If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
tttthis.com
tttthis.com
But that's rarely how things work.
The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'll get.
Then, nothing. 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.
And this is the point at which most bloggers stop. After all, how can you justify more time spent on something that doesn't pay back?
The problem is that with a blog you need to think in terms of years. You have to write regularly over the course of years before you'll get any kind of reliable following.
In the meantime, you'll notice how blogging regularly changes you. You'll notice patterns you never noticed before, especially if you stick to a particular "beat." You'll get better at choosing topics. You'll figure out ways to write faster. You'll get better at pushing through mental fog and procrastination that keeps so many others from writing.
You may also discover that you really, really hate writing. Nothing wrong with that, but understand that many people also dislike writing anything longer than a tweet. And that's why good blogs are kind of scarce. And therein lies the opportunity.
Some of the internet has also shifted to a privacy centric attitude. The whole world is a big place to share intimate stories which will be indexed and used against you in job interviews or by oppressive governments.
I still think there's value in private blogging, writing just to keep your friends and family informed. Blogging doesn't always have to be sharing with the whole world. I wish there were more platforms to make this easy to do.
This is what I've been pointing out for years as the lost core of the internet.
Patreon, Etsy, OnlyFans, Kickstarter, and even Github (just to scratch the surface) all serve to put pressure on creators to turn their hobbies into second jobs.
I had some hobby pages in the 1990s that got a lot of views and came high up in search results. None of them were ever deliberately publicised. I doubt that any of my material would show in the top 1000 of any web search today.
Hobbies for most people are a way to spend money, not make it. No one I know has "side hustles"
It’s social media, it’s private blogging platforms and it’s the plight for power.
It's the way you're given knowledge, slow with thought control and subtle hints
It's the fast talk they use to abuse and feed my brain
It stretches for as far as the eye can see
It's reality, fuck it, it's everything but me
Atmosphere - Scapegoat, with some blogging additions
Youtube is a good example. It used to be so fun to just throw up videos on the internet, without caring how far they would really go. I definitely think there are great content creators on it nowadays and I'm glad that they're being paid for their hard work, but it still feels like we've lost something.
Almost all news organizations -- they're not bloggers but chances are they're using blogging software (mostly WordPress) -- have figured this out. And they're still not making enough money from advertising. Hence subscriptions. Bloggers can go this route directly with https://substack.com.
Google-owned YouTube's willingness to compensate those who make popular videos has fueled that service's growth and helped it draw a young audience.
The fact that Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have no way of "paying" its top performers, as it were, is interesting. You get paid in eyeballs. In exposure. Since the pay for blogs is usually non-existent, there's some value in the "likes," and most people who envision making money off of their social-media/internet presence need to get a side hustle to their side hustle -- a product they can make and sell.
Or, to put that another way: blogs are/were effectively people publicizing their diaries. (Or, in the case of a work blog, publicizing the contents of their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook).
> Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/
Not really? Facebook/Twitter/etc. are for "what you're thinking right now." Incomplete, out-of-context thoughts. Maybe conversations, where the thought plus access to the author for further questioning can "add up to" a complete, legible text.
I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for "a breakthrough in understanding you've had, and want to preserve for posterity and your own future reference; where enough context is given that you (or someone else) can recapture the whole of the idea just from the words on the page, 10+ years down the line." That's the sole province of blogging. (Or of books, journal papers, and open letters. But blogs are a lot lower-overhead than any of those.)
Sports journalists (including the mathy ones) use Twitter this way. And, boy howdy, do I hate it. But they do.
It was more of a journal and something maybe if my friends and family wanted to read, they could. A slightly extroverted way of showing your inner thoughts and life.
Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just end up getting abused, but who knows?)
The downside is that as a reader you wouldn’t be able to follow your favorite authors anymore.
Say, you always write like Yoda speaks, "Great you are." Then the AI would change it to, "You are great."
I know, I know, it's a tall order.
Consider the usage of semi-anonymous accounts on HN or Reddit or wherever. There's some risk of deanonymization depending on usage style and how determined the attacker is, but it's still quite different from openly publishing things in a manner that links back to you directly.
The issue for me is that (for an anonymous blog) once I decide to publish something to it the article becomes permanently and publicly linked to all the others as well. This means that I can never change my mind in the future without simultaneously changing my mind about all the other content published there. It also means that if I ever slip up (say on a non-anonymous HN account) and reveal that I'm the author then I've inadvertently and publicly tied the entire blog to myself (not just that one article).
Any time bits leave your computer it would be wise to assume that they're out in the world for good. Especially for anything with a distributed architecture, presumably all you have control over is whether your personal box continues distributing it. I suppose you could set a "don't distribute" flag and hope that other hosts choose to honor it ...
Consider all the issues that Reddit and HN have with spam and other sorts of abuse. Then again, BitTorrent and IPFS seem to work well enough. At a minimum, I suspect that issues will tend to crop up anywhere a search or other curation mechanism exists that can potentially be gamed in order to gain an audience.
All the social problems, such as the underlying reasons for wanting or needing anonymity in the first place, remain.
And people will slip up and make mistakes. A lot.
My honest feeling is that if you're a good writer and not just posting ranty flamebait -- and "strongly worded and highly opinionated" is not the same thing, although it can be -- blogging is valuable. Or at least it used to be. And really, I'd like to see it make more of a return, too.
It requires work to avoid being flamebaity
This right here. You all need to calm down like you're all so unique you are all owed 1000s of views a day. Write for the sake of writing- it's rewarding in and of itself.
Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog.
I also recall a distinction between homepages (IE where useful static information collected in one place) and blogs (personal stories not with the goal of teaching). Homepages could have lots of traffic but little real interaction (like FB today). Blogs would have lots of detailed interaction but but very little viewership.
It was a nice way of discovering new things, and a more personal one. You jumped around topics and social networks simultaneously; at every step it wasn't just a new theme, but a new person, an acqauintance of an acquaintance, someone with a name (or more likely then, a nickname) you would remember and refer back to in conversations. Even though we mostly didn't know one another except from blogs and IRC, the Internet felt much more like a village back then. Now, it feels like a strip mall.
Don't they all work like this by default? You don't have to share what you write everywhere. You also don't need to use FB or Twitter to blog.
Writing is a public act. You might still be expecting some readership without the expectation of ad money or promotion of something.
What I miss most about the blogs in 90s and early 00s is the conversation between blogs by linking, quoting and commenting each other. Reading blogs involved going from one blog to another, and reading blogs of 10 people about a single issue. It was a conversation. And you would constantly discover new blogs this way.
Besides, I really prefer to read over watching videos as I can do it at my own pace. Except in cases where a lot is shown like EEVBlog, it makes sense there.
But easy platforms exist. Wordpress is still there :) You just have to keep it up to date like a hawk.
I used to think blogging come as complementary to your skills. How will anyone use them against you?
If, say, you blog about some social/economic/political position that is (or becomes) unpopular/unacceptable, your career may be toast. Such as, for example, happened for James Damore.
So if you're going to blog as your meatspace identity, you gotta protect your brand.
If you want to blog carelessly, you'd better do that using a persona that can't readily be linked to your meatspace identity. That's why I'm here as Mirimir.
But even then, Mirimir has a reputation to protect. And that's why I use other personas, which can't readily be linked to this one.
But I like the idea of blogging under a fake name! This will sound ridiculous, but I'm a young individual with big ambitions. I don't want to blog, lest my future enemies figure out my psyche to use it against me.
I think you overestimate the sophistication of your future enemies. The bigger risk may be that by not blogging you don't figure out your psyche, to use it for you.
I suppose that you could use other personas for totally non-controversial stuff. Indeed, you could have a range of them, and disclose some if you like.
There is the issue of writing style. At this point, Mirimir is my only persona that writes extensively in English. There are a few others that are basically Mirimir's pseudonyms. But my IRL identity doesn't post much in English. For some others, I've translated into other languages, using offline software.
As Mirimir, I have voiced opinions about such topics. I'm not dogmatic, but neither do I avoid dark humor, so I suspect that I've managed to piss off some on every "side".
Anyway, I was thinking about decades ago. There were opinions that you just didn't voice, if you cared about your reputation. Back in the 50s, communism became a dangerous topic in the US. And homosexuality was a dangerous topic there until the late 70s. Although there were some flamboyant stars, and cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny, they were just perceived as strange.
Further back, dissent among Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony led to the establishment of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.
Yes I did, sorry.
The rest of your comment here highlights why I believe freedom of expression is so important. Society would not have progressed if it were not for people brave enough to defy those social norms. I guess the intolerance for alternative points of view has not changed, but over the past ten years or so we have seen the establishment of an entirely new set of sacred social norms, which I would characterize as a bit of a regression.
That depends on who you are, and where you hang out.
By "sacred social norms", I presume that you mean what some call the "social justice movement": liberal perspectives on "race", culture, sexuality, gender, and other human rights. It's true that those norms now apply for liberal mass media, academica, and large enterprises. And increasingly, they've become part of state and federal law.
Those norms reflect activism over at least the past 200 years. However, change hasn't been steady or even monotonic. Recent reverses occurred during the Reagan era, driven by the Moral Majority. And again during the Bush II era, driven by them and the New Right.
American society has also become increasingly polarized since the 60s. Although the mass media has become increasingly liberal, the Fox News Network and associated talk radio developed. And since the early 90s, development of the Internet has dramatically increased polarization.
So now we're in the Trump era. By 2016, American society was already so polarized that the liberal mass media was totally blind sided by Trump's election. And even after three years, they're still convinced that it was a Russian plot.
Anyway, it's hard to say whether the intolerance of the "social justice movement" has caused the backlash, or whether the backlash has driven the intolerance. But either way, both sides are ~equally intolerant.
And yes, it's a disturbing development. At some point, it may drive the US to partition. Much like India split off Pakistan, but on a larger scale.
>But either way, both sides are ~equally intolerant.
When I was growing up it was the intolerance of Christian morality that prevented people from living their lives and expressing themselves the way they wanted to. The intolerance was a largely bipartisan (see the PMRC with Tipper Gore and Paula Hawkins for instance), but it was really the Democrats that gave way to social progress first, and the Republican party still today retains a reputation for Christian puritanism. The modern flavor of puritanism most certainly comes more from the other side of the isle (whether you want to call it the "social justice movement" or anything else). The basis of each of those political stances is the same. People should not be able say anything they want, or live any way they please, because allowing them to do so would risk causing offence. I've supported gay marriage since the 90s, and for the same reason that I support freedom of expression today. In the past those views (which I have not changed) aligned me much more firmly with the "left" than the "right", and the reverse is true today. I would argue that modern "progressive" (or whatever else you want to call it) politics has no room for freedom of expression, because it won't tolerate anything seen as "offensive", "hateful" or "dangerous". Which is basically the same premise that has obstructed all of our past social progress up to this point.
Yeah, same here.
But arguably the "right" just talks that way because they're recruiting. If they had a lock on the government, and the mass media bagged, they'd be far less tolerant.
But in any case, that's why I'm an anonymous coward. In meatspace, I just keep my head down. Nothing to see here, move along.
But I think it's a stretch to call the situation "reversed". You can see the right often using the very methods and talking points they seem to criticize on the left. From efforts to shut down protests, to constant usage of patriotic symbols to silence speech ("if you kneel during the anthem, you're disrespecting the flag"), to starting investigations for cases where speech didn't align with their values.
Here's an article about growing right-wing threats to free speech on campus for example. Note, this article was published in Reason of all places: https://reason.com/2019/09/19/the-growing-right-wing-threat-...
I blog my work activities on an internal wiki for similar reasons. Major decisions need to be gathered in project documentation but small decisions and daily challenges are good to have written down.
Personally, I think the blogosphere is covered pretty well for me by the likes of Medium. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but they've made a damn good job at cornering that part of the market for those more serious posts that were previously relegated to the blogosphere. That's a place I'd put a more well-formed idea. A great example is the article, "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" by Thomas Pueyo.[1]
Outside that, blogs still exists! I still even have my own. I think the complaint is rather that they're hard to index or search. And to that end, there are many solutions and ways around it that still exist, such as syndication or even RSS.
[1]: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
I've never really bought this line of argument. People who "write just for writing" don't publish. They write it in One Note or Evernote or Tiddlywiki or plain old text files on their laptop. They don't sign up for Wordpress accounts (or even worse, spend hours configuring some static site generator) and publish it.
People publish things because they want them to be read. Having no indication that they are being read is, understandably, discouraging for people who are publishing things.
Then internet slowly became a place where everything is a business opportunity, and blogs were relayed into the second zone. Google also somehow became much less useful when it comes to find good blogs, probably because of aggressive SEO.
That's what people chose, because it's easier. They gave up content rights and many, many possibilities for the ease of posting and the near instant views and feedback.
Still, something doesn't feel quite right about Medium to me.
From a reader’s perspective, the content just seems repetitive and traffic-driven. There is a certain sensationalist slant that must drive views, and the articles rapidly started to feel samey.
I’m still subscribed to it but I doubt I’ll renew.
I have a blog which I've maintained for a long time and continue to publish on. But for a lot of the material I write on a day to day basis, I can publish at online pubs/sites where I have editorial support, an established audience, and promotional machinery. I'm not limited--I can always publish by myself--but for many of the things I write about I might as well choose an existing publication.
I'm 26 and I see people writing about stuff that are much younger than me and I still think "I know nothing". Maybe I have a huge case of imposter syndrome?
Here's the thing: write that. Go meta, just a little, and write about your journey. "I thought this, but then I found out that, and now my questions have evolved thus..."
I think it was Orson Welles who, when somebody asked him if they could write his biography, said, "No, because it will be false. You may write the story of your attempt to discover the truth of my life."
There is also nothing wrong with serving good knowelage, even if you can find the information somewhere else. Maybe your source is 10 years old, what has happened since? Or maybe its hard to understand for laymen. Or maybe the other sources will fall off the web, great websites disappears in the thousands every day.
Maybe someone is looking for a tech, but there's little info out there, even if the i info is good, it can still be dismissed. Help spread the knowledge.
Then there's the noise to signal problem. Your blog will be a light beacon - for others to navigate around all the crap.
Not everything has to be new or novel. You may add to the discussion and enhance it by writing about what informed your change of heart.
When you're familiar with an idea, it seems to you like it's obvious and it's mentioned everywhere, but there are also lots of people out there for whom it will be new. Maybe you aren't the first one to say it, but you're the first one they heard it from. You'll inevitably put your own spin on it, too. I've been working on convincing myself that it's not necessary to come up with some completely novel thought that nobody ever thought before in order to just post something. Practically nobody does that.
> But that's rarely how things work.
Totally agree. I've written a fair bit about blogging, but when I started a new blog aimed at helping new developers, for the first month I wrote more posts than I had visitors (!): https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/10/14/how-to-start-b...
I think that six months is enough time to commit. At the end of that period you'll either have the bug and want to keep blogging or know the format is not for you.
My problem with blogging is that I can’t just write in a vacuum, I must always write in response to something and when I have something worth responding too I can write more usefully.
To my surprise, medium doesn't let you publish (write yes, not publish) anything, unless you jump through several obscure loops like "engaging with the platform for a while".
My article wasn't particularly important, so I am not too heartbroken about it. But what this tells me is that there seems to be a lot of demand for publishing posts of different nature.
I think what is missing now is the rich set of tools around the ecosystem. Posterous was a great service to let you email your thoughts directly to a blog post. I am amazed there was no other competitor that sprung up when they got bought out and shut down by Twitter nearly a decade ago.
I really miss Google Reader, which was where I used to keep a curated list of the top blogs I used to read regularly. Even now, some mornings I wish I could just open my Google Reader home page and check out the latest updates from some of my favourite bloggers.
It’s hard getting the ideas down, but having lived long enough to lost a few email accounts from My childhood, and other such content.
When you want to preserve for future generations I think there’s really something to be said for paper. I think Nassim Taleb had ideas about papers longevity too, the longer a technology had been around the longer it will likely stay around. As in email will likely outside Facebook simply because it’s already been around longer.
You might want to check it out.
Edit : Their free tier has 150 RSS subs allowed. So it's pretty reasonably. I have the middle tier for $US 20 a year that sets that to 500 subs.
Also, I have no interest in the company financially, just very pleased that there is a better than Google Reader replacement.
Think this is NOT his fourth post. It may be a new front end: Check out the other blogs: http://tttthis.coolstuffinterestingstuffnews.com
Their site is http://tttthis.com
I remember it because I sometimes try to find it. I quite liked a post of theirs called "Remember websites" or something to that effect.
However things with the publishing and PR industry are such that I think it would be best to get some eyeballs and feedback before you spend years writing hoping to get discovered, much like launching a product or service too late after spending too much time in pre-production.
Sadly I think it's multiple changes in google that killed blogs over the years and I don't see blogs coming back into the top search results (or blog link rolls not being penalties that scare people into never using them) and changing things.
I love blogs, and blogging - but I must admit that more success is found by tweeting or even making a meme that is shared. If you can't hope for google to give you results and never know if fbook is going to block your blog, then I don't suggest people put eggs in that basket - unless there is another side reason for doing so, like your posts are auto-added to instagram or something somehow.
Real blogging is about sharing your thoughts and ideas on whatever niche topic interests you with people who have the same interests, and the conversations that arise out of that. Like the friendships that form from participating in BBSes and forums over the years, the value is in the fun you have and the interesting discussions and bouncing ideas off others' viewpoints. It doesn't need to be a business to be fulfilling.
my first thought when reading this was "yeah, that's because users don't know how to RSS". it's not that i know how to RSS that well, but i do have friends who use RSS in the style of masters. my favorite strategy that i have heard of, and what i will try to replicate in a few months, is: rss subscription >> local mail service >> inbound mail folders filled with articles from my RSS feed.
i've been practicing my own ability to use "the computer" in a way that makes me feel like a master... and we'll see if i ever get there. surely though, we are all missing out on the oldschool internet that was swallowed by the walled gardens.
but it seems that we're headed for a renaissance
I've only been doing it for less than a year, so I haven't reached the stuff you're talking about. I haven't even really branched out into talking about general topics yet, but I plan to soon. I'm just slowly feeling my way around, seeing what I can do and what I have time for and whatever. I don't get (m)any views that aren't myself yet though, lol.
Open source software development can be like this as well. Most of my projects ended up being useful to me alone. I started some just to see if some fundamental idea was possible: lost all motivation to actually finish the project once I proved to myself that it was.
I contributed some features to an existing project and they got a lot more attention. Interacting with fellow developers and users is a great experience. Made me care a lot more about the end result and whether it got merged.
Perhaps a personal wiki would be better than a blog. As long as the articles are useful to their writers, they should have enough motivation to keep writing.
If I was to make an analogy using your perspective on blogging with facebook or instagram - you post about yourself or post personal photos for a long time. It is futile, for a long long time, nobody sees your content... you post photos for years, and you realize it changes you. You will notice patterns, you will get better at posting photos ...
I am exaggerating to make a point and it is this, you may find yourself needing to perfect your content strategy(blog, photos or facebook-style posts) for years and the main reason it doesn't pay back is there is no network or community anymore. You shouldn't have to be a pro to get noticed.
People tried decentralized networks and that didn't work so well, because one - you need modern blogging software (newsfeed, real time comments, spam moderation, good recommendation algorithms) and it has to be managed by a centralized authority that offers a great user experience. Today, closest thing to this is facebook and twitter (and instagram). All in all you must have these for a great blogging experience: first, good software and central authority, then network. It must be focused on serving authentic bloggers, and it must be backed by a commercial solution.
That in turn means, a paid service, whose customers are bloggers. That means, how badly do you want an amazing blogging experience, where you blog with great writing tools, search, discover, and interact with others (and probably in today's world, be able to hop on a video chat with your viewers and share that in comments). Yes, so how much do you desire to have it, would you pay $5/month? $30/month? $100/month? It comes down to this.
If there was monetary backing, this problem could be solved with a 'solution'. Chances are that not enough many people want it, and people are content with free posting on instagram, twitter, or facebook, and happy to live with ads. If this was a high demand service, chances are that it would have already been built, or existing ones would already be prospering (tumblr didn't make money and got acquired, blogger shut down, medium serving writers looking to make money, recreational blogging is not their target and so on). So is this a real problem to solve or not?
Maybe people don't know they want it and aren't organized enough to support it, - if you built an amazing experience maybe lots of bloggers will pay for it, then it will become another, facebook where the network is funded by its users.
As for a network and aggregation, back in the day there were decentralized solutions. We had RSS and pingbacks and Google News, which in the early days was largely a blog search engine. There were things like Reddit and StumbleUpon for finding new blogs, in addition to slashdot and Hacker News. Many of these sites have changed in terms of content since then, but originally a lot of what they linked to was blogs.
I've been blogging for eight years now, and it has been very rewarding. It's great to get readers, and it is great to end up on the front page of Hacker News. But it is also really good to have a blog to point people to when you look for a job.
One thing that is still true is how much work it is to write even a short blog post. It still takes me hours of concentrated work. But I am still doing it, becuase the value outweighs the cost.
More on my blogging here: https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...
And that, right there, is the best reason to remove all analytics from your blog/website[1]. At the risk of being held guilty of self-promotion, I wrote a little blog post about just this a couple of weeks ago: https://one.mikro2nd.net/2020/05/why-no-web-analytics-are-to... (Thing is, if anybody here does go and read it, I won't even know.)
At the root of the unease is the question, "Why are you blogging?" If it's something you do for yourself, then analytics -- specifically: who is reading which posts -- is a distraction, and sure to lead you astray into the thickets and quagmire of writing mere clickbait.
If you're writing to establish "thought leadership" in some sphere, then display leadership, not followership (i.e. chasing the analytics.) It's a strange and uncomfortable feeling at first (perhaps always!) but at least you'll always know who you're writing for (yourself). If you're writing for some "payback" then I'd suggest that submitting articles to magazines is a better path/platform than blogging.
Personally I am more interested in inciting thought and discussion through my blog, so mere visitor statistics are of little interest. What would validate what I do there would be someone who reaches out to talk about something I've written. That's the real payback.
[1] Nor any trackers of any sort.
Why would I use the very thing I'm trying so hard to avoid when surfing the web? It's basically a matter of respect to the reader. So I designed my site following the values I consider so important for websites in general: no trackers, no mandatory javascript, no obstacles between the user and the content.
+1 on joining in. Perhaps we can turn it into a movement. ;)
> After all, how can you justify more time spent on something that doesn't pay back?
If you think that the value of your writing is measured by the attention it attracts, you are set for a really rough and sad career as a writer.
Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the list slowly grows.
Wrote a tiny bit about my setup on my blog: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/rss-is-luckily-not-dead-ye...
I also recently started a new blog where a friend and me are blogging about annoying things: https://annoying.technology
The open web has had a great run but it too is being brought to its knees by spam just like every other open platform.
I've never encountered this before when searching for linux or programming topics. In those cases, Google results always include relevant stack overflow postings and links to the appropriate section of documentation.
I'm surprised Google hasn't penalized these spam pages, but I'd imagine there are some perverse incentives to keep them around. Wouldn't surprise me if many of these sites show adds through a Google-owned affiliate program or are in another way tied into Google's ad tech empire.
You're rebuilding the internet, if not from the ground up, then {UDP,TCP}/IP up.
What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?
More like not pushing for more acceptance. Allow a community to form, but do not try to market your way into a larger community.
Obviously this approach is not sustainable, at least on the first try, as the Internet itself shows.
However, now that the internet already exists, a parallel internet so to speak would not have as much/any appeal to the average consumer/corporation, which ideally would lead to only those who are interested in the community/content arriving there.
If the only barrier to joining is a technical one, than anyone who wanted to could join, but the majority of people would not have interest in joining. Ideally, this would prevent AdTech from taking an interest.
As for the fact that these are primarily social issues, I agree. A social solution is going to be much longer lasting and effective then any technical solution. However, it is also much more difficult to implement.
Ads blocked by default on all browsers. The original sin with a lot of these comes from the fact that incentives drive towards maximizing clicks over building a subscriber base. Ads themselves aren't really the problem either. Magazine style ads, where you just buy space on the strength of a subscriber/distribution reach rather than paying per click, wouldn't be perfect but they'd align incentives between readers and writers much better than the current situation does.
The core problem is that the metrics are too granular, so there's too much room to game them at the margins.
Mostly by putting some cost to having an ID in the network.
Ban (yes, legally) collecting & monetizing most information about users. But do that generally, not just for the Internet. Or at least make holding such data incredibly risky (enormous company-ending fines for leaks or misuse).
No loading third-party domain content in browsers. At all. No images, no scripts. You can link to it. That’s it.
Limit scripting to defining custom sorts for tables, custom regexes for form fields, and... that’s about it. Too easy to spy or do shit without the user’s express permission otherwise.
That should take care of the worst of the bad incentives that have made the web so hostile and shitty.
But yes some kind of payment flow that is just about entirely controlled by the browser—special UI pages cannot mimic, a “you’ll find a way to accept what this form sends you, or you won’t take payments” attitude from the spec—might be OK. I’d have to think it through some more. It’d be easy to screw up in a way that let the Nu Web become overrun with bad incentives and dangerous garbage again (watch the “non-computer-literate”, which is a lot of people and yes that includes the next generation now entering adulthood, not just old folks, try to use the web to accomplish any task at all if you don’t get what I mean by “dangerous”)
With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality
I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.
A good chunk of that is that more and more info is locked into walled gardens (in some App, on Facebook/Instagram/TicTok), but also a lot of what people want to find in todays world just isn't on the internet anymore, except places like the web archive, where Google isn't allowed to venture...
I think that's not the case: There's a lot more people with more diverse backgrounds, from different locations and cultures online now than it was the case 10 years ago. It's just harder to find the places through a "globalized" search that is mostly aiming at commercial offers. From time to time I stumble upon absolute niche blogs (Example from my feed reader: https://singapore60smusic.blogspot.com) and it reminds me that there's a lot of good resources out there if you find them somehow).
https://www.google.com/search?q=1960s+music+blog+from+singap...
I'd guess the issue is simply people aren't looking for it.
Isn't think kind of a feedback loop though? Search gets bad, so people don't bother putting useful, relevant, and high effort content since nobody will find it. Thus, search gets worse since there is less useful content to crawl. Thus even more of the content out there starts leaning towards clickbait and SEO rather than thoughtful writing. And so on and so forth.
As with TFA, the notion that Google has some death grip on data is premature at best.
Go to Wordpress and start a blog. The fascists have blown up much of the rest of social media.
I'm just re-setting up my own blog (to complement a Youtube channel). Without designing one from scratch (with a static site generator or some such), it's quite difficult to get an off the shelf one that isn't bloated as hell though. I should suck it up but design isn't my strong-suit, and I'd rather just get straight to writing and recording.
WordPress is still around, and I recommend it. It's more "social" than ever in some ways, and the built-in comments are looking better and better as the years go by. (I use Disqus to moderate the comments for more than a dozen blogs in one network, but for an individual blog, I prefer the native WP comments.)
After some reasearch I decided to go with Jekyll + GitHub Pages, forked a theme that seemed Ok and made some style changes, nothing fancy. Must say I'm really happy with my choice.
There's one thing though, I'm writing posts using markdown in an IDE. Don't really consider that a disadvantage though, and I guess most developers would be really fine with that.
Here's the link to the repository in case you'd like to take a look and try it out: https://github.com/TCGV/blog
One thing, people really like https, especially when sending form data such as the signup.
I'm currently the only one that can add RSS-feeds though.
It has custom actions also, eg. https://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Details?id=ab43c38d-3d96-ea11-... where comments by HN are loaded in the post.
( Custom tag that adds a form field to input the HN Id )
Eg. CommentsByHackernews is the tag.
I also have a variation for the city were I live in ( Bruges / Belgium )
It's just a static page that gets rendered on the server after each scraping round (every half hour).
Eg. check http://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create on top right (The bookmarklet).
On mobile ( Android), I share websites to Tasker that then open handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create?Title=%1&Url=%2
I then add the tags and then create the item. I think it's the only way to easily bookmark websites.
Note: If a url is filled in, but not a title. Then on focus-out the title is fetched from the page and filled in.
Although RSS is an "easy" content crawl feature, i wouldn't be able to miss the "bookmarking" functionality that makes the site more usefull.
When you want to save a page, you then click on the bookmark ( which contains JavaScript)
It will get the information of the current page and execute it ( check the js code behind the bookmarklet)
Ps. HN has this too
Anyway, it felt like a bunch of places went from having active communities to stagnating or dying outright overnight. People forget just how much general innovation was being driven by these sites - Styleforum and AskAndy for men's fashion, BB.com for health and wellness (ignoring misc), Something Awful also comes to mind.
Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative, but it just really hasn't happened.
You could say that the current karma system is sort of supposed to be that, but at least it does not affect comments visibility as far as I know.
Having a parallel unofficial social credit system looks like one thing that would just create unnecessary conflicts in communities that do not have a strong troll problem.
I much, much, much prefer Reddit when it was more like HN, back when HN was modelled after Reddit & Digg. Today, any time I see a Reddit link, I exit immediately after I've gotten whatever information I require - and even that is rare.
I suspect what you’re looking for is:
1. The intimate small town feel of the early internet, and
2. The higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain specificity, and demonstrated expertise.
Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon. Great content is interspersed with what is essentially “noob spam.” Even if it has a greater aggregate amount of quality content, it doesn’t have the same feel as older forums.
Reddit can try to fix this by grouping people together into social clusters. If there is a subreddit with 2 million people, why not create many smaller “breakout” groups that coexist with the main thread? Of course, this is easier said than done, but I’m sure it’s possible to execute this idea well.
I think VR meeting rooms will be the ultimate solution. They will be intimate by definition, and people will sort into their favorite social groups. An American scientist might join an international “scientist salon” and socialize with scientists everywhere from Germany to Japan. A bulletin would contain and display static text posts by the members of the salon. It would also display things like plebiscites and summaries of important meetings. You’d be able to bounce around different groups with a different subject matter any time you want. Some will have barriers to entry and identity verification, most won’t. Some groups will be purely social and defined more by the members than by any subject matter. Altogether that would make the internet feel more like a collection of physical spaces inhabited by communities of people.
What I’m describing ideally shouldn’t be run by one corporation like Facebook or Reddit. The communities should be strung together by a shared backbone under an Internet 3.0. Visiting one should be like visiting a different website. We can use the formation of the original 2D internet as a template for how to proceed in creating a VR internet.
2) You're seriously claiming that Reddit, a privately held company with sysadmins, subreddit moderation and user voting, could be a venue in which what happens is "a tragedy of the commons" (should such a thing actually exist)?
I find Reddit is still one of my favorite resources to search for help. If I need help on how to do some home DIY thing or help on making a particular decision, I'll Google for "how to decide blah Reddit" and I'll get much, much better signal than just Googling for "how to decide blah". In the latter case I'll get a bunch of ad-filled garbage and an article that was probably written by an algorithm.
Case in point, my original post, which was one of the first ten-fifteen comments, has a bunch of up votes. There's no way this would be true if I missed the original post by an hour or if it was the n'th response in a large comment chain.
But low-traffic SE sites just don't compete. I wish SE would change their account system and/or design so that their smaller sites became a better resource.
I want to edit posts on SuperUser too... but SE won't let me. Despite having enough rep for complete trust on SO, I'm a bit short of 2000 on Super User.
If I try to edit a post, it goes into a queue for review by high-rep SU users. But there aren't enough of those, because the site is lower-traffic. So it takes hours to review. High-rep SO users, of which there are MANY, cannot contribute to this queue.
The questions and answers and culture between Stack Overflow, Super User, Ask Different, and their other "tech" sites are essentially exactly the same. There's no reason I couldn't contribute to any of those sites. But their multiple account system makes it impossible.
This kills informed discussion - some topics need more than one or two minutes of thought for a thoughtful and articulated response. This simply isn't possible when you know that the person you're replying to likely won't respond if you take more than a couple of hours to reply, that the conversation thread will be hidden behind a 'read more' button after one or two responses, and that the post itself will be buried shortly thereafter.
The average post quality on most forums was awful, as much or more so than what you see now on Reddit or HN. The difference is that it was possible for informed posts to persist as the center of discussion for years, if needed.
As an example, I don't see how a group of people can become interested and collaboratively participate in something like designing an amplifier circuit on Reddit without moving to a third party site, and in doing so cutting off contact and visibility with potential collaborators who happen to find the discussion a couple of hours too late. That's the level of connectivity and cooperation that was possible through forums and bulletin boards for a bunch of different niche topics, and it's basically been lost now that the 2chan/Digg style format (Reddit) has taken over.
Reddit on the other side used to have a better response-interface. You get a message for new responses and can discuss things over weeks and months if it just happen so. New redfit-interface killed yhis a bit.
This is even worse with communities using live chat platforms like Discord and IRC. Live chat is an atrocious medium for community building as you constantly have to be involved to keep up or if you just check it for 5 mins you don't actually get anything if there is no conversation at the moment or the conversation isn't interesting.
For a discussion site, Reddit's a really shitty discussion site. Good conversations rarely even begin, and die rapidly. I've discussed this a few times and places.
On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16865105
It was a problem I'd identified when first trialing a Reddit-as-blog dynamic:
The Reddit Notifications dynamic is proving to be a very strong negative. Something Google+ got right is to keep re-engaging people with active, productive, posts. Days, weeks, months, even years later. This isn't something you want in _all cases (and can opt out of), but it is often useful, and means that conversations can develop. Reddit, sadly (after some five years or so of trying) is proving to be a Flying Purple Conversation Eater. This is a major site frustration.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/wiki/faq#wiki_so.2C_red...
That's from 5-6 years ago.
True conversation is fragile, rare, and scales poorly.
And, as noted in both links, Google+ managed this surprisingly well.
HN's lack of an active reply notification means that, unless you're checking the [threads] link obsessively, replies can easily go unnoticed, so writing here is more performative.
How that intersects with the rest of the site's dynamics, I'm not sure.
Mind, inbox replies for any activity on, say, /r/funny or /r/politcs would get old fast. But some indication of 'this thread is still live* would be tremendously useful. Again, from Google+, I (and other) users frequently "lived" in the Notifications pane. I'd customised that through CSSso that it was large and functional enough to do that.
Twitter's TweetDeck and the similar Mastodon web client similarly feature a Notifications pane as a principle feature, and much engagement can be transacted from it. One of Ello's iterations had a similar and incredibly fluid design making following up very lightweight, unfortunately later abandoned.
HN's "Threads" view is ... similar, but crippled (lack of context within the subthread I'm replying to being a constant annoyance). Reddit's notifications suffer similarly.
Part of this is the fault of threaded presentation -- very useful for following a specific subthread, but horrible for seeing where a discussion remains live. HN suffers from this as well. Unless you can alternate flexibly between various threaded vs. flat time-ordered presentations, or even randomly-selected contributions, you're not going to break out of this.
A real challenge is that as conversation, functional scale is low. At least one person, more usually at least 2. I've noticed that panels with more than three participants (live, radio, TV), and usually as host/moderator + two guests, do poorly, often due to the timeslicing problem -- an "airtime hour" is effectively ony 50 minutes, with a Q&A and after introductions, speaking time is often only 20-40 minutes. Divide that among participants, and by the time you're at 4-8 minutes per participant with 5 panelists, fewer still with more. Usually the form devolves to a loosely coupled set of short serial speeches or lectures rather than actual engagement.
With more time -- hours at a symposium, Socratic lectures, a long dinner discussion, an academic seminar -- it might be possible to bump the size up slightly -- there's more time to discuss, or (academic) more focus. But even here the ideal size is 5-15 participants (see for example: https://sites.google.com/site/entelequiafilosofiapratica/aco...).
Text gives the potential for expanding this ... slightly. Maybe about 50 people, possibly double that with an excellent moderator. Yonatan Zunger at Google+ is among the best I've personally witnessed. Sadly the archived conversations at the Internet Archive preserve only a small number of comments.
Group size, intragroup relations (do participants know and respect one another, even where they disagree?), avoiding perils of groupthink (self-selection, unconscious group bias, self-censorship, privilege, cultual mythologies, etc.), and a fair-but-firm moderation, are all critical. And you're still lucky to apprach, let alone exceed, Dunbar's number (about 150).
Last I checked, there were slightly more than 150 people online. This means that there'd have to be on the order of 10^7 individual conversations, minimum, more likely 10^8. FOMO much? Group concesus and information sharing are ... profoundly limited.
HN has, as I understand, has on the order of 10,000 registered users. (A very rough guesstimate.) As of 2013, daily uniques was about 200,000 (see, with interesting discussion of some site-design parameters: https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne...). Looking over the list of just the top 100 users (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders), I recognise many, a few personally, and shave one, but ... really can't say I've got a relationship with the vast majority. And that's ~0.01% of registered users, 0.0005% of daily visitors.
And just to note: I'm agreeing with your comments. I just see them as the tip of the iceberg and part of a problem that goes far deeper than mere technical aspects.
HN intentionally makes it worse by forcing you to choose between only starting new conversations (or participating in currently-live existing conversations), or obsessively checking all your posts for replies.
But this should be easy to get back in the same way blogs always did -- have individual blogs. Even if there are now a million blogs full of "noob spam" the good ones should still exist because their authors are the same people they ever were.
You still have the discovery problem, but that's kind of the OP's point -- it all falls apart if you can no longer separate the wheat from the chaff because of SEO and anti-SEO.
This was all inevitable. The mere existence of a popular meta-forum attenuates traditional blogs and forums.
This is the problem solved by RSS.
Didn't used to be an issue really. Then Google killed off Reader and nothing filled the void fast enough.
Shouldn't this cancel out against there being more people though? If people are 90% less likely to want to read long blog posts but there are ten times more people on the internet, you should still have about the same number of readers, all else equal.
> Because of that, bloggers are less likely to publish (smaller audience + less engagement = smaller incentive to publish). That lowers the average quality of blogs, turning away even their most ardent advocates.
This conclusion may be right but it's also explained by the discoverability problem. If people can't find you then your audience is too small and you give up.
> This was all inevitable. The mere existence of a popular meta-forum attenuates traditional blogs and forums.
Blogs and forums are completely different things.
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/
Reddit has its uses but it is not a substitute for these.
So much easier to take a picture on your phone and post it to your Instagram page or story. Better dopamine rush, too, from a bunch of Like/Comment notifications rather than maybe a single forum reply hours later.
Even though the major blog platforms (Movable Type, WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot, etc.) had a social component in the form of comments, the big social media sites -- including Reddit -- took it up quite a few notches. People like the feedback and the conversation. Blogs can be much more of an island. Some like that, too.
I remember in the "dying days" of some of the forums I was on the conversation had largely devolved into reposting and discussing memes and things that were happening on Reddit. From there it's just a matter of time before the discussion moved to Reddit too. This fate perhaps could have been avoided if "Sign in with Google" type capabilities were more widely available at the time, or if we had a more universal login/forum scheme like Disqus back then, but they all came around too late.
I get the same sad feeling from Sasha Chua's weekly Emacs News these days, where half of the entries are now links to posts on Reddit's r/emacs. You can see the dwindling of any diverse ecosystem for discussion.
Google heavily biases their results to two things: the top 1000 sites on the internet, and clickbait (callout posts and threads slandering someone rank like you wouldn't believe; no backlinks required). Maybe if you keep at your blog for 2+ years, manage to land a few HN frontpage story links, it might eventually show up. But who is going to invest that time and effort instead of just setting up a Facebook page instead?
Your reasons were wrong. Blogs, the old blogs and hobby websitrs the OP is talking about were made for fun, not for followers.
Started about 20 years ago, It’s totally vibrant, despite an old school UI. Some threads keep going for years.
Sure, the signal to noise ratio isn’t always perfect either, but there’s still a continuing flow of golden nuggets of deeper industry information, helpful howto answers, and thoughtful commentary and feedback around music software.
In some ways it’s a little like HN, but in some ways I find it superior, like baked in notifications and being able to mute those that are too annoying. It probably helps that it’s adjunct to arguably the best music software directory, with imperfect, yet useful taxonomy, and old school advertising that’s highly relevant to the community.
Are you suggesting Google had a plan to promote reddit? or what do you mean by "was supposed to"?
But quite frequently as I was trying to read, everything on screen jumped upwards, by a few lines or half a page, apparently because stuff below it was loading. Normally I wouldn't complain, the site has taught me not to put up silently with such things. Don't think I've seen that behaviour before. (Am using latest version of FF)
Overall I'm very happy with this extremely simple setup, and am almost annoyed that I didn't spend those few seconds it is to set something like this up years ago.
---
As to the original link posted, blogs obviously never went anywhere, but they aren't (anymore) in the places that you are. I feel this comes close to the frustration some people have that "nobody is reading books anymore because everyone are streaming movies and series instead". Books never went anywhere, and they're probably more accessible than ever. If you're not reading books now, that's on you.
Similarly with blogs: if you're not reading and/or following blogs, it's just because you don't want to.
I guess it’s hard to find blogs these days when you just type “blog” into the search engine, or search for a keyword that a million people compete on in order to sell you stuff. But if you have actual, say technical questions, you’ll land on interesting blog posts in no time, sometimes not even on the dumpster fire that is Medium, and written by people who aren’t writing merely to bolster their online presence.
My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google).
I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad.
Here is my blog: https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois
Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/
I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead.
Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).
For me it's really quick and lightweight.
But certainly the more the merrier
When it comes to reaching people, the odds are stacked against you on your personal website because of multi billion dollar companies optimizing for ad revenue and vastly preferring directing people to ad equipped channels of their choice rather than your website. This is also the real reason Google killed Google Reader: they wanted to capture the ad revenue and instead force content producers to use those. Which is why all news publishers bend over backwards to ensure their news shows up in Google news.
It's that simple. Any click that goes to your website directs the user away from their money making channels. So, they don't. With RSS readers, most of your potential audience will never find you unless they subscribed to your article or it randomly shows up as a link in some channel they follow. Getting lucky on HN helps. But most people don't get that lucky.
So-called influencers basically try to manipulate the odds by doing what they think yields the best results. That's why clickbait exists, why your twitter and facebook feeds are filled with crap, and why it is so hard to find channels that contain curated content. That's also why we all love HN.
I genuinely don't understand the author's complaint. The only thing I can imagine is that there are a lot more alternatives for self-expression on the internet now, e.g. Instagram, Twitter, podcasts, etc. So blogs are perhaps a smaller percentage.
But given that you could never read even 0.1% of all the blog posts ever written, the percentage is irrelevant. There are more unique, quirky, individualist blogs out there than the author could ever get to the end of.
So I don't understand what the problem is. It's not even factual. The author claims Blogger was shut down... but it still exists. The author claims there's no way to find blogs... but it's pretty easy. The author claims nobody is writing blogs... but obviously they are.
I guess the main complaint is that you can't find quirky random blogs by searching Google for the search term "blog"? Not much of a complaint to me. If you want a curated list of quirky blogs, there are lots of lists out there of people's favorites.
So longer form blogging on a unique site [yourname.com or wordpress.yourname.com] didn't grow as quickly as posting pics on Titter/IG/Snap etc...
That makes sense to me, most people aren't putting effort into writing.
If i were looking for front end blogs, I'd say: Thanks, but I'll rely on some aggregator instead.
but ranking blogs? It's more like personal attempt nowadays(e.g. your list) and not really the main focus of internet anymore.
The request was examples of people compiling blogs on a subject, and an example of that was given.
I don't get the point you guys are making. Yes, BuzzFeed style lists of "best blogs" don't exist. So what? There are plenty of blogs and plenty of ways to discover them.
No, they don't. This comes down to two main changes in how Google operates: 1) Google no longer respects search operators so that users can get fine-grained results, and 2) Google has chosen to progressively delist old content, even if many blog posts from the early millennium remain just as relevant today because no one has posted at length on the subject in the years since.
Thus, people are unable to find a great deal of content through Google even if they search for the exact strings which appear in those posts. You might see some blogs in search results, but they are a miniscule representation of the whole blog ecosystem.
Do you have an example of a website that is linked to from other sites (so Google can find it) where a quoted search for a unique sentence fragment from it doesn't list it as a result?
I've just never heard authoritatively of Google removing old content from results, especially since it seems antithetical to the company's mission of organizing all the world's information. And seeing how so much of the value of search (and purchasing and content and so much else) is in the "long tail", it seems like it would be an extremely counterproductive strategy.
[1]: http://stop.zona-m.net/2018/01/indeed-it-seems-that-google-i...
Giving the article and comments a quick-rebrowse, it honestly seems extremely circumstantial -- that they're mostly explainable due to content moving, URL's without any links pointing to them, etc. -- generally stuff that can be identified and fixed in Search Console for your site.
It hardly looks like any confirmable trend or policy, not even remotely. Just Google doing its best to rank the most useful search results with the heuristics it has, but not excluding anything it's able to find. And jumping to the conclusion that any de-ranking has to do with age is pure speculation.
So unfortunately I just don't see any real evidence to support the up-comment assertion that Google delists content due to its age. And again, it flies in the face of its business model which is to return useful results so it can show advertising next to them. There's no plausible business motive here.
You’ll also notice that you can’t really navigate to “page 13” of a google search anymore. Despite “xx million results”, they only display the top hundreds or so.
Blogs and forums are so deranged that you have to either know the domain and use that on the search, or use multiple keywords like “forum” or something specific to surface them. The only blogs you’ll ever see naturally surfacing are hosted in Medium, WP and “noticed” by bots because they were linked from reddit, Pinterest or some other aggregator.
[0]: https://google.com/search?q=ghost+blog+latex [1]: https://google.com/search?q=disable+networkd
[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ghost+blog+latex [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=disable+systemd+networkd
[1] https://search.google.com/u/2/search-console/
[2] https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/how-to-find-choose-and-boo... https://blog.michaelscepaniak.com/i-am-retired-kinda
They do. Search for "javascript vscode" and "javascript -vscode" completely different results.
Everyday I run into a Google hell. Tonight I was trying to find info on how Github uses let's encrypt for https on custom domains. The only thing that comes up are questions about how to enable it.
I switched my default search to duckduckgo. I always thought DDG would never catch Google, but never realized Google would make their results so useless as to make DDG competitive. (Sorry DDG, I love you.)
If on some rare occasions I don't find what I want in Google, I just assume either my mental model is broken or the topic doesn't exists. I also try other engines in same cases, but when I'm that lost it doesn't help, I change something else.
The medium has diversified away from just blogs, but the amount mediums and creators has exploded.
Many of those people who used to blog on Blogspot have moved on to YouTube, TikTok Twitter, Instagram, Medium, WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, and more.
So the whole premise is bunk. "Blogs" in their 2005 term may have changed. But the amount of people publishing 280+ character content on Twitter, Instagram (as video or image descriptions), and all others is more than ever.
Instagram and YouTube are where many of the eyeballs are.
The author longs for self-expression in blog format, the self-expression is there more than ever, just not in the one strict format that existed that way for a brief moment.
> just not in the one strict format
It’s exactly the other way around. 95% of all “content” on the platforms you mentioned looks the same today. The goal is now success, not sharing for the sake of sharing, and that severely limits how much you express yourself.
Blogs were written and read on computers. Now people consume, and increasingly produce, on phones. Hence blogs (long-form text) -> social media (short-form text) -> vlogs (long-form video) -> tiktok (short-form video)
Not sure what this author is talking about.
Oh there are still endless blogs. There are definitely a lot of defunct ones - but many have become active again recently. I review the unknown ones I come across here: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ (I skip software and startup blogs, because they are so numerous.)
You just can’t use the old avenues (Google searches, casual social media mentions) to find them. HN is a good source, Indieweb circles are good, and Pinboard and Are.na are other good catalogs. Once you find a few blogs you like, you’ll find your way to many more.
...on a platform (it was a tweet), ironically. I tore my jekyll-based site down earlier this year because I have a bad habit of redesigning it every other Tuesday.
it’s a strange compulsion, but your site and a few others I found on indieweb.xyz have been some good motivation to work towards some degree of content permanence that I own and control (plus a general frustration and growing loss of patience with the platform)
If you get your own site up, let me know!
It force content creators to write it in a certain way that in many cases might be way too long and not ’to the point’.
I dont remember the last time I searched for something on Google and it showed me a high quality opinion article in a random blog.
nowadays everything is around SEO and blogs, as much as I understand why google does that, I think it's the main reason for why blogs are not that popular anymore
I should also mention I have no ads of any kind on my blog.
This is a huge problem and google definitely makes it worse, but this has always been a problem.
From magazine writers who are paid by the word to technical books that are padded out to be 400 pages when they could have been 50.
Instead of an introduction and a recipe, you get a massive wall of text, such that you have to scroll for what seems like an eternity until you get to the actual recipe. Drives me nuts!
I guess search engines aren't the best place to get recipes, you need someone to vet and review them.
Actually.. that might be an interesting thing to do heh
Writing for SEO and trying to game Google is not interesting to me. There comes a point where the only think that keeps you going is the desire/compulsion to write.
I think the primary discovery mechanism should be blogrolls but few blogs have that today. My website does not have one either. Why? Because I don't follow my feed reader that deeply anymore. Instead I rely on Hacker News and other aggregators. The advantage of aggregators are that a human filter further reduces the noise.
A secondary mechanism should be links in articles. This requires articles to be comments on other articles. However, commenting mostly happens on the aggregators these days. When did you see a blog post which was a response to another blog post?
A healthy blogging culture requires a web of relationships between bloggers. Unfortunately, these relationships are mostly replaced by more efficient aggregator platforms.
In some sense blogging is dead: I see no discussions between bloggers anymore. On the other hand blogging is still alive: Lots of people write blogs but the intended audience is usually an anonymous community of aggregator commentators.
In short: Discussions do not happen in the blogosphere anymore but on aggregators and thus the relations between blogs have nearly disappeared.
Update: After writing this comment, I felt bad about not having a blogroll. Fixed that: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/blogs_en.html
As for content discovery I find that Google is irrelevant. Most of the time I want to read on topics I don’t know much about. Hence I would not even know what to search for. I rely on the power of the community to bring to light the best pieces of content. If I was still using RSS I would need to be subscribed to specific websites and would not read anything outside that bubble.
On a final note I think blogging is alive and well. This community proves it as much of the top posts are from blogs.
Nope. It still exists and I use it.
And I'm given hell for it.
The degree to which my blogging gets so much hostility from people does not mesh with articles like this one claiming they wish blogs still existed. I can't get traffic for my blogs. No one shares them but me and then I get crap for doing that.
If you want that kind of internet, foster it. Look in the mirror. It's not just choices made by big companies or whatever that shape this space.
You shape it with your actions. And I get a fuck ton of accusations that if I advocate for something, it's "content marketing" and not my actual opinion. And the many people who know I'm dirt poor and most of my blogs have no ads, etc, usually don't bother to come forward to defend me or make sure to post first before some random internet stranger can thread shit.
Downvotes: Ironic evidence of the veracity of my claims.
Currently it's linking to the "edit" page.
Here's a great example that will probably trigger some nostalgia for anyone who grew up on the late 90s internet:
Blogs - permanent, can explore at depth
RSS - Multiple chances to go back and read something if you don't right away
Feedly is a great app that I use regularly to keep up with RSS, and there are other RSS readers too. It's not like we're talking about a dead protocol like Gopher, here.
We all know too much about one another these days. It doesn't seem to matter to whom we address our writing. There is something to writing for yourself, writing offline, writing as a means of forming a private life and a private consciousness. And what about writing for the experience of writing itself? Forget publishing.
Ours is a society that says so little about nearly everything, and most commentary on the web today isn't worth reading. Furthermore, all content is ephemeral, people share gentle opinions instead of strong convictions because it is safer for one's public reputation, nobody is good at or cares about typography, self-editing is not a skill that people have, and you can never tell where the delusional self-promotion ends and the truthful personal expression begins.
We have become so sensitive to other people's personalities, accomplishments, productivity habits, recommendations, and advice for life. To what end?
I don't know. Reading blogs is not my idea of quality time.
As technologists, I think we could help by making it easier for people to publish to the open web with just plain HTML. Static site generators like Hugo go a long way there. CDNs like cloudfront are cheap now so no servers needed. We should make it easy for people by having something that can do it all for them. Get a domain, CDN, and SSL cert then a simple local editing tool and one button publish.
I hate that Facebook groups hide a lot of info this way. Back then google found blog posts and forum posts about a particular subject. Now if they are in a closed facebook group (is this the default?) then google won't see it.
I don't know if google indexes public facebook groups.
Yet, I don't think most people are going to want to go this route and it would take a fair amount of tooling to automate everything. It's not sufficient to just abstract away the cloud provider, people also need tools for creating and managing content. In theory you could run such tools locally, but I think most people would expect a web interface similar to that provided by Wordpress and medium.
Further, there's a big difference between free and essentially zero cost. How many people are going to be motivated to pull out their credit card to create blog when free alternatives already exist? Not only are existing blogging sites free, but they also promise the opportunity to actually make money through their affiliate program if the site becomes popular.
HN is part of that of course.
Another thing that died is the practice of linking to each other like it's going out of style. These days the majority of backlinks are earned through aggressive SEO techniques, not organically like 10-15 years ago. This penalizes regular blogs in favor of crappy blogs run by SEO experts.
I still believe in blogging and I think that the lesser competition, in a roundabout way, makes it easier to stand out. However, discoverability in Google can be a frustrating process both for readers and publishers.
I wrote my own blog engine in Python (https://github.com/betodealmeida/nefelibata). It generates static pages, but publishes a snippet to Twitter/Mastodon/etc., linking back to the blog post.
People can only comment on the social media sites, and periodically the comments get scraped and appended to the blog post. Here's an example: https://blog.taoetc.org/mastodon_integration/index.html
This way, people can comment in the other venues where they're used to, and comments get persisted past the lifetime of these venues.
Running a blog is either free or nearly free. With Github pages, Blogger, Netlify, and many more platforms, the only cost you're going to incur is a domain name and even that isn't mandatory. If you do want one, you can easily get a domain name for a tenner a year or less.
Technicality isn't a convincing argument either, there are many ways to get started with just a push of a button and the range of options spans far and wide if you want more. Premade templates, static site generators, WYSIWYG editors and more have made the barrier to entry lower than ever.
Which brings me to my last point, audience. Audience is one of the most recurring themes of woes and, I would say, the most childish. Wanting to be heard is a reasonable wish, along with wanting to belong and many other basic traits. However, demanding to be heard is something else entirely. Your blog wont attract thousands of regular readers from day one and in hoping so, you're simply setting yourself up for failure. The truth is, if you write good content, the readers will come.
Even with that said, I would argue that having readers isn't a good end for your means in and of itself. Much like chasing popularity just because, obsessing over SEO, analytics and all that other jazz is simply trying to feed your ego. Tame your ego, and write about what matters to you. If you're only writing for others, then maybe writing isn't the best way to use your time.
fwiw I don't see Medium as being a replacement for blogs. It's gotten quite bad from a user standpoint and kills the relationship with the reader in the same way that "blogging" on Linkedin or Facebook does (not quite as bad because at least it's findable on the open web).
Most of the 200-odd RSS feeds I follow are unique voices (albeit 50 or so are "mass market" stuff like Anandtech, The Verge, etc., just so that I know what is making the headlines).
We've always been here. Search results and social networks have added a lot of noise, but you can still get signal.
It sounds exactly like what the OP is looking for. In addition to being a easy-to-use (micro)blogger-focused platform (no ads, $5/month basic plan for hosting), the fact that they allow you to host everything on your own domain and cross post to more widely used platforms like Twitter and Medium seems like the best of both worlds. My current flow is writing in iA Writer and saving to Dropbox (for long term archiving). iA Writer allows publishing directly to micro.blog. Following other people through RSS feels like a breath of fresh air after being used to the Twitter feed for too long. I thought that RSS was dead for a long time, but checking out NetNewsWire and the default feeds there restored a bit of faith for me.
I hope and believe that blogging is going to survive this current centralized social media boom, and come out stronger in the end.
This is because there's no point in self-hosting; using a platform is free and gives you some degree of discoverability.
Nobody wants to self-host on their own domain because it costs money and you need at least some rudimentary tech/sysadmin skills. Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work.
But you are right. People feel they don't need to self host because these things are there. The problem is you then no longer own your content distribution and are at the whim of them walling it off or shutting down.
I think something does exist in Ethereum platform but why it doesn’t exist out there anywhere else.
Svbtle is also good if you don’t mind mandatory Google Analytics that you can’t disable (I left the platform because of that).
Squarespace can also be used as a blog although it’s more general-purpose than just blogging and a bit more expensive as a result.
LiveJournal went closed source in 2014. It was also bought by Russians, relocated its servers to Russia, and began enforcing Russian law in 2017, which included laws against "gay propaganda", which was when me and my remaining friends abandoned the service for good.
The internet has changed a lot in the last ten years. People have realized that popular content has a big monetary potential, and it is far easier now to get compensated (remember when YouTube content creators couldn't monetize?). More content is created as a income source, than out of passion or interest. Search results are gamed by commerical blogs. The average hobby blogger can't compete with that.
I'm actually working on something with that spirit.
We will put a "subscribe for updates!" form at some point. You can follow us on Twitter though:
Sincere question, not trying to be snarky. Since much (though not all) of the bullshit in Medium is their weak attempts at monetization, what's the bullshit-free alternative business plan to sustain and scale pluma over the long term?
If you look at Ghost, WPEngine, etc, there are a lot of people willing to pay for being able to blog independently. We are betting that within that market there is a niche of people that want to do it as easily as possible, which I think is Medium's best feature.
They have offered a lot of benefits but they also have the ability to censor.
I started blogging in 1999 (and sadly there are the Wayback Machine archives to prove how juvenile I was!) and it was either self host or use Blogger.
Discoverability was pretty interesting. Most blogs' traffic didn't come from search engines (Google existed but it was pretty much geeks only) or platforms, but from other blogs whether by being referenced in a post, via a sidebar link, or via a webring or similar device. Getting over 100 visitors a day to your blog would be a big deal! Getting other bloggers' attention via linking to them was a big part of things or leaving comments on their blog. These things barely move the needle anymore.
While I have a lot of nostalgia for those days, I think there's actually a lot of other ways to be discovered now. Sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Designer News, etc. provide opportunities to be found within various sub-communities. Most people have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social profiles on which they can share their links, often findable via hashtags people are monitoring. There are 1001 email newsletters that are always seeking out interesting things to link to.
So, I dunno, is discovery really a problem nowadays? I don't think it is, but maybe I'm too "in the game" to see the problems people are having with it. If anything, I think there's just too much to do nowadays and we're really competing with there being 100x more people online than 20 years ago.
I think most people resorted to platforms for hosting the blogs. Not sure if it's so important if many people read something as long as it's interesting for some people.
They allow for manipulation of the new commons and the societies of the people therein.
The manipulation existed before, but not in such an effective way.
US army in Eglin, various Russian bot farms, and effective private firms are open to deep-pocketed millionaires.
There must be a way that's /less/ open to manipulation. Or at least a way that openly expresses this happens.
As the world comes even more digital, the bigger risks this manipulation has on society.
Upvoting is a difficult one. Undoubtedly it's enjoyable. But given enough money and time any private or public organisation can game it for the same political ends.
If you can use targeted mass advertising to play on people's fears or give the illusion of group acceptance, then you have an incredibly powerful tool, and especially so in a democracy.
But I guess the author means a platform, not loose websites without a collective 'new' feed. I remember looking for one when wanting to make a new blog and I haven't found a platform that felt right, at least back then (probably ~2015). Heck, I couldn't even find software to install: everything is either super heavy stuff that requires caching or at least a beefy CPU to survive the HN homepage (with custom software, HN can be survived on an ancient Atom CPU even if you use PHP (also pre-PHP7) and do multiple SQL queries per pageload) or some static generators that I wasn't looking for.
Edit: While we're at it, another blog I read is Robert Heaton's one[2], and I'm subscribed to a few others but they don't seem to post anymore since I stopped getting email notifications. I remember Coding Horror[3] was also nice to read but he posts very infrequently now (for those who don't know, that's by the co-founder of Stack Overflow). Finally, Cryptography Engineering[4] might be nice if you're into that sort of thing. But I suppose those can all be mostly considered successful in that they all have a following.
[1] https://lucgommans.nl/blog
Just like there is still good music today.
The problem is discovering it.
Before internet became a medium for mass sharing pictures of inspiration quotes and kitten, blogs had a change to stand out.
Now, theyr are completly dwarfed by other usages, and most users don't find it a popular format anyway. Search engine rarely put them in top of search results either, because they rarely quickly answer and direct question or provide the popular untertainment du jour.
So if you want to help bring blog back, you gotta find a way to make them more visible, and get people interested in them.
Good luck with that. Videos store instantly became more popular than libraries IRL, and I don't see a reason why suddenly blogs would win against Youtube. Same with equivalent to Facebook, Twitter, etc.
HackerNews and other niche sites, word-of-mouth, and serendipity, play a bigger role in blog discovery for me. It’s a slow process but the results are stronger.
There’s no instant tech-effort solution to this in my opinion. If you want a good blog to stick around, express your thanks and gratitude to the blogger. Buy them a coffee. Encourage them.
Go now to your favourite blogger and send them a message of appreciation.
Kinda weird reading a blog post about no blog posts, like it being read disproves its point a little bit.
I think they are there as long as you know where to look.
Blogging, when introduced, was marvelous. People sharing their personal takes and learnings, unfettered by the desire to earn from them.
If you were into bicycles, you find a blog by a cycling-fanatic and start following along and engaging (remember inter-blog "pings"?). If you were into any topic, you could find enthusiasts writing on it. And it'd have a bit of personal touch, which is very valuable!
"Planets" were great as a starting point, and you still have those at Planet Gnome (I think one of the original ones, at least it had custom software done for it), Planet Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora...
It was the true decentralised discussion forum bliss that Internet always promised!
Alas, platforms like Blogger and Wordpress actually diminished the true essence because they promoted siloing in.
And being there from early on, I can promise you that "blogs" (web logs) were not personal diaries put public. People did that a long time before blogs and called them, surprisingly, diaries.
It was already a point where web was becoming too big, and search engines were becoming useless, so it was, imho, a "log of the web" — every early blog post was pointing to a hidden gem elsewhere on the web which you'd never reach through a search engine. It's just that the term was taken and switched to "any regularly updated set of articles" without any other constraints (technical or topical) that defined the early blogs. As if that did not exist before "blogs".
The internet is full of people with incredible ideas, many of which are writing them down, but the problem is discovery. How to connect them. If you can unify blogs with a feedback mechanism, with the immediacy of social media then that would be progress.
Unfortunately most mechanisms for discovery are hopelessly low SnR or totally contaminated with advertising or articles gaming some search algorithm. Funnily enough I write a little about it here within the context of one platform which could have been good, but wasn’t. https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
> But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago
It's still up from what I can tell, the blogs hosted there still work, and the Wikipedia page still lists it as active.
That said, I definitely wish blogs were more popular again. Finding individual people's blogs used to be a great thing, and the way they've basically been buried by Google is depressing as hell.
The reason I don't blog as much as I used to is because nobody reads anything I write. The traffic is a joke. Thus is doesn't seem like a wise investment unless there is some ulterior motive (eg. demonstrate proficiency in some field).
Also anything I feel compelled to write about is generally something controversial, especially relating to politics or work culture, and it would be career suicide to write that under my real name. Therefore if I want to write anything that's actually interesting, I have to write under a pseudonym.
If I could bring anything back to the internet, it would be internet forums. Real communities. Reddit and HN serve their purpose, but there's no sense of any real community.
There are still a lot of blogs around, but they seem to be targeted at specific groups, with technically minded people and fashionistas being the two largest.
We all know what a tweet is: A short polemic statement, usually emotional, biased or opinionated, but expressed as self-evident without any justification, explanation or thorough analysis, which simply wouldn't fit.
I was an avid blogger at the time Twitter started, thousands of daily readers, and relatively influential in my tech niche. I had every reason to continue. And yet after I started tweeting regularly, my blogging slowed and then stopped. That day had passed, and now my blog sits on my website like a monument to the 2000s. Many others were like this as well.
The reason is pretty simple: When you blog regularly, there's a certain itch to express an idea or an opinion that builds up and you want to scratch it by writing a post. But you'd ruminate on it for a while, so that it could be a decent sized post with rationale for your thought.
But tweeting could scratch that itch instantly - no need to save up enough of an idea to write a full blog post of a few paragraphs, you could just write, "Wow, foo sucks. Totally prefer bar instead." And the feeling was satisfied.
You'd think at the time that you'd save up some ideas and write a longer post later, and at first you did, but as time went by, later never seemed to come. And then, when it did, you'd be so used to culling your opinion down to the essential idea for a pithy tweet, fully expressing your thought became harder. Besides, the more open-ended a tweet was, the more opinionated, the more it would get reactions. It seemed that expressing fully formed ideas wasn't worth as much.
It was a vicious cycle, you'd blog less. And others who used to blog their ideas or leave comments wrote less as well, and that great feedback loop stalled as everything moved to tweets. Intelligent analysis was replaced by emotional exclamations and hard opinion. There's no room for nuance in a tweet.
And that's where we are now. With a president who's a master of tweeting unjustified, irrational opinion and lies and a society that responds in kind because doing otherwise takes too much time and effort.
Blogging is never coming back. Even this comment is probably too long for most HN readers to do anything more than just skim. And if they don't like a word or two, they'll downvote and move on, rather than write their thoughts out in a coherent manner.
Wanted my own domain, didn't want to deal with content moderation by someone else, wanted the ability to easily customize things, didn't want to show crappy ads, didn't want editors being able to hold up things, etc.
I spent a good 10 hours configuring all the basics for that between SSL certificates, DNS, domain name, etc. The barrier to entry seems to be substantial if you just want a simple clean interface that you yourself control and that is still building everything on top of WordPress.
Netlify static hosting has a very low barrier of entry (just drop a folder if you don't have a git repo).
You get a fast SSL enabled site.
Adding your own domain is just going to your domain registrar as usual and pointing to the appropriate address.
Now, if you go over 100GB a month it could get pricey. https://www.netlify.com/pricing/
Still for a simple text oriented blog that could be a fantastic option.
All authors tend to do so to re-create the same content in a different form and publish it. I assume taking most popular answer from Stack Overflow and writing a blog post about could be one of their strategies.
Basically blogging today is all race to infinite splits of the initial pie.
I have to admit I often true to keep blogs published on Hacker News because they usually do contain some unique content. However that is no longer the majority. An average blog today is equivalent to an average Facebook profile - it has nothing interesting per se.
That's it.
e.g.: A little RSS icon pops up when RSS is available on a page, press it and you're now following that feed. Feeds window in the browser shows your feeds, and a small alert icon shows up somewhere when there's unread content. Your subscriptions are saved to your account. If you want to read the article, you click the link and read it directly on the source website. It doesn't need to be any more complex than that.
Firefox had "Live Bookmarks" for RSS but it was relatively terrible, and eventually got removed.
I suppose good communities still exist out there, somewhere... But, like the OP said about blogs being hyper focused, there don't seem to be many general forums. I've mostly stumbled across tech related forums.
It's not a tooling problem. There are several high quality forum tools out there. Discourse being one of them. But getting people to actually participate seems impossible. I've had a Discourse instance running for family for over a year now. It's basically empty.
I've tried inviting friends to a another instance, and only one ever showed up.
I also find it kind of fun when I'm searching for something and my own blog comes up reminding me how I did something 6 years ago.
This happened to me a couple days ago. Except it was a 12-year-old post.
Try searching with Bing. Bing is years behind Google, and that's a good thing.
1) Locally ran blog app with nice UI (think wysiwyg text editor, file “uploads” etc) and single file install.
2) Central server managed by a cloud service to resolve people’s dynamic IP into a stable URL, your blog will live at myblog.blogservice.com
3) locally ran blog engine pings new IP address every time people’s ISP change it.
4) Good instructions on how to forward 443 to your local machine running blog.
5) bonus points if local app runs on raspberry pis that can be always on.
What the author speaks of sounds a lot like I2P.
Years ago I played around with I2P. I2P was pretty interesting, it was a traffic obfuscator like Tor that had the express goal of not connecting to anyone else who wasn't also on I2P. (Of course people can and did run outproxies where you could connect to the web through them).
If you made a site available on I2P you had to keep the local I2P router running. You could register your node with a I2P hosts maintainer if you wanted and that was as far as DNS went (it was pass around the hosts text-file style).
The couple sites I found were a lot like the web in the early 90's as far as style and content. Before I stopped messing around with it, someone had created a Twitter clone and made it available. At that point it was very slow. This was probably 2011.
Overall, there's nothing preventing people from trading lists of URLs, and nothing preventing anyone from putting these in local a searchable database. It's completely possible to do this without Google. Google made it much easier and spoiled us, but there was a world before Google and there can be one afterward.
The site was well visited, approaching million-month hits at times. Advertisements on the site supported me while I bootstrap my Startup (failed later).
Now, I write but very far and in between. If a topic/idea comes to mind, I search/research and found that someone has done a better job and so I don’t write. Trivial things are ignored because it is trivial and everyone would have known. I don't think I even have analytics enabled or it is just that I never cared to look at Analytics anymore.
People emailed me about missing/non-working links, open-sourced files missing, thanking me, etc once in a while but that's it.
The bar for a good article has hit the ceiling and I’d rather not write than write like I used to write long ago.
> I turn to Twitter even though it is just about the worst platform imaginable for the exposition of ideas. In its favor: the barrier to publication is extremely low, and there is no shortage of engagement with others to be found. The negative: that engagement is often of the worst kind. Nevertheless, for all its flaws, Twitter is immediate and just sufficiently gratifying that once you’ve blurted out a half-formed, typo-ridden, uneditable utterance, you might find your original communicative impulse satisfied enough that you’ll never take the time to turn it into a more polished and complete work in the form of a blog post.
1. By an expert in a specific domain.
2. Blogs by someone in the process of developing expertise, documenting what they learned along the way. The idea is it really helps the learning process to learn something well enough to write about it cogently and teach others.
Having a blog that I built that is truly “mine,” with a domain name that I own, is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done. Even though I don’t write that often and don’t have that many readers.
I currently host it on github pages, but I could move it somewhere else in a weekend if I wanted to.
Depending on your motivations, discoverability by strangers may be overrated. I’ve had good success just telling people that I respect that I wrote something and getting feedback from them. I’m not selling anything on my blog, so that’s worth a lot more to me than anonymous attention.
Social media like HN, Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook may also help for getting the word out about your writing while still letting you own the space where your writing lives.
Imagine a search site that is dedicated to nothing but sci-fi, and it includes blogs, reviews, and discussions from a curated list of smaller and independent publications. No large, ad-heavy, seo gimmicky sites are indexed.
YaCy (https://yacy.net) seems like a reasonable option for this.
I run an instance (non-peered) internally on my network. I index smaller blogs, mostly around music reviews. While I like to use RSS to get updates, I find having a search engine is great to go back and find something or to seek out something new. I only index with a depth of 1, so I get the origin site plus any direct links to external sites. For my purposes, it has been working really well and is easy to maintain.
I still treat it as a way for me to gather my personal/professional thoughts or provide a summary of a topic or technology that others may find useful. And no, I don't give a rat's ass whether it's politically correct.
But over the past 2 decades, I've received hundreds of emails from people who came across it from all around the world. And some of my blogs have even been posted here on Hacker News. It's http://jasoneckert.net (which forwards to a longer URL that is secured) in case you are interested.
1. Walled gardens (this include medium). Basically they've self decided that content should be here and they keep your audience there. Also, they tend to self select what opinions the community is to keep. This is a huge concern for freedom of expression.
2. The networks aren't there. We need a way to have neutral aggrigation and federating against many other blogs for commenting, replying, and annotation of existing content. (Give people a reward for being in a community, reddit does this with karma, but they also try to wall off the users)
3. RSS has been badly treated. This is a great standard for syndicating updates to your channel.
4. Build good networks to remove the spam. Basically the baby was thrown out of the bathwater rather than to fix the problem.
These days, light and responsive client app/interfaces with little Javascript (service worker) scripts could be busy UUen/decoding and uploading/downloading all those distributed binaries and 'news' with ease! ;)
I never get far with that, though.
You find interesting blogs by chance or via blogroll of blogs you like.
What really has changed are stock related news. Recently I went back into stock trading and was shocked. Basically 90% of the stock related news on google seems to be AI/ML created bullshit with zero value.
On the other hand it has never been easier to set up your own blog with services like Netlify, Jekyll, Pelican etc.
I recently started my own blog in this way, however it requires some coding skills... I know it’s a shameless plug, but here it is: https://haltakov.net/blog
To not be too selfish, let me also share one of my favorite blogs of a guy telling amazing stories about his hikes and adventures (unfortunately, he hasn’t written in a while): https://www.otherhand.org
Ohh boy, right here why blogs might not be best suited for this hyper-connected global world we live in... HN Hug of death is real I guess
there I fixed it
A friend and I have a blog based upon our experiences scaling product/engineering at a startup (we've been fortunate enough to see several growth stages over ~8 years). But it's challenging to get in front of readers who might be interested, outside of places like HN or Reddit.
When I look at the blogs that I read regularly myself, it tends to be a small subset of names that I've collected over the years from Hacker News, Quora, and friends sharing articles. I'd like to find more but don't really know the best place to start. I'm sure that there's tons of content that I would really enjoy but discovery is difficult.
You can still use https://www.inoreader.com/ for blogs and use Google to find good-quality blogs in your niche.
The fact that blogs aren't so popular anymore could also force them to write higher quality content to gain popularity.
Ao3 for blogs? That'd be nice. I mean, does anyone actually like clicking into a Medium link?
Those that went dark only because search engines now don't find them feel like they never done it for these values.
Discovering unknown parts and blogs on the internet is one of the enduring goals of a newsletter that I run [1], which provides a single link to an interesting article every day, usually by lesser-known authors and blogs across the internet.
[1] www.thinking-about-things.com
Before, Firefox used to show the RSS icon but they killed it. It really should be a browser-level thing, it's no different from favicons, rather than requiring users to hunt down a link somewhere on the page.
That is not a blog.
You don't have control over it, you don't have archives, and it's not world readable.
None of what you listed is a reason to not to use a real blog.
If I want to find random rare opinion X from a casual person, now I have to search youtube to find something useful unfortunately. Youtube videos are a lot slower to digest than the equivalent blog article, and take more time to make. But since youtube can give you money, thats where people go.
If you want to join the TestFlight which will start within the next few days, find @illumineX on Twitter.
(I founded illumineX in 1998, and iBlogger was one of the first apps on the iPhone App Store in 2008.)
This happened to me. One of my first blog posts pre-2005 made it to the front page of Digg/Reddit. With only AdSense ads I managed to make $20-$30 day for a few days. I tried writing a few follow ups but never again "caught lightening in a bottle".
IF I had kept blogging consistently, I'd now most likely have a nice side income.
Maybe we need to bring back a webrings but with a modern spin.
I went from Drupal based blog to Hugo and then I stopped blogging. I used to write a post every six months or so. This was long enough to forget how to use Hugo, so I stopped. Lame excuse I know.
[0]: https://blog.ryjones.org/
[1]: https://gist.github.com/ryjones/73739f6a7e662b9ed9ba64d9141f...
It's delightful! I've discovered so many cool blogs! It made building the tool take twice as long as it should have, as I kept finding myself reading extensively from a delightful personal blog.
Check it out!
Also built with a custom static site generator (https://github.com/owenshen24/Volta), like many other blogs in the comments here. Woot for customizability and self-expression.
I wrote a post about a precursor to blogging, which was “Everything / Nothing” websites:
https://ease.gg/2020/05/07/everything-nothing/
Does anyone here remember those days?
If you miss the old days of blogging I think you’ll enjoy watching vlogs.
Ask HN: What niche blogs are worthwhile to follow? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21928170
There's really never been a better time to control your site, own your content and start working on your voice.
Read David Perell for more the benefits of writing publicly more often.
When I hit a problem and solve it I'll usually make a blog post about it on my personal blog. I try to share as many random learnings and other tidbits from my career on my blog. There are even some search terms where my blog comes up in the top 1-5.
There aren't any less blogs now than there ever have been, other content is just more prolific these days.
That said, I rarely read company blog posts any more as many companies seem to be phoning it in. Writing high quality blog posts likely to be useful to an audience is a lot of work.
I’d love to see the return of blogs as a priority not an after thought done mostly for SEO.
When something becomes "too cheap to meter", someone will immediately start working on a better meter.
Blog can never go back to be the most popular media. However, blogs will continue to specialize in long form articles, e.g. tutorials, how-to, reviews, ebook, courses, etc
Furthermore, most people choose to "blog" on the major platforms, probably because it's easier and they don't care about ownership of content or monetisation or anything.
Sad imo, but it's just a reflection of how the majority thinks.
It's a huge uphill battle if you do care about such things. Don't go blaming them. That sounds an awful lot like victim blaming.
You want to see more blogging, help people succeed instead of adding more baggage to their path.
One could use WordPress or Hugo. Or a Reddit account. The latter brings instant viewership and feedback. The former gives you more control.
There's no fight here, people choose what they want.
I have a zillion blogs. I'm telling you from firsthand experience that it's hard to get traffic, it's hard to monetize, etc. So it's unsurprising that some people go "Fuck it. I don't care. I'm just going to talk somewhere on the internet."
And the irony is even if you go that route, people will give you hell. One of the most common criticisms I get on HN boils down to "Bitch, go start a blog and stop leaving long comments on HN telling us about your life." when I have a zillion blogs and I'm pretty choosy about what I say here.
This is the reason platforms are far more popular than blogs - people don't have this knowledge of setting up web servers that we take for granted. And even if they did, there's no benefit.
https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...
Current attempts:
Zeronet: https://zeronet.io/
Secure Scuttlebutt: https://scuttlebutt.nz/
I wonder when writing does the content have to provide something to the reader eg. teach them something. I like to just write as I build something but I think people don't want to read it if it's not cleaned up/packaged and has value.
I think of it like a live stream where you just tune in for noise.
What I miss is the public forum and chat. True, it still exists in English, but in my native language, Japanese, these are long lost in the Internet.
And it’s the first page on google for blog catalogue
Today no one will read the blog unless I push them from twitter or youtube or facebook.
People post photos/videos/comments with less investment and get better viewship.
I used to maintain one (mostly because I worked with other engineers who fetishized blogging and encouraged everybody to blog). I eventually lost interest.
Does it stem from Usenet?
Writing for years, and only now I start to see more visitors per day as well as other sorts of traction. Don’t be discouraged and write something that you yourself would enjoy reading.
I feel like the internet moved on from reading walls of text, and if I don't get with the times, I'll just become irrelevant.
I blog semi irregurally on my blogger.com blog. Read dozens of blogs every week. Just added a couple new blogs.
Maybe it depends on subject. All of the above are rpg and warfare blogs.
Here are some of them, a feed with lots of them.
I don't get it. When was the last time you looked?
There's more good stuff to read online than you could ever read. There are probably even more blogs than ever before, blogs just don't have the same slice of the pie that they once did.
Seems like when people complain there's nothing good to watch anymore. I suspect that they are so accustomed to having so much material to watch that they confuse their lack of looking for lack of content as they're so used to the next thing to do served to them by recommendation engines.
In other words, this just sounds like another "ugh nothing is good" circlejerk, a subject unfortunately destined for upvotes on HN.
It's very popular on HN to yearn for the good old days of the internet instead of realizing that we're in them right now.
More importantly, it's also likely you that's changing more than the internet. Maybe a decade or two ago you were looking for blogs while these days you just stop by Reddit and HN. And assume anything you don't find on Reddit/HN is probably dead or dying, you're not going to look. In fact I guarantee that's what going on most of the time in these posts.
Kinda like how almost everyone reading this who used to use an RSS reader doesn't use one anymore. Not because RSS is dead or all of the blogs evaporated overnight. But because we just don't use the internet like that anymore.
I think TFA is closer to a nostalgic obituary for how OP used to use the internet, and they remember those as good ol days, and they are mistaking this flicker of nostalgia for some overarching commentary on the New Internet.
So you saying that browsing reddit had replaced the “old ways”. That is exactly the problem, this was not an option. If those blogs or sites never appear in search engines, blogrolls are gone, archives have been deleted (eg Tumblr), delicious/stumbleupon/etc are gone, how do you find them? The internet and how content is distributed has changed a lot, it’s disingenuous to just dismiss it as nostalgia.
On RSS, maybe you forgot that google mangled it in 2013? They shut down the most popular RSS reader without warning, and around the same time most large platforms stopped providing full content via feeds, to drive traffic to their site == ad revenue. RSS went from being a major source of traffic for blogs, to 1-2% of visitors. Of course people will stop using it if stops giving you content and your software is gone.
What you’re seeing with platforms like Medium is it centralizes content discovery. That’s powerful. But it doesn’t mean blogs have disappeared.
- It takes a lot of time to write well especially every day.
- Most couldn’t make a living on it because Google’s whole model is to underpay for content and Google has a monopoly on ads.
Twitter is absolutely the worst thing to happen to the internet. Low effort, inherently self-aggrandizing and standoffish, literally impossible to express a complex or nuanced thought. The only people I know who regularly engage with Twitter are extreme narcissists and conformist thinkers, and yet all of Twitter considers themselves to be the Important People. This mentality has crept into all spheres of public life.
Good blogging requires effort, effective communication and something interesting and original to say. Those days are long gone.
It's a supply and demand issue, not a tool's existence.
My twitter feed is 95% weird humor and cool art/tech projects. It takes some work but it's doable.
It's not a good place for conversation. And that's ok, as long as users understand these limitations and there's an alternative (blogs or forums) that interested participants can turn to.
A column in tweetdeck can be a user, a search, a list, a hashtag, and more. Every column shows ever tweet and they mostly come in realtime.
I think it's been years since I posted anything on twitter.
This is arguable. The very idea and existence of non-profit organisations are proof.
The privacy ok until the content has issue then ... it is a hard question.
Not sure about the no focus part. I go to a blog at least the person is the focus and usually even for hobbits they have focus.
The one I go to everyday is still a blog
https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...
Other that or ipfs.
Could be a great way to find 'unpopular' content
https://medium.com/@solidi/the-one-about-blogging-cd9e65a205...
The discovery? I am interested in humanist side of software development. With writing once every 2 months for 3.5 years, this small but impactful finding changed my life and focus.
There's WordPress, Ghost, and static site builders, all amazing self-hosted solutions. They're hosted on your own domain, meaning you own your content and control your audience. This type of decentralized blogging makes it difficult for writers to find audiences, and it's typically hard for readers to find relevant content. These blogs are all over the internet, and only a few can make it to the top of Google. Setup, maintenance, and server administration are large barriers for those simply looking for a place to write something.
Of course, there's also Tumblr and Medium. I'm actually a fan of the idea of having more centralized blogging platforms, because they give writers audiences right out of the box. It takes just a few minutes to start a blog and begin writing your first post. But these platforms limit creators' ability to own their content, and even go to lengths to make content less accessible to readers. I especially don't like Medium's paywall approach, nor their policy towards not allowing custom domains.
Nowadays, there is so many of above that simply finding meaningful read is really hard work. I guess we are race of attention seekers (money and fame), some of them justifiably as they have really new inspiring ideas, other not so much. One Flappy Bird and gazillion clones. Issue is in global world with 5 billion connected, top of the pyramid is very limited space. And to get into that space is very, very hard.
Anonymity never worked, as because of shared data across cookies and huge number of cross referencing vectors, it is easy do identify any person. GDPR does not help much. So, do I agree of anonymity no, maybe for a change everything should be transparent, if you have crazy idea, and you wish to say, because you broadcasting to wide population then you have to be prepared to face consequences. Also if people would bully writer because of what s/he said they should post their comments only as identifiable personas.