| search engine for content, like corporate classifieds.
|
| I imagine what the landscape would be like if they had any
| kind of formidable competition in the earlier years.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is
| entirely their own website and their own social media
| properties.
|
| There might also be an ad for a competitor in the top
| position.
| superkuh wrote:
| Yep. My biggest peeve is that google never returns more than
| 400 search results now. Either you find it on the first 3-4
| pages of 100 results or it stops and gives you no more. You
| can go 36 pages at 10 results per page but it's still only
| ever <400 results.
|
| It makes serendipitous web search and surfing nearly
| impossible and like you said, the first pages of results are
| stuffed with corporate sites and things that changed in the
| last week.
|
| Bing, btw, will only ever return <900 results.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| are you aware of https://search.marginalia.nu ?
| jefftk wrote:
| _> If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is
| entirely their own website and their own social media
| properties._
|
| My expectation is that most people searching for the name of
| the bank are doing it because they are trying to find the
| official bank pages.
|
| If searches like [bankname fraud] etc also mostly got the
| bank's own pages, that would be a problem, but this sounds
| like giving people what they're looking for?
| wolpoli wrote:
| I just did a Google search on a [big canadian bank with
| 4-letters fraud] and got all the bank's own pages. The bank
| created specialized pages for different fraud related
| scenarios, and they monopolized the first result page.
| jefftk wrote:
| Hmm, I forgot that "fraud" in this context will often be
| things like identity theft, and the bank's own materials
| might be relevant. But yeah, trying that search I agree
| there's too much of the bank's own results in the
| response.
|
| [big canadian bank with 4-letters criticism] is better,
| though
| ljm wrote:
| I like what the indieweb community are trying to do to promote
| this, at least in principle.
|
| It couldn't be easier to host a blog, whether static or through
| something like Wordpress or Ghost. But integration with native
| editors is pretty poor and writing a lengthy post into a blog's
| hosted editor isn't that nice if you already have a nice
| writing setup on, say, your iPad.
|
| So, things like Micropub and IndieAuth are interesting
| solutions to that problem, but the ecosystem isn't quite there.
| But if it was, it'd be a nice way to manage a blog without
| requiring too much expertise.
| root_axis wrote:
| Exactly. What's more, the masses were driven by marketing
| budgets to the internet _for_ megacorp internet products, they
| were never going to come online all on their own based on a
| motivation to read personal blogs.
| lapcat wrote:
| Bloggers were always a minority, because most people have little
| or nothing interesting to say. If you asked them to write a long
| essay on a subject, they just couldn't. This is why social media
| was a godsend to a lot of non-bloggers, because it made them feel
| that their 140/280 character sound bites were worth publishing on
| the web. These people can never "go back" to blogging, because
| they never did and never would write blogs.
|
| Setting that problem aside, another problem is that people have
| become accustomed/addicted to receiving links via social media
| rather than via RSS. This is a big problem for current/former
| bloggers who wish to leave social media. It's difficult to take
| their followers with them. You'll lose a big chunk of your
| audience if you rely entirely on RSS to publish. After leaving
| Twitter, my RSS readership doesn't seem to have grown. AFAICT
| it's the same as before.
| palidanx wrote:
| Since the early pandemic, I've opted to e-mail 100 of my
| closest friends quarterly some really long form e-mails. It
| does take me quite a bit of time, maybe about 40 hours of
| writing and editing.
|
| What is interesting though, is when I see some of those friends
| after a long absence, they always would cite something I wrote
| from the newsletter of interest.
|
| I know there is quantity vs quality tradeoffs out there, but
| its nice to know some thought I wrote still sticks after
| several months.
| ant6n wrote:
| Did they all get the same email?
| palidanx wrote:
| Everyone does get the same email
| tester457 wrote:
| What topics do the newsletters cover?
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Blogs never went away. It was the audience that abandoned rss
| with a little 'lure them in then pull the plugg' from Google.
| marban wrote:
| Please stop whining about this non-issue -- The tools are and
| have always been readily available for anyone willing to post a
| single letter on the Internet. The problem is that people
| apparently need an external trigger/confirmation/applause (aka
| like) now to do just that, whereas old-school blogging was more
| or less writing for yourself with the occasional random feedback
| in whatever form. Just lower your expectations and be prepared to
| give up your social currency in return for creative freedom.
| tayo42 wrote:
| If your not looking for an audience why bother putting what you
| wrote online at all? Writing has a purpose, one of those is
| sharing an idea. If there's no one to share it with why would
| you write it then?
| the-printer wrote:
| Sharing an idea and looking for an audience are not mutually
| dependent motives.
| endemic wrote:
| People keep diaries.
| xigoi wrote:
| So you have something to link to when you're later arguing
| with someone and don't want to bother writing down your
| complex take on the topic.
| [deleted]
| bob1029 wrote:
| Feeling like someone _could_ be watching is a motivating
| factor for many. If I had a sense that no one would ever find
| my blog, I might feel more discouraged than otherwise. In
| this new reality, I am more likely to jot down my notes in a
| private GitHub repository for future reference.
|
| For another example, look at Spotify. Granted, lots of
| horrible practices involved here, but the discovery aspect of
| the product is so good that many of us overlook those issues.
| I have found & purchased more music simply because of this
| discoverability. I win, the artists win, etc.
|
| Everyone tends to lose when the discovery mechanisms suck.
| ljm wrote:
| You can always post on your own thing and then syndicate it.
| It's exactly what RSS was designed for after all.
|
| It's just that there isn't really much syndication if you're
| using a walled garden as your source of truth, as you can't
| really syndicate an FB or LinkedIn post, or even a tweet
| really.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Bloggers need to bring back blogrolls. When blogs ruled, bloggers
| would link to other blogs on the same topic or were otherwise of
| interest. A reader could hop from blog to blog endlessly.
| kaetemi wrote:
| I still had one until 10 years ago, but those other blogs have
| since disappeared, and I've not done any effort on that part
| lately.
|
| I'm open to any offers to set up a little banner across blogs
| again though.
|
| Used to get them by just actually chatting with people online,
| but a platform to arrange blogroll matches could be neat.
| smetj wrote:
| Lets bring back link portals and webrings to cluster topics ...
| childintime wrote:
| I'd say it far too hard to bring up a personal site. Why are
| there no free tier zero config markdown web hosts including a
| custom domain for $20/yr? Why doesn't the domain registration
| entitle you to a single static 100kB page, and/or a redirect to
| some shared my-site.on.domain.com? Instead there is brittle
| configuration and/or having to contract a third party.
|
| Come to think of it, what has ICANN been doing with their
| monopoly? Where is all that (10 figure?) money going to? I don't
| mind a tax, in fact open source infrastructure would benefit
| greatly from (tax-financed) bounties, but I see nothing being
| offered in return. Who's drinking from this neverending firehose?
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| If you can write HTML or have some sort of script that creates
| HTML from Markdown then you could use neocities.org
| natebc wrote:
| Re: ICANN
|
| https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/governance/financials-...
|
| They do publish financial reports. They also publish some
| details about executive compensation.
|
| https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/remuneration-pra...
|
| Granted ... I don't really know what we're getting for that. :D
| tech234a wrote:
| You can almost get this with CloudFlare. They have a domain
| registrar and free static HTML hosting that you can upload a
| ZIP file to or connect to Git.
|
| (Note: I'm not a CloudFlare employee, but I do use the
| CloudFlare Pages HTML hosting service.)
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Why are there no free tier zero config markdown web hosts
| including a custom domain for $20 /yr?_
|
| There are shared hosting providers around that price, including
| domain, that offer one-click WordPress installation, and
| WordPress-specific hosting options, so that exists in a
| slightly different form.
|
| Non-technical people know about WordPress a lot more than they
| know about markdown, and technical people would more likely
| want to self-manage such an arrangement, so I don't think there
| would be a large enough market to make that practical (the
| margins would be low, even accounting for the potential for
| lower resource use per client than WordPress by using something
| simpler, so you'd need to sell a lot of accounts to make it
| worth-while).
|
| _> Why doesn 't the domain registration entitle you to a
| single static 100kB page_
|
| I don't think enough people would want it to make it a key
| differentiator against competing registrars, so the extra admin
| (particularly dealing with occasional copyright claims and
| other legal issues, and a DDoS attack against a client every
| now and then) would not be worth it. Registrars are essentially
| competing on price and inertia, and will do _nothing_ extra
| unless it brings in extra money or makes them look enough
| better than the next registrar to the average user.
| hotcoffeebear wrote:
| I have tried gohugo + gitlab, just because portability of md
| files. I would pay small fee for a service which provide a
| more user friendly IU*. Small fee because i am writing very
| rarely, and in this subscription ridden world, i am already
| enough recurring payments.
|
| Forestry.io was confusing because i am dumb.
| [deleted]
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