Hacker News Reader

Comment by codecamper | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is really a smaller blog audience now than before.

Or is it that a massive number of people have arrived to the Internet knowing only the FB, IG, and WA apps. Those people don't quite get it yet. Some of them are new because of finances. Computers and routing equipment too expensive 10 years ago. The smartphone has brought massive numbers of new arrivals.

I think the problem could be app stores. Could be paid search results.

But these are short term problems. I think eventually all these new people will discover blogs. And podcasts.

Just like people these days are discovering grunge rock, and mullet hair. Or at least they were 8 years ago - last time I had a look.

View on HN

There's a bigger audience of readers but people don't subscribe to readers like they used to. There's also been an increased cynicism around the idea of "thought leaders" and "takes." With platforms like Medium anyone can publish their opinion so everyone is battling each other for attention with who can have the "hottest" take.

Many new users simple don't get it. They know only the Facebook app, WhatsApp app, YouTube app, SnapChat app, GMail app and use their web browser not at all or only to search for Google and then immediately search for Amazon.

Many simply don't know what the web is and how to write a search on Google. Someone has to explain them the concept or show them by examples.

It would certainly help if Android and iOS show a short introduction video about the web. Though both are more interested in guiding the new users to their AppStores.

I think it's the majority of people won't ever pay $10/year for a domain name. If domain registrations were free, that might help save the Internet as we know it. But $10/year vs. free Facebook, most people will take the free cookie.

Well, that’s why some ISPs in Germany give you a free website and a free domain (plus free self-hosted, managed email) with every contract.

Mine (TNG) is one of them.

Is the domain registered to you or is it user.company-owns-it.com ?

It’s an actual, real .de domain registered to you.

Do a WHOIS (with DENIC.de) for koschima.de, it’s an example for a domain that you get for free with them. (It’s what my dad got).

(Don’t do a ICANN whois, because that only shows you the technical admin, not the domain owner).

That's great, I think everyone should have a domain, especially for email.

Philosophically, I agree with you.

The problem is, you cannot do it any more, at least not without significant expenses.

Problem 1: either you choose a provider to handle incoming email for you (basically you want Google Apps, which costs $$$) or you end up with your inbox filled with spam, viruses and bullshit.

Problem 2: Unless your email address ends in Google, Yahoo or one of the other big companies, chances are high that other servers will just dispose of emails you wrote. Especially true if you self-host your server (e.g. an AWS virtual machine, or a rootserver with an IP range of your mass-hoster), because other people's hacked servers will put the entire IP range on public blacklists due to spam originating from these.

Problem 3: you will, if you self-host, have at least three servers to control: your DNS server, your SMTP server and your IMAP server. In addition, you will need to take care of your SSL certificate. All three not easy to do and people will try to hack you all day and night. And you will need at least three machines (two DNS, at distinct providers, and a SMTP/IMAP server). Your DNS must not go down in any case, but your SMTP server isn't as critical because SMTP allows for outages as long as the domain name can be resolved.

Well, SSL is a solved problem, and most providers allow you that they handle DNS for you.

Self-Hosting email is also no issue, at least in the German world – as most people are with gmx, web.de, etc (or one of their hundreds of alias domains) and hotmail.com/outlook.com, yahoo.com and co always ended up in the spam filters.

Here is an example of how hard it is to run your own mail server these days:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/15/email/

From the link:

"Thus, I predict that software freedom that we once had, for our MTAs and MUAs, will eventually evaporate for everyone except those tiny few who invest the time to understand these complexities and fight the for-profit corporate power that curtails software freedom. Furthermore, that struggle becomes Sisyphean as our numbers dwindle."

He's got a point. All I can say is it hasn't reached Sisyphean for me yet and I will continue to run my own infrastructure as long as it is possible, cloud notwithstanding.

Isn't the first alternative to "free Facebook" rather "free blog on medium/blogspot/..."? The own domain of course is optimal, but not absolutely necessary. And if you can live with a subdomain somewhere, but want it to be independent of your content hoster, those can be had for free, too.

But in terms of free speech, TOS about what you can say, acceptable use. Also there's the matter of longevity, company shuts down and all content is gone, editorial control, like here you can't edit past a few minutes, and moderator interference. Advertising becoming too invasive or distracting, popups, or price increases. Blogger does have a content export, last I checked, and WordPress will import that, which has created great opportunities for some people! Also a Medium could push you under a lot of offensive content, bury you in navigation, maybe flood the page with "related articles." Or with Facebook, the algorithm just hides you from your friends, same difference. It's a trap and it plays out over and over, most people learn the hard way. Also the older content farms find out a database with a billion blog posts is tricky to maintain, response times increase, which is why many old articles just 404.

I don't think it's the price. The vast majority of Internet users today don't even know what a domain is, much less how it can be purchased (by anyone!) and linked to websites they own, or the benefits of doing so.

Yes I agree, and WordPress is not easy to set up.

It doesn't matter what domain registration costs when there are no domains to register. The namespaces of the TLDs people have heard of were picked clean by squatters years ago. It taxes extraordinary creativity and a giant heap of luck to come up with a relevant, vaguely pronounceable string for which the .COM is available. Reliably determining which John Smith you mean based on your social graph is one of Facebook's main value propositions.

I disagree. You can easily find good names if you have an original idea. One technique that I use, just combine two words. Most two-word combinations for an original idea are not taken. Also, use an honest registrar that won't register the name ahead of you.

In the early '00s, most people I knew were using LiveJournal, Xanga, or Blogspot (with MySpace having a short-lived burst of popularity in the mid-00s). And back in the '90s, people were using free webhosts like GeoCities, Xoom, Crosswinds, etc.

It's not like Facebook came out of nowhere and invented the concept of a free platform to publish your musings. No, Facebook is popular because it's more convenient than any of the free services I mentioned in the above paragraph.

Facebook provides not just hosting but a fully-set-up CMS with no configuration necessary or even allowed (a selling point back in the day when people were complaining about MySpace's unreadable themes with annoying autoplaying music), social networking to connect you with your friends, advanced data mining and machine learning features to make sure you're matched up with the content you want to see, an IM service built into the platform, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com