The Second Golden Age of Blogging

I try not to be cynical about this but, within the cultural context of HN this reads a lot more like someone is trying to write "mainstream tech interest" articles get Other Life onto HN to submarine a ton of links to the new project white-nationalist info (you may recall in 2018 they declared they felt the political left was actually more rife for nationalist and fascist recruitment, hence this seemingly sharp left interview with Moldbug and a shame-and-sympathy piece about "internet trolls" in the roll).

I don't think that's a correct comparison. The Web isn't a physical commons that suddenly got crowded. It's a mesh of hypertext and interlinked pages that just keeps expanding infinitely in all directions.

How information gets linked is a reflection of our collective mental model. The crux then is to control or influence where links are pointing to. Creating a hyperlink is arguably the most powerful thing you can do on the Web.

Hence why true walled gardens such Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,... discourage adding links to your content. The shoddy way to add a link in a comment (if possible) is totally intentional.

Then there's the fact that in the past decade billions have started using social media to publish their thoughts. But then you have to consider that those same billions never truly left those walled gardens. It's like they entered the theater but keep lingering forever in the foyer.

This isn't bad in itself... unless you start to consider that all content is equal and turn this into a zero sum game: you either move towards social media, or you publish your content on your own domain.

If you're a small commercial venture, arguably there's little point in investing in a 200k$ website and you're better off starting a FB page. There's nothing wrong with that. Conversely, you might derive a lot of value from publishing on your own self-hosted personal blog if that's what you're into.

Which brings me to this:

> So you start a self-owned blog in 2020. The only way to direct traffic to it is to also post on all the other walled gardens, because that's where the people are. That sounds like a lot of addtional work just to get eyeballs on a page.

This depends entirely on how you define your own success parameters and why you want to start a blog in the first place. If your blog is meant to promote products or services, then it stands to reason that you want to drive as much traffic as possible. A blog might not be the right channel for you.

If your only interested in modestly sharing a creative streak, driving traffic likely won't be your primary goal. You might already be content if 10 people see that picture you posted and 1 person makes a nice comment.

The strategy you describe is called POSSE: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

It worked out well for a while, but those same walled gardens have gradually closed their API's over time. For instance, it used to be that WordPress allowed you to cross post links of your blogposts to your personal profile. This isn't possible anymore. (https://jetpack.com/support/publicize/facebook/)

Such actions tell us a whole lot about those walled gardens and how their policies create a divide between the Web of hyperlinked pages at a large; and the limited "small web" they have created between their own walls.

The irony is that the walled gardens are build on Large Web technologies. Sure enough, they detest the open nature of URL's and hyperlinking, but they can't easily get rid of them because they are foundational to how everything works.

That's where you see how Google is leveraging it's dominance in the browser market and search market. For instance, by stopping to show the http and www prefix in the address bar. Or by not showing a proper URL in the search results. Or by pushing it's AMP technology. The goal then isn't directly to get rid of URL's immediately, but to play the long game and see they can assert control over how content gets published and linked in the long run.

My point then is that self hosting your content and curating your own links is the most powerful act you can do on the Web in 2020. Because that's a token of your own independence or freedom which you can never really have when you relegate yourself to a walled garden.

(Also, I think Reddit has been an outlier for a very long time because they actually make it very easy to post links and use links in content. However, their walled garden nature is asserted when you're on a mobile platform, as they aggressively push the use of their own app over a mobile browser.)

But it doesn't sound like overly difficult or excessive work. There's no reason to expect people to read your blog who don't know you; there's never been a time in which (nonfiction) authors didn't do promotion through engagement in public conversations.

If you start a blog or a podcast, you have to post elsewhere and show up on other people's podcasts, write articles for established outlets, and try to get TV guest spots if you're mainstream or corporate-friendly enough. You might have to start as a good poster on a busy subreddit, or as a Trump reply guy on Twitter. When doing this, you make sure that people (or potential employers) who find you interesting or insightful can find their way back to your personal outlet.

I don't see that system as very broken. The delegitimization of mainstream outlets outside of party partisans and the older hasn't destroyed them, it really just made them into prominent blogs (often running on wordpress and drupal no less.) So as traditional news media loses credibility to blogs, it really was just a process of coming to a parity where they had to compete on their own merits (links to administration and intelligence officials.)

edit: Those links are the actual cause of mainstream delegitimization - they're maintained by the willingness of those outlets to float government stories without any independent corroboration, and through friendly op-eds that help people and groups they want to maintain access to. I don't think this is a new process; its a balance between getting insider information and helping those insiders maintain their positions that these outlets have always made.

It sounds like your blog is a personal one, so you might not have treated it as such.