Ask HN: What happened to blogging about programming? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What happened to blogging about programming?

19 pointsbbotond9 comments

10 years ago I could spend a weekend binge reading Joel on Software, Steve Yegge, Coding Horror, Peter Norvig's or ESR's articles. I learned a lot from their writing.

I look back at those days as the golden age of programmer writing. Super smart people who wrote very well.

Nowadays I feel like there is simply no new content that compares to the quality of these blogs/web sites. Why is this so? Or am I mistaken and there is a thriving blogging community I somehow overlooked?

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> Or am I mistaken and there is a thriving blogging community I somehow overlooked?

Code blogging moved almost exclusively to Twitter and Medium, and a lot of what might have been blog content to Youtube.

The same thing that happened to blogging about everything else.

In one dimension, the same thing that happened to Dr. Dobbs and Byte. The world moved on.

In a different dimension, blogging has become a "I am too old for this shit." Believe it or not, Usenet used to be good. Now everything requires massive administrative effort for spam and trolling. And SEO'ing because there's so much noise.

Because business took over, and when that happens people are more focused on looking good than being good. There's also an influx of non-tech people flooding the tech world because they want to do business, which diminishes the quality of tech. This is both good and bad, depends on how you look at it.

Only one reason, Attention span is decreasing.

Too much resources being added every day and month. it is really difficult to filter them. Even google can not do it, when compare the first page result with second page then you will see drastic change in quantity of content.

There are a couple out there but the standards have taken a nose dive.

It’s harder to trust the random website.

There’s so much automatically generated blog spam, and on so many blogs there’s some annoying pop up about services, or even attempts to hostile takeover of the back button, or paywalls..

I don’t think user attention span is decreasing. People are preferring other long form content like youtube and podcasts. In both mediums, you have more control over the consumption of the content and nobody has figured out how to automate spamming that content out yet.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." - Yogi Berra

When everybody has a software blog, then the average quality goes down. Sure, there are still some that are as good as they were in "the good old days", but finding them in the blizzard of mediocre-or-worse is a chore.

Maybe HN is the perfect place to create a curated (or at least vouched-for-by-at-least-someone-here) list of quality software blogs? Anyone with high-quality favorites they want to share?

There have been several "Ask HN" postings asking people to recommend blogs. Here's one from a few months ago that got a lot of discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27302195

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