I mean, even if you don't want to make money from your cool project or tutorial or whatever, you still want people to see it.
But man, I really hate Medium.
After switching to my own I re-wrote one of the articles of my old blogspot posts (word for word) and because my custom solution was so much easier on the eye, the post picked up and I got TV and Radio interview requests, etc.
Even reddit and hn hugs and thousands of concurrent users didn't bring it down.
You don't need Medium, you need to write stuff that people are interested in reading.
I had used Hugo before, but I'm learning some Full Stack dev now (I work in Data Science, so it isn't my main work) and making a blog could be a good exercise.
To be honest, this sounds like profit thinking as well. Why would one need "wide audience" when it's about their interest and hobbies? They need sincere search engines, that's all.
It's like sending invitations to your birthday party. It feels bad when just one person shows up.
> They need sincere search engines, that's all.
What exactly are you suggesting to the content creators?
That is called vanity in one word.
> What exactly are you suggesting to the content creators?
If it really is a hobby, one enjoys it on it's own. The "showcase" part shouldn't be essential for one to take joy in the process.
My recommendation is to find a space where one can share what they achieved, but it really doesn't (shouldn't) need to be a "wide audience", rather the opposite: a group of people who actually enjoy the same things. Enthusiasts, maybe even fans.
Showcasing isn't essential, but it can increase the enjoyment and it can benefit the others. That's why we have art galleries, trade fairs, talent shows, and Show HN threads.
I specifically asked about how "They need sincere search engines, that's all." What exactly content creators should do about it? Make their own, sacrificing time from their main hobby? Maybe one already exists. But then they need to tell their potential fans about it. How would they contact them? They might not even be aware they exist. I guess they could wait until the new sincere search engine reaches critical mass. But what until then?
As for the "wide audience", consider this. At one point in their lives, fans were part of the wide audience. They weren't born fans; they became them over time. So why shouldn't the content creators try to capture new fans from the larger audience? They don't have to - becoming too mainstream is a thing after all. But if they choose to do so, why not? Unless you oppose the creators growing their fans and popularity, in which case I don't know what to say.
Isn't this is a problem that search engines were intended to solve? Before they went into the ad business, I mean?
Google's daily search stats are getting harder to find, but with 3.8 billion Internet users and probably a few billion searches/day, it's likely single-digit searches per person per day, as a mean.
Algorithmic/stream discovery, as on Facebook, or HN, is at least an order of magnitude higher.
The big fish use up so much oxygen that the little fish in the pond shrivel up. They live, but in a stunted form.
All are inherently rivalrous
Even discounting any financial returns, howling into the void / winking in the dark fails to accomplish anything if there is no receiver or audience.
Ms. Typeset might be engaging in a form of personal journaling or meditation, but in a world that has so many competing distractions her curation is never shared, or even where perhaps it is but the potential community of interest, and the discovery tools possibly reaching it, are fractured and distracted to the point of dissolution ... the effort to communicate and gains of doing so are lost.
Mind that large audiences really aren't communities -- I'm talking Facebook or national broadcast scale. As Dave Winer observed, conversation doesn't scale very well. Dialogue between two people is its most intense form, and past a handfull of participants or so, what remains is mostly a set of serial monologues. Above 15 or so, the graph starts trending increasingly to a star, with one broadcaster and numerous recievers, collectively an audience. At sufficient scale, selling that audience to those who'd hope to advert its attention to their own message becomes a principle commercialisation model. The baiting message tends to the minimum viable common basis.
At extreme levels of specialisation, such as, say, aa maths PhD, the relevant community might easily fit in a small classroom. Possibly in a single car. My cursory analysis of Google+ communities by size and activity levels suggests diminishing returns above about 10,000 registered members, of whom perhaps 1--10% were highly active, so 100--1,000 participants, roughly within Dunbar's Number range. Extremely large groups are visible but not especially useful --- most seemed overrun with spam and memes.
Pursuit of that audience tends strongly to sacrifice or ignore nuanced, specialist, or niche interests, to the point of actively trying to steer potential members of such groups to the larger, and more monetisable, vulgar pool.
My own seeking of expressive outlets is an increasingly frustrating trade-off between the expressivity of the tools themselves (mostly formatting and media capabilities), technical hosting issues, audience discovery and cultivation, search, and related concerns. I'm hoping to learn, share, and discover. The sense that this used to be more viable back in the days when I used Usenet and mailing lists may be a Golden Age illusion, but its a damnedably persistent one.
I disagree strongly. My complaints are not merely theoretical. Addressed in the Reddit post below and the three internally-linked articles. That subreddit itself is a failed experiment at community-building and fostering. One of several. (There's also been the rare modest success.)
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/8rq08y/i_wont_...
There was a time that intelligent conversation was ... reasonably easy to find online. You'd head to the appropriate Usenet group, later an email list, or, for a time, Slashdot.
Hacker News seems to be about as close to that as I can find at the moment. It has numerous flaws, and it definitely has its own niche. The moderation philosophy is excellent and the practice nearly always lives up to the goals.
I came to have a strong appreciation for the site by voicing disagreements to dang, generally in email, and though I sometimes disagree with specific decisions, the actions which are made are in general fair and serve the site's goals. The increasing politicisation over the past four-plus years has clearly been problematic, but HN's breasting of that surge has been largely admirable. Not that the occasional thread doesn't fall flat, and not that there aren't rampant attempts at manipulation. But as a whole, and compared to other platforms, the bottom's not fallen out, and the site's not become a complete cesspit.
Usenet was small. I've a copy of John Quarterman's The Matrix, an overview of online conversation forums and networks published in 1990 (it covers Usenet, it does not include WWW or Gopher). That includes DEC's estimates of Usenet activity. The total population with access was ~880,000, and I believe fewer than 150,000 active participants (posting activity). HN alone, a minuscule site by modern standards, is roughly comparable in size (precise statistics don't seem available, though this is my general understanding).
Usenet also had high barriers to entry, though based largely on interest and aptitude (by way of university campus access) rather than market-based rationing. Campus-based administration also helped moderate behaviour, though more overt mechanisms had to be developed with time, and ultimately Usenet could not scale to the hygenic-controls needs of a multimillion-user network, on several fronts, so discussion migrated elsewhere. (Yes, a tiny fraction remains on Usenet, but for all intents, it's dead, Jim. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_use...)
It's not that you get trapped in some ED mutual admiration society. It's that the folks trying to launch or join an earnest discussion ... often cannot.
I do fundamentally believe that markets and information goods are a poor match. Attempts to "market it harder" to fix news, academic publishing, ratings, community, and most of all, conversation, seem to be a category error. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...
Advertising seems remarkably pernicious, particular in its adtech instantiation.
Bitcoin ... well, that's another story ;-)
We don't want just the fruits of everyone's hobbyist weekend warrior free-time. We want it to be profitable to make the stuff we want to consume so that we get better content than hobby/charity content.
Also, most things aren't hobbyist cheap. Even in the era you're looking upon nostalgically, consider message boards. You'd either use a freemium solution like Proboards/Ezboard or you'd pay for hosting which could cost you $100+/mo if your forum was popular.
I have a feeling every time people talk about the old hobbyist internet, they're talking about brochure Angelfire websites they themselves never spent all that much time on. Most people want better content than that just like most people want to watch Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, not hobbyists on Youtube.
Yet these threads always sound like "remember the good ol days before Breaking Bad when it was just hobbyist vlogs on Youtube? ahh, those were the days even though I didn't watch vlogs, they were boring."
Maybe things were different before the AOL era back when there was almost nothing online that we want to do online today, but I'm in my 30s and first got internet in the 90s with AOL and "profit motives" were always the driving force for why there were compelling things to do online, like playing Age of Empires multiplayer through MSN's Internet Gaming Zone platform in 1997.
> We want it to be profitable to make the stuff we want to consume so that we get better content than hobby/charity content.
We, huh? The most enriching content you've ever encountered on the web, was it churned out by the likes of about.com? The places you've had the most meaningful conversations, were they on platforms that regularly purge and actively censor content they deem not to be advertiser friendly? What you are describing sounds a lot more like network television to me. If you just want to zone out in front of the latest episode of "Dancing with the Stars", you already have that option.
I get the kneejerk assumption that if something even approaches the potential of being nostalgic, it must be the product of delusion. But that really isn't applicable here, as we all know the ways that technology and infrastructure has been twisted to benefit commercial interests at the expense of everyone else.
The friction point is not so much presenting/hosting content as "discovery" - finding interesting new people and new content. And that's much more complicated because it's full of perverse incentives.
Very true but with a few notable exceptions - successes such geek_at says he's had, others have pointed out that self-funded, self-hosted sites don't get the large visitor coverage of the big conglomerate/commercial sites. This stands to reason and it's a damn shame.
It seems to me a way around this would be to have a common universally-wide index type site where all the free, no-ads, no spying sites would be listed.
Similarity, this index site would be spy-free, no ads and free for visitors to use but those listed would pay a small listing fee to cover site running costs. To keep listing costs to a minimum the site would be non profit, revenue-neutral and run as a cooperative society or similar non profit structure.
To stop cohersive pressures from commercial interests, commercial, for profit sites/businesses would not be allowed to list.
The site itself would be indexed and cross referenced along topic lines using the Dewey Decimal Classification system or similar schemes that libraries use to classify books.
This would have the advantage of grouping likemined/likekind websites together in ways that were easy for visitors to browse from one to another. The listing for each site could also include a short description.
This index site would cover just about every topic imaginable and thus attract many sites for listing which would provide economies of scale. For example:
- Trades/Woodworking/Cabinetmaking
- Science/Physics/QM/Quantum Field Theory/Yang-Mills
- Philosophy/Utilitarianism/Jeremy Bentham
Right, the site could easily contain interests as diverse as any book library, and it could even have its own internal search engine.
It seems to me that we desperately need such an independant nonprofit site on the web. It's our only reasonable hope of escaping the centralization created by Facebook, Google, etc.
(these are popular with library nerds, but in practice the public wants a constant feed of links + discussion in some form, whether that's slashdot, digg, reddit, or twitter)
What I will say is that taxonomy and classification systems in general are problematic and have always been so. Anyone who has ever tried to sort and classify stuff knows this! I'm forever sorting the myriad of stuff on my PCs, smartphones, etc. into various classifications and then into appropriately named directories and it's an ongoing struggle.
If I dream up too few classifications then I end up with directories that don't have sufficiently specific names to find things, too many and I'll lose items in directories whose names that are a near match but not sufficiently so. If I ignore the obvious catalog/directory naming system and use a program such as Everything that finds stuff anywhere based on name then I'll lose the ability to browse (grouped) like subjects as their names won't necessarily be sufficiently alike. It's all a damn nuisance really.
Then there's the problem of what you classify by: subject, or author's name or physical object (a major problem in a general purpose catalog).
I could write an essay about nomenclature and how it's a significant problem for the web and IT generally. For instance, if people were a little more knowledgeable about taxonomy and classification in general - and that includes both general web users and website owners - then Google could be spared millions in electricity costs due to much more accurate search results first time around.
That said, existing classification systems have their uses even in days where electronic sorting has come into its own. Take a physical book library for instance, I'll check out some subject in the catalog index then go to the book in question - and, as more often than not, I'll browse many of the nearby books on the same subject. The fact that they're grouped together by subject is very useful. If they were grouped alphabetically then this would not be possible.
I take your point that in practice the public's constant need for links, discussion etc. However, I don't see this as inconsistent with what I've suggested, especially so if one doesn't take a one-system-fits-all approach as is so often the case not only on the web but with software in general.
For instance, with Windows 8 when Microsoft moved away from the traditional IBM/CUA-like GUI to its new Metro GUI, it didn't allow users a choice to retain the old GUI. This programmer-know-best arrogrance permeates both software and the web like a bad smell and it does nobody any good.
I see no reason why the site I'm suggesting can't have multiple methods of access. The Dewey-type, search a la Everything, and also those along the lines you've suggested. Moreover, there's no reason it cannot have user comments in the same way Hacker News does.
The key to its success would be in having wide appeal - by providing both casual and sophisticated users a service suitable for each. As the saying goes, to each according to his/her needs.
On the other hand, I only have my experience to go on. I have no idea what youtube is like for everyone, only myself.
I hate all the tech blog posts that seem not about actually sharing useful info but instead about reputation building. I have no idea how much of youtube is that or if it will degenerate to that at some point. Maybe because the tech blog posts don't make money, only rep, they're being used to farm rep.
note: i'm not dissing all tech blogs. There are tons of people who write great and informative posts. I'm just saying that I run into enough that seem like they aren't about sharing, they're about rep farming, and it seems like a phenomenon
Once upon a time premium TV stations, like HBO, had no ads. After all, you were paying for them directly. Then they realized they could charge you a monthly subscription fee and show ads.
And all the theorizing about "but then a competitor that doesn't show ads would take all their customers" hasn't really panned out.
So I imagine the same thing would happen on the internet. Companies have all discovered that most people are willing to tolerate ads almost everywhere, giving them "free" revenue. So we get ads on things we pay for: Kindles, Microsoft Windows, etc.
I don't actually consider this remotely likely, but the world is getting weirder, so I'm not writing off the highly improbable so easily.
Read here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26034131
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=htt...
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=no&tl=en&u=htt...
I see what you're saying, but you're referring to something like a "market-based solution" to this problem. The one and only market-based outcome is the one we have. This is a case of imperfect information. There's no reason to expect a market-only approach to deliver a desirable outcome when one party has so much more information than the other.
If a paid service engages in data mining in violation of its own ToS, it is liable to be punished by law as soon as that leaks, so that’s another counter-incentive.
The expectation of free service is what enables shady practices: new companies can hardly compete on price with a giant that doesn’t charge money and is incentivised to keep users locked in by making migration to another service difficult.
Will it lose some users? Sure. Most? No.
You can buy a tv costing 4 digits that happily will harvest data and show you ads.
Second, context matters. Buying a TV is different from setting up a commenting system for your site. In one case you want to consume, in the other to be a service provider (you have a website, possibly generate profit from it, probably know what JavaScript is). Moreover, you are unlikely to be able to make your own TV, but you are much more likely to be able to set up your own commenting system if you can’t find a company to handle that responsibly.
So never? People don't read the ToS and certainly don't judge services by it. It seems people have come to accept surveillance capitalism as a fact of life
Most news is not actionable for the person reading it, except for popular apps where there are most users. The information needs to get to the right people at the right time to be actionable.
Of course, there’s no “justice” to speak of if you get stuff for free, so paid social is where it’s at. Paying customer to service provider relationship is radically different from one of a product-to-dealer.
Normalising free service is exactly what incumbent de-facto monopolies want, it empowers them and destroys any potential for competition. They hate paying users because that’d mean actual responsibility and people voting with their money.
Just like paid cable television still includes ads, I fear even paying for content won't alone bring the end of ads and tracking, since providers can always make even more off both subscriptions and tracking...
I'm not seeing it. Newspapers and cable both heavily rely on ads. Credit card fees eat up way too much for small transactions. I had hoped Paypal would have addressed this 20 years ago. They seemed best positioned to bypass traditional credit card companies. Cryptocurrencies seem like it technically could work, but I don't see that happening.
One way around is the iTunes model. Where everything is bundled under a single company (Apple) that negotiates and/or batches transactions with credit card companies--or eats the fee on small transactions as a loss leader for larger ones. Patreon seems like a decent candidate for this. Another benefit of a centralized model is trust an familiarity. I'm more likely to use Apple or Patreon for subscriptions because individual companies suck with alerting you before reoccurring payments or letting you cancel.
How do you see the money side playing out?
Because of the fundamental asymmetry in the law: advertising+tracking don't require AML/KYC, cryptocurrencies (mostly) do.
If your users pay you with their attention or tracking data, you're not required to verify their identities, ask them if they're terrorists, store copies of their passports in some hacker-magnet database, or any of that.
If your users pay you with cryptocurrencies you have to do all of that.
The problem isn't a business problem or a technological problem, it's a regulatory problem. This outrageous double standard is massively subsidizing the adtech-surveillance monster. Require AML/KYC be performed on users before ads can be shown to them, and if ads are shown or data collected without AML/KYC, impose the same "corporate death penalty" allowed for AML/KYC failures. Or else eliminate AML/KYC for cryptocurrencies.
I've used cryptocurrencies here and there for online services (merch and digital services) and don't remember any additional scrutiny. I reasons I had in mind are the confusion and overhead of using crypto for the average person.
I guess if there were some regulatory requirements in a made-up "ideal" scenario, I would see it mirroring existing banks and credit cards where your source wallet was from a "sanctioned" account to track location for local taxes and whatnot. The onus wouldn't be put on the business other than having an allowlist (by prefix or something)--but none of that exists. I would think a lot more structure an institutions would need to exist anyway to make cryptocurrencies more palatable to individuals.
https://preview.redd.it/52bkflf0cld31.jpg?width=462&format=p...
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032158891-Wha...
I disagree with a lot of Brave's approach. However their experience shows that this problem isn't theoretical. One company has already managed to deliver frictionless micropayments, and was told by the government that if they didn't add some friction back in (AML/KYC), executives would be going to prison.
Not cool.
This also led to a real mess with the operators of archive.today, who don't live in the USA and apparently aren't supported by the AML/KYC process being used. So a fairly large amount of money collected in order to support them is stuck and can't be paid out:
https://blog.archive.today/post/626174398020403200/please-pr...
KYC: know your customers
The problem is not everyone has the means to pay for everything.
E.g. what if Youtube and other video sites switched to a paid only model? Youtube is full of educational videos which can help a poor person to learn stuff and make his situation better. Such persons would be at a disadvantage if they can't afford Youtube's fee.
The post tells the paid plans have all the same trackers.
Paid-for might be necessary for non-scummy, but it's certainly not sufficient.