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Comment by ricardo81 | Hacker News Reader

It's easier to put things online wrt technical barrier of entry and cost, but it's a lot harder for things to get seen.

Got a popular page on Facebook? pay for it to be seen. Got a great unique website? Pay to be seen via Adwords.

Website owners don't link so liberally as they once did because the link graph has been obliterated by "what people think will please Google" rather than linking to things they think other people might like to see.

When I used FB I lost count of the number of times I had to re-jig my setting for displaying content from "most popular" (according to them) versus most recent.

I still find that when I'm browsing Facebook. I see an article with XXXX number of comments and try to see what's newly been said, it's almost impossible- it's like I'm fighting against what new information is available vs their preferred method of displaying things due to the technical limitations of how they store information.

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> it's a lot harder for things to get seen.

Here's something I've always wondered: I don't really get this obsession with maximizing the number of people who go to one's web page. If you're just a regular person who's not profiting from ads or something, it shouldn't matter.

If I post something to the internet, I maybe send it to a few people who might want to see it and that's it. I don't care about collecting pageviews, or likes, or follows, or upvotes, or any of these vanity metrics. It doesn't really matter to me if something I wrote was viewed by 10 people, 1000 people, or 100,000 people. Who cares? What difference does it make? My life is not richer because thousands of random people read some blog post or forum comment.

The only reason I can see to promote some creative work is if you're making a profit off of it. In that case, it's an investment. Spend $X on discovery and make $Y in revenue from ads or conversions or whatever. But just to put up some web site about your stamp collection? Who cares how many people visit?

Indeed. Why publish your journal at all?

I think you're seeing it out of context.

I'd agree, it's not about volume.

I'd disagree about your supposition of an 'maximizing the number of people who go to one's web page', which the rest of your post alludes to. Most smart online marketers are concerned with conversions rates, not volume of visitors. ROI as you mention with $X and $Y

The point is about how people discover new information. As an end user, on which platform, how that platform allows me to discover the new information, are there platform or result alternatives etc etc.

IF we're reducing my online information discovery to "how advertisers can effectively make an ROI out of me", especially from one or two portals, I suspect the outcome is I'm being duped or at the very least, shortchanged of all the other sources that should be available to me.

Almost anyone who publishes something wants people to read it. The ones who don’t care how many people read their ideas don’t publish — they keep it to themselves or just discuss it with friends.

Sounds somewhere in between Plato: 'Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something'

Note that you learn to generate valuable things to say by saying things.

People will read it if you link to it contextually. I made a throwaway video demonstrating the 125mhz Ethernet carrier for that etherify HN post a month or so ago. I posted the link in a mid-level comment. 200 people watched the video.

Today we view that number as approximately zero. But that's past Dunbar's number. That's more people than I will have any kind of meaningful relationship with simultaneously. Most people would get a little nervous standing up in front of 200 people and saying anything.

Our sense of scale has been mutated.

It is astonishing that you have to state this manifestly evident fact.

Since I do currently earn money from my programming tutorials, let me tell you about my blog in the late aughts.

I wrote hundreds of pieces about language learning, teaching and elementary school-aged education. One benefit from that work was that it helped me grow as a teacher and later as a curriculum designer. But that wasn't the whole thing. I made friends from that blog.

I also got emails from teachers living all over the world, asking questions and thanking me for the topic. Cambridge University Press contacted me and purchased rights to some of my writing and distributed it far further than I ever could have.

Given the assumption that the content really was useful, more people seeing it meant better educational outcomes for many, many young students that I'll never meet.

The reach of media is a multiplier for its impact.

It sounds like you made something beneficial for the web in which your peers agreed.

How about in 2020, would you agree that the amount of visibility your site gets is dependent on FB and G algos? Even if the content is evergreen? Of course that disregards other sites making new things but I'd say your value is not diminished either way.

Social media was a major source of blog traffic 10-15 years ago and now it's negligible (see Rand Fishkin's talks for more on this).

Google has also been keeping more and more traffic within its ecosystem, but it's still by far the largest remaining source for most independent sites.

The landscape for independents to get even traffic, let alone comments is very, very different than it was. As fb and reddit grew, my site comments reduced by over 80% while traffic was flat. Readers who had been around for years continued but newer visitors stopped.

For a while social media shares made up the difference, but over time social media traffic dropped to less than 5% of its original level. I started seeing less and less value in what I'd once thought was evergreen content.

Then, I changed careers to software. It wasn't because of the drop in RSS readers, blog commenters, etc, but those changes did decrease my enthusiasm about blogging as a social activity.

That’s great, thanks. But do I need to slaughter and sacrifice my privacy to Facebook and the public space to trolls and fake news optimized for virality?

Reach out?

Find presence on a specialized platform rather than generic portal containers steered by proprietary algorithms.

It wasn’t about views, it was about feeling that you’re part of a community. If nobody can get to your pages then no comunity.

There used to be a time when websites were linking eachother and the information sharing formed a wonderful community. At first, search engines were indexing these webpages but those times are unfortunately over. Now the community turned into walled gardens.

Why post it at all if you don't care?

Why not? I put all sorts of notes, random thoughts, and guides to the web. It’s nice if someone else benefits from it, but the goal is really to keep notes for myself or that I can directly share with someone else. It’s great to have it easily accessible from any device with a web browser from anywhere.

Kind of what blogging was about (and still can be).

There is one place where you can guarantee your information and exchange of ideas is easily seen, paying little to no money.

Comments.

Comments are the final frontier. Why do you think I never bother getting a personal blog website off the ground? Because the traffic it gets pales in comparison to the audience I get from writing comments. This comment for instance might be seen by several hundred people, all within my target demographic. How many people might see my longform blog content? Maybe dozens if I'm lucky. I've never really written a meaningful blog post, but I've probably written a novel's worth of comments.

And because comments aren't really written for monetary gains, they are one of purest forms of writing left on the internet today. People still write comments liberally and openly, speaking their mind and even voicing unpopular opinions, because they don't give a shit about what Google thinks. Google doesn't read comments. Say the quiet parts loudly.

Maybe someday there will be an age where you can be certain almost every comment you read is already bought and paid for by some corporate interest or a guerrilla advertiser, but fortunately we are still not there yet.

If we do nothing about it there will be a time like that with comments interspersed with ads or not being able to read a full comment without clicking some ad to unhide the rest of the comment. Im still behind adblockers but am not sure how future proof they are

I get what you're saying, because you might have a lot to say about topics in comment sections where it matters and in topics you know a lot about.

But there's some comment sections where you say something and it gets filtered out. What say you after this? I'm sure you're aware of shadow banning/filtering, which YouTube at least does, perhaps other large platforms.

Maybe a case in point. There was a referendum in Scotland about independence from the UK. There was a very prominent blog ranked in Google regarding the question of aye/nay, but you found that the comments were moderated towards one disposition.

If all the funnels point to that information source, the comments are almost useless, especially so if they're curated towards one conclusion. We're relying on a middle man (or many middle men) offering a variety of conclusions which we should reach ourselves, rather than one hand delivered to us by one or two algorithms and/or social engineering.

Diversity, basically, not just in results, but opinions and conclusions.

How would you have been able to get people to see your great unique website 20 years ago? I don't remember it being easy to get a large audience at any point in the internet's history.

Word of mouth. Post in some relevant chats/forums. Get a handful of other people interested, have them spread the word (links/chat) for you.

Posting in a subreddit will likely get you more traffic than you would have gotten back then.

For a couple of hours, then it's forgotten.

You build a site with unique content, decent layout, design. Email other website owners "Hi, I think this would be would be a decent resource for your 'other resources' page / your visitors might like this". (as opposed to ... what other means do you discover new content?)

Only, no one does link pages anymore, because they're fearful of platform algos deciding that their inbound/outbound link profile is toxic.

What I'm after is a more decentralised Internet, less black box algo, where people link to whatever they want without cutting off their oxygen, or having to pay for exposure. Might be idealistic, but FB/Google have certainly been diagnosed as part of the problem.

In my case, getting a good link from harvard.edu really helped wrt search. And obviously a great link from Harvard drived traffic by itself.

Just a hint for the downvoters, that's how it was done 20 years ago. Nowadays due to systemic link building spam, perhaps not. I'm addressing the above reply is all.

Linking liberally to a wide range of domains is seen as a net positive in SEO.

SEO isn't as complicated as anyone makes it out to be. It's really simple.

Not sure where you're coming from wrt SEO. Get 100 SEOs in a room together and you get 100 different opinions.

But when it comes to linking, people generally link out less. I can't source anything right now, but the information is available, perhaps through Majestic that shows that over time, people are more shy about linking out to the wider web, anecdotally, from fear of being penalised for doing so.

The threat of having a bad outlink meaning your inbound organic search traffic disappears means people err on the side of caution.

I'm not saying they don't. I'm saying they're wrong to do so. [1]

The amount of links you can shove into a page before it makes any negative impact is very high.

1. https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-outgoing-link-ex...

I think this has stopped working not because of platform fear, but because it no longer solves a problem. Back in the day, good content was scarce and discovery was hard. These days neither is true. If my to-read list weren't already overflowing, 30 minutes poking around on Twitter would fill it right up.

+1. Twitter's timeline """solved""" [0] the content recommendation and scalability problems in forums and mailing lists. The large newsgroups in the late 90s Usenet were already unreadable (unless you have an elaborate filter), but all Twitter needs is to ask their users to follow people relevant to their interests.

[0] Of course only partially "solved" with many limitations. Just like how Twitter's predecessors Reddit and Hacker News "solved" the same problem by voting with their respective limitations.

Think there's a bit chicken and egg with that one. Back in the day Google relied on DMOZ (and perhaps relies on Wiki a little nowadays, WRT knowledge entities). Search (and social) rely on signals to indicate that something is of relevance... you're sort of implying that the monopolies and their single perspectives on how information should be ordered is satisfactory for us right now.

Sometimes there's 10's, 100's or 1000's of pages/sites that are relevant to what we are searching for. All I'd say is that if we diversified the way in which we search/discover new information a little bit more, there's less reliance on a platform or a single algorithm- to me that sounds healthier.

It is totally worth remembering that as much as the likes of Google and FB control a huge share of browsing time and clicks, their algos don't make them the arbiters of truth and information discovery. Sounds quite daft to say it but that is pretty much what the reality is of the modern web- if the portals don't want to rank you, you aren't seen.

I am definitely not implying that.

Twitter lets anybody publish small things. And it lets anybody select a set of accounts and get a time-ordered list of what they've published. That's how I use it. I follow a couple thousand interesting people, ones who tend to point to other interesting people and articles. If at any point I'm bored, I can drink from a firehose of good content.

I also maintain a feed reader, which is how I follow people who have their own sites. But I don't need to use those sites for discovery, the pattern you describe in the old days. Discovery just isn't a problem I have much. These days, my problem is filtering down to what I actually have time to read.

So something like stumbleupon with a search bar to search for certain topics?

I think what you're missing here is simply how much larger the Internet is now than it was in the romanticized past. If there was ever a time where you could reliably establish a meaningful distribution platform by personally emailing individual webmasters, surely it was a time where there was an extremely small number of regular web visitors. In fact, I would be willing to bet that, right now, the world of independent webmasters using traditional hyperlinks and eschewing the current megaplatforms is vastly larger than it was in the time you're recalling. Which is to say, you can probably reach a larger audience today using those distribution techniques than you could in the time you're recalling. You just will obviously have a much much smaller portion of today's web visitors.

I'm not buying either of the points, about romanticising or the portion.

What means to do we have of discovering new content, right now. All the eyeball time on social media, all the searches done for the most part on Google.

You've basically two methods of discovering new things when considering the sum time of everyone who might recommend something they've seen.

That's not romantic at all to me!

FWIW I don't think the link hunting of 20 years ago was systematically better, but it was definitely more individually minded, problem is it's been systematically spammed/undermined as well as the SEO issues I've mentioned so people are generally going to ignore 'link suggestions'

My main point is, diversify away from one or two central platforms. The issue is their consensus of what should and shouldn't be seen and the size of the market behind this.

What are the two methods?

I have received quite a few visitors from a Reddit post on the right subreddit. Hackernews posts generate a lot of traffic. You can also advertise on a number of platforms.

The two methods are the social and search portals that command the majority of time that Western world people spend their time on.

I'm not saying that reddit or HN aren't dead ends but we're talking about the main arteries of information discovery. I'm sure we can agree the general populous don't have the nous to regularly visit HN or subscribe to relevant subreddits, the question is how do they find their information and conclusions.

You could join a webring, or link to related people and ask them to link back. Given that there was no financial incentive to get traffic (if anything the opposite), there weren't so many pages with duplicate content (or no actual content at all) competing for attention.

There were are also far fewer person-minutes in front of an Internet-connected screen.

I had a website back in the late 90s/early 2000s that was one of the most popular sites for its niche (at the time) topic. It was on several topical Webrings and got noticed enough to get several of those silly thinly-veiled advertising "<company's> choice on the web" award badges.

If I brought that site up today as it was then I doubt it would show up on the first 3 pages of a Google search for the topic. But hay, at least you could view it with noscript turned on.

> Got a popular page on Facebook? pay for it to be seen.

And if you stop paying Facebook will severely limit any organic traffic to your page. That should be illegal, unfortunately it is not being viewed as something serious, meanwhile Facebook gets showered with billions extracted out of small businesses.

> due to the technical limitations of how they store information.

Has nothing to do with technical limitations and everything with engagement metrics. Facebook does not want to show you what you want to see, they want to show you what will hook you and keep you in the platform. If anything, it takes more resources to show their view than just a time posted order.

Not sure I agree, because you can fiddle between "most popular" vs "most recent" and sometimes the "most recent" cannot be seen at all! It's as if they're unavailable, or, too many hops away to be available.

And if it's a case of guessing what's going to be engaged more with, I want to see everything and make my own choice.

wrt to resources, perhaps they index one or the other and they make their choice rather than mine.

> Facebook does not want to show you what you want to see, they want to show you what will hook you and keep you in the platform.

Sounds like drug dealers. I'm not hooked to their platform because they don't show me what I want to see. But what you said imply that there is some addictive content that people would normally avoid, but Facebook helps them get addicted. Truly evil. I'm not active Facebook user so I don't know how it goes there.

> ... vs preferred method of displaying things due to the technical limitations of how they store information.

I don’t believe that is what the platform is doing. It is displaying content the user will most likely interact with, resulting in the user staying on the platform longer. It seems quite dangerous to me, as it could cause users to assign some sort of weight to the content, particularly if the content is well liked by others it could lead to the belief that ‘this is the correct information’.

> It's easier to put things online wrt technical barrier of entry and cost, but it's a lot harder for things to get seen.

On the other hand it can be too easy for too many people to be seen: spam.

Which makes you wish for more curated and controlled platforms.

And that’s why we have moderators and upvotes and downvotes.

> it's a lot harder for things to get seen

Do you think it was easier in the age before the internet to be gain an audience?

Not GP, but I believe they meant it is a lot harder for things to get seen on the Internet now than it was on the Internet before, not IRL before.

That might be it. The GGP was talking about the history of civilization, so it could be either way.

I was born in '81 so I'm probably not qualified to say.

I made a site in the late 90's, biology-online.org which I harried universities and whatnot to link to which they happily obliged, ad-free educational content laid out well. Nowadays that kind of solicitation is ignored. All I'm saying is it was easier then than what it is now, and large platforms deciding what gets seen and what isn't certainly doesn't grease the wheels of discovery.

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