Bring Back Personal Blogging | Hacker News Reader

Bring Back Personal Blogging

theverge.com

134 pointsalexzeitler85 comments

Blogs never went away. It's just that all the vast majority of the new web users, a number that completely overwhelmed the existing population, went straight into the walled gardens of megacorps. They still haven't become aware of the web at large (partly because web search sucks now). But their perceptions don't effect that the fact blog users and readers still exist.

I think the real title of this article should be, "Introduce Personal Blogging to Smartphone Users".

Right: https://jakeseliger.com/

Anyone who wants to do personal blogging, can. There are few things with lower barriers to entry.

Looks good. What's the Wordpress theme you're using?

Looks like they're using https://themify.me/themes/elemin

Thanks!

Doesn’t help that Google often de-ranks non-corporate content.

They used to ensure a mix of results: some blogs, some forum posts, some reviews, some videos. Now it’s just the bigger players.

If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is entirely their own website and their own social media properties. Even Wikipedia is toward the bottom of the page…

Yep. My biggest peeve is that google never returns more than 400 search results now. Either you find it on the first 3-4 pages of 100 results or it stops and gives you no more. You can go 36 pages at 10 results per page but it's still only ever <400 results.

It makes serendipitous web search and surfing nearly impossible and like you said, the first pages of results are stuffed with corporate sites and things that changed in the last week.

Bing, btw, will only ever return <900 results.

are you aware of https://search.marginalia.nu ?

> If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is entirely their own website and their own social media properties.

My expectation is that most people searching for the name of the bank are doing it because they are trying to find the official bank pages.

If searches like [bankname fraud] etc also mostly got the bank's own pages, that would be a problem, but this sounds like giving people what they're looking for?

I just did a Google search on a [big canadian bank with 4-letters fraud] and got all the bank's own pages. The bank created specialized pages for different fraud related scenarios, and they monopolized the first result page.

Hmm, I forgot that "fraud" in this context will often be things like identity theft, and the bank's own materials might be relevant. But yeah, trying that search I agree there's too much of the bank's own results in the response.

[big canadian bank with 4-letters criticism] is better, though

> If I search for a big Canadian bank, the first page is entirely their own website and their own social media properties.

There might also be an ad for a competitor in the top position.

I remember when Google said their results wouldn’t include adverts, but now out of maybe 12 results on the first page, 8 of them are ads or some kind of sponsored result.

It’s more of a search engine for adverts now than it is a search engine for content, like corporate classifieds.

I imagine what the landscape would be like if they had any kind of formidable competition in the earlier years.

This is where I think Kagi helps. They've always got a nice tidbit section out for personal blogs. Very useful for tech work, nostalgia and personal touches/viewpoints on many tech (and non-tech) related things.

Do you mean this site?

https://kagi.com/

I like what the indieweb community are trying to do to promote this, at least in principle.

It couldn’t be easier to host a blog, whether static or through something like Wordpress or Ghost. But integration with native editors is pretty poor and writing a lengthy post into a blog’s hosted editor isn’t that nice if you already have a nice writing setup on, say, your iPad.

So, things like Micropub and IndieAuth are interesting solutions to that problem, but the ecosystem isn’t quite there. But if it was, it’d be a nice way to manage a blog without requiring too much expertise.

Exactly. What's more, the masses were driven by marketing budgets to the internet for megacorp internet products, they were never going to come online all on their own based on a motivation to read personal blogs.

Bloggers were always a minority, because most people have little or nothing interesting to say. If you asked them to write a long essay on a subject, they just couldn't. This is why social media was a godsend to a lot of non-bloggers, because it made them feel that their 140/280 character sound bites were worth publishing on the web. These people can never "go back" to blogging, because they never did and never would write blogs.

Setting that problem aside, another problem is that people have become accustomed/addicted to receiving links via social media rather than via RSS. This is a big problem for current/former bloggers who wish to leave social media. It's difficult to take their followers with them. You'll lose a big chunk of your audience if you rely entirely on RSS to publish. After leaving Twitter, my RSS readership doesn't seem to have grown. AFAICT it's the same as before.

Since the early pandemic, I've opted to e-mail 100 of my closest friends quarterly some really long form e-mails. It does take me quite a bit of time, maybe about 40 hours of writing and editing.

What is interesting though, is when I see some of those friends after a long absence, they always would cite something I wrote from the newsletter of interest.

I know there is quantity vs quality tradeoffs out there, but its nice to know some thought I wrote still sticks after several months.

What topics do the newsletters cover?

A lot of is my personal perspective on events, either things like travel or circumstances that have occurred to me which I thought were interesting. Below is a sample of an older newsletter about dentistry, a neighbor, and a long hike to Vancouver Island.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yerJQ3gLjUcahxyznkPHtwRQ...

I've been debating perhaps writing more of a public blog, but we'll see.

Did they all get the same email?

Everyone does get the same email

A lot of people don't want to receive a sermon and, likewise, wouldn't want to give one either.

Every time I visit LinkedIn I roll my eyes at some of the things people publicly post. There is a certain self-seriousness bordering on pretentiousness with a LinkedIn post versus a half-serious Tweet. Twitter is more like chat. The blogs I tend to read are more informative than opinionated. E.g. "How to get this USB device working on Linux" versus "X Considered Harmful, Here Is My Hot Take Which Is Targeted For Maximum Virality".

I've stopped reading most of HN opinion blogs because they are all terrible. This is not to say you can't have an opinion and express it in a nuanced, intelligent manner. But the viral algorithms and promoters aren't looking for those, and the skill to write such content is rare.

> Every time I visit LinkedIn I roll my eyes at some of the things people publicly post. There is a certain self-seriousness bordering on pretentiousness with a LinkedIn post versus a half-serious Tweet.

I don't think the employment-focused LinkedIn is a good example of the "good old days" of personal blogging. LinkedIn, with 800 million users, is much larger than Twitter!

News Flash: blogs can be of any length, including 280 characters.

It's not 5th grade English, there's no minimum word count. It's just that the early "winners" in the blog space churned out essay-length content every week, which is not feasible for most other people.

This is missing the point, which is to consistently have something interesting to say. If you don't have that, then you don't have a blog worth following.

What Twitter does is "make it up in volume". Most individual tweets, and most individual tweeters, are not particularly interesting. But when you collect enough tweeters and tweets together, the odds are that there may be some diamonds in the rough at any given point in time.

You say this, but plenty of people post short `Status` type posts on their blog just fine. See https://aaronparecki.com/notes for an example. Combination of on-site stuff, mirrors of Twitter and Mastodon content. He's one of many folks posting both short-form statuses and long-form content. It works.

If the EU has its way then interoperability with ActivityPub will make migrating followers/following easy, as it is with redirecting Mastodon accounts. Tumblr is adding ActivityPub support. Flickr is mulling it.

> It works.

Technically it works. I never claimed otherwise.

I don't know who Aaron Parecki is and have no idea how much traffic that website gets. In any case, my claim is merely that most people don't consistently have anything interesting to say. Maybe Parecki does, I don't know. If he does, that puts him in the minority.

So many tech sites call for boycott of Twitter (see Engadget) yet they actively post on Twitter to their massive audiences. Put your money where your mouth is and delete all your corporate Twitter accounts.

I'd happily subscribe to mastodon.theverge.com just to avoid Twitter.

Verge was amazing, but slowly seemed to drift in the direction of being the Vice of tech news. I remember watching a "how to build a PC" video that I was convinced was parody but was actually serious.

Vergecast is both informative and entertaining.

I watched every episode of On The Verge, and tend to think the network faded out when Josh Topolsky left.

Maybe it has? Please refer me so something better in the domain of consumer tech.

So many great Youtubers were demonetized for making fun of that Verge PC build video.

I agree. The Verge used to be a top tier tech publication, but now many of their articles come across as unnecessarily angry to me — especially since their recent redesign.

I don't think I have ever looked at the Verge until this comment so I decided to take check it out. The first article that I clicked on was about how it is OK to Schwarzkopf my watches. Not exactly hard hitting tech there so doubt I will ever return.

This isn't a bad piece but the "demise of Twitter" stuff is laughably incorrect and sounds like Spaceman Bad brainworms.

> So many tech sites call for boycott of Twitter (see Engadget)

Citation please?

I've found that a great way to discover new interesting blogs is the Thinking About Things newsletter [0]. They were on hiatus for a while but seem to be back now. I've gotten some great reads from them.

[0] https://thinking-about-things.com

I personally started blogging in 2001 so I feel qualified to inject some opinions.

Whilst the early blogging scene was cool, we should not glorify it too much. Even then it wasn't mainstream. Most people did not blog and the few that did were mostly unsuccessful. Centralization was a thing from the very start. "Blog rolls" would ultimately aggregate into a few winning bloggers, whilst the rest gets near-zero traction. Just like the influencer model of today. It seems codified into the internet, the extreme inequality of distribution of attention. So I frown upon terms like "golden ages".

There was no golden age. It didn't really work well back then for most people and in today's radically different landscape even more odds are stacked against you.

Discovery is even more of an issue than before, there's basically no mainstream platform/app to discover blogs. Not even Google Search delivers. That puts blogging into the enthusiast sphere, same as it always was.

Due to saturation and dumbed down mobile phones/apps, engagement will be underwhelming and razor thin. There will be little engagement and most of it will be shallow.

If not toxic. The one thing I do remember as vastly better were comments/conversations. People were far more relaxed, reasonable, open-minded, less polarized. Having a comment section on almost every site was common, not so much anymore.

Similarly, the changed landscape of extreme polarization online means you have to weigh your words very carefully. Best to blog about something extremely boring/neutral.

None of this suggests that you shouldn't blog. I'm just saying there will be no blogging revival as it never was a mainstream tool and in a world with the masses now online, even less so.

"Twitter threads just don’t do the trick — and neither will Elon’s alleged plan for allowing 4,000-character tweets (I swear, if I see anyone tweeting out 4,000 characters, that is an immediate block)."

Not getting this self-own. You block a person forever for the single act of posting long form content, which likely will be visually presented in a truncated way? And one writes this in an article making the case for the return of blogs?

Pre-2001, we had webrings, and thus people got plenty of traffic; anyone becoming successful meant others became successful. That's the golden age people refer to.

In terms of reasonable conversations, prior to the internet going truly mainstream and people wandering around with access to the internet 24/7, most relatively niche sites that had interactive elements ended up attracting very specific demographics, of which you would likely have plenty in common with.

The stats on Tumblr, and number of sites running on top of WordPress begs to differ in regards to blogging not seeing a revival. This doesn't even take into consideration Tumblr adding ActivityPub, nor WordPress being able to add it with a simple plugin.

What I'm saying is this...

Imagine that blogging at its golden ages was 100%. Then in the course of several years it plummeted to irrelevancy, say 10%. Imagine this new revival being successful, that would put it back at 100% of it was.

...which is still nothing. Blogging never was big or mainstream.

I'd say it far too hard to bring up a personal site. Why are there no free tier zero config markdown web hosts including a custom domain for $20/yr? Why doesn't the domain registration entitle you to a single static 100kB page, and/or a redirect to some shared my-site.on.domain.com? Instead there is brittle configuration and/or having to contract a third party.

Come to think of it, what has ICANN been doing with their monopoly? Where is all that (10 figure?) money going to? I don't mind a tax, in fact open source infrastructure would benefit greatly from (tax-financed) bounties, but I see nothing being offered in return. Who's drinking from this neverending firehose?

Re: ICANN

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/governance/financials-...

They do publish financial reports. They also publish some details about executive compensation.

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/remuneration-pra...

Granted ... I don't really know what we're getting for that. :D

You can almost get this with CloudFlare. They have a domain registrar and free static HTML hosting that you can upload a ZIP file to or connect to Git.

(Note: I’m not a CloudFlare employee, but I do use the CloudFlare Pages HTML hosting service.)

If you can write HTML or have some sort of script that creates HTML from Markdown then you could use neocities.org

> Why are there no free tier zero config markdown web hosts including a custom domain for $20/yr?

There are shared hosting providers around that price, including domain, that offer one-click WordPress installation, and WordPress-specific hosting options, so that exists in a slightly different form.

Non-technical people know about WordPress a lot more than they know about markdown, and technical people would more likely want to self-manage such an arrangement, so I don't think there would be a large enough market to make that practical (the margins would be low, even accounting for the potential for lower resource use per client than WordPress by using something simpler, so you'd need to sell a lot of accounts to make it worth-while).

> Why doesn't the domain registration entitle you to a single static 100kB page

I don't think enough people would want it to make it a key differentiator against competing registrars, so the extra admin (particularly dealing with occasional copyright claims and other legal issues, and a DDoS attack against a client every now and then) would not be worth it. Registrars are essentially competing on price and inertia, and will do nothing extra unless it brings in extra money or makes them look enough better than the next registrar to the average user.

I have tried gohugo + gitlab, just because portability of md files. I would pay small fee for a service which provide a more user friendly IU*. Small fee because i am writing very rarely, and in this subscription ridden world, i am already enough recurring payments.

Forestry.io was confusing because i am dumb.

I can see the utility, but:

> Small fee because i am writing very rarely

there like the problem: I don't think the number is people willing to pay that small fee is worth it from a commercial perspective.

Of course you might get lucky and find a f/oss option written by someone with very similar needs/wants, but you'll probably have to self-host that so have a bit of admin to do.

Something I hate about stuff like this is people who work for media publications assume everybody else on the internet is like them. It reminds me of the Gawker days. They're all blue checkmark types and assume the world's discourse, the true "zeitgeist" is on Twitter. It's incredibly myopic.

Now that Twitter is crumbling, they're looking for something else, which is fine. But I wish they'd have the self awareness to acknowledge that Twitter never truly was what they thought it was. All social media networks have a niche. Twitter's appeal was to journalists/'mediarati' and people who want to be (or are) important in some way. It wasn't this ubiquitous thing that EVERYBODY used.

Some of us got off Twitter like 7 years ago and have been blogging ever since.

Your words tasted like coffee. Very well put!!!

It's been a while that nobody in media thinks “everybody” is on Twitter. What I hear and witness (being myself part of the media) is that the most powerful, influential people use Twitter, which is… kinda true? As a major evidence, let's remember when the US spent four years being led by a Twitter addicted, decisions made on Twitter.

I hope Musk's disaster put an end on this, though.

What Twitter and others solved with micro-blogging was discovery. There was nothing wrong with personal blogs. Sure, they had a bit more setup than just signing up for Twitter and typing out some 140-word screed but they were perfectly capable. Blogspot and others made it free, you needn't even have a domain and yet people still went to Twitter to build their "brand" (I hate that phrase) and get "discovered" and then get the sales funnel going to send "fans" (also gross) to their paid newsletters, podcasts, books, etc., all of it facilitated by the algorithm and Twitter.

Some kind of discovery protocol for blogs RSS feeds would be nice. Maybe BlueSky will fill that void. There probably are services already doing something like that, but it still puts a central authority in control of the discovery.

Yeah … RSS will likely play a huge role and for mass adoption or a large number of eyes it’ll need to be a centralized thing but then you get all the problems of centralization including the ability to say what can and can’t be part of the new discoverability index.

Blogging/Authoring functionality needs to be built into the browser, as per the original vision for hypertext transfer.

Browsers becoming read-only reduced web authoring to those that had the time and the means to learn HTML. Of course by 2005 blog software was common, so blogging was available to anyone who was computer literate.

18 years on, we are at another inflexion point now. At least a billion more people have been onboarded to the internet since 2005, and their first device was a smartphone. Computer literacy works entirely differently between the generation that grew up with mice and keyboards, and those that grew up with the peripheral-free UI of touch OSes. We could look under the hood of our computers, and often had no other choice. Smartphones on the other hand are so locked down, people can't even access a developer console on a browser.

I have a writing blog of sorts [1], but nobody knows it exists. Nobody sees my posts except when I share the links to directly via other social media.

Most of my posts can’t be found on google at all, even doing searches by name of the article (a few will turn up).

It’s nice to have a blog but it’s really more of a diary unless you have readers. At least with substack, I get a handful here or there from the substack ecosystem, vs my custom website which got almost nothing at all and is now inactive because of that

[1] https://barbariangrunge.substack.com/

Please stop whining about this non-issue — The tools are and have always been readily available for anyone willing to post a single letter on the Internet. The problem is that people apparently need an external trigger/confirmation/applause (aka like) now to do just that, whereas old-school blogging was more or less writing for yourself with the occasional random feedback in whatever form. Just lower your expectations and be prepared to give up your social currency in return for creative freedom.

If your not looking for an audience why bother putting what you wrote online at all? Writing has a purpose, one of those is sharing an idea. If there's no one to share it with why would you write it then?

Feeling like someone could be watching is a motivating factor for many. If I had a sense that no one would ever find my blog, I might feel more discouraged than otherwise. In this new reality, I am more likely to jot down my notes in a private GitHub repository for future reference.

For another example, look at Spotify. Granted, lots of horrible practices involved here, but the discovery aspect of the product is so good that many of us overlook those issues. I have found & purchased more music simply because of this discoverability. I win, the artists win, etc.

Everyone tends to lose when the discovery mechanisms suck.

So you have something to link to when you're later arguing with someone and don't want to bother writing down your complex take on the topic.

Sharing an idea and looking for an audience are not mutually dependent motives.

People keep diaries.

You can always post on your own thing and then syndicate it. It’s exactly what RSS was designed for after all.

It’s just that there isn’t really much syndication if you’re using a walled garden as your source of truth, as you can’t really syndicate an FB or LinkedIn post, or even a tweet really.

Bloggers need to bring back blogrolls. When blogs ruled, bloggers would link to other blogs on the same topic or were otherwise of interest. A reader could hop from blog to blog endlessly.

I still had one until 10 years ago, but those other blogs have since disappeared, and I've not done any effort on that part lately.

I'm open to any offers to set up a little banner across blogs again though.

Used to get them by just actually chatting with people online, but a platform to arrange blogroll matches could be neat.

I agree with the sentiment of the title but this is a terrible article that doesn't go into any depth and adds nothing to the conversation.

> The decline of Twitter

What evidence is there that Twitter is declining? If anything it seems Twitter usage has increased under Musk.

> (I swear, if I see anyone tweeting out 4,000 characters, that is an immediate block)

How can someone talk about the need to bring back long-form content while simultaneously saying they'd block someone who writes long-form content? Doesn't make any sense to me. I've always thought the Twitter character limit was stupid as it eliminates the ability to write long form content on Twitter, and I'm happy Musk is finally going to eliminate this artificial restriction.

There will always be a place for blogging, but the problem with it is lack of discoverability and conversation (sure you can add a comments section, but most people won't take the time to register for an account on your site just to write a comment on your blog post). Ultimately people write to get read, and social media gets more eyeballs.

I don't think blogging will ever be more than a niche thing due to this lack of discoverability. Solve the discoverability aspect, and you've basically reinvented web 2.0 social media

I think blogs are great but social media should not be ignored. It is a great source of traffic for your blog.

You CAN have it all. It's ok to have a facebook, twitter and instagram account. You are just giving up too much potential exposure for not participating in social media. It's nice to get comments on your blog, but people need to find it first.

If you don't want/need/crave exposure, you could just use your blog as a personal space. One that you can look back to in 5-10 years, like a journal.

Personally I use my blog to bookmark things that I find interesting (like a personal archive). Sometimes I don't just save the link to the site I want to bookmark, I copy-paste the whole contents of the page into my site (because the site could disappear). If you are worried about copyright et all, just make your blog private.

Private blogs ARE A THING, if you didn't know.

It's perfectly possible to run a blog that isn't optimised for social media users or private. The kind of exposure I could get from those sites is also the kind I can do without, I don't think I'm alone in holding that belief either.

I share when I write a new article but I don't have comments on my site for the reasons you mentioned. Too much negativity from places like Reddit, Twitter, HN is bad enough without having to moderate comments on your own site too.

It seems weird to accuse social media of killing the personal blog, especially by waxing nostalgic about the early web. You know what else didn’t exist back then? The Verge. Notably the author chose not to post this article on their personal blog.

You're just accusing him of participating in the "society" he's looking to amend and improve which just dismisses his entire post.

You could try engaging with the content intellectually.

His points about owning your content down to where it's hosted is a valid message worth engaging with.

Lets bring back link portals and webrings to cluster topics ...

Blogs never went away. It was the audience that abandoned rss with a little 'lure them in then pull the plugg' from Google.

Isn't this what substack is? Substack writers making huge money. Even non-famous people getting hundreds of paying subs.

Yeah, it's weird that this article doesn't mention Medium or Substack which, for all of their faults, are just Web 2.0 monetization-ready equivalents to the Web 1.0 sites it mentions (their list also misses Xanga and LiveJournal, a real oversight). And Tumblr for popular microblogging that's not Twitter.

But does monetization affect the content of blogs?

I must admit that I really enjoyed the flavour of old school blogs where a person would just put some interesting ideas out there without ads, pop-ups asking for subscriptions, or product pushing. They'd built something cool or learned something new and wanted to share. They were excited about it, which translated into interesting reading even if the subject was really quite niche.

I'm sure it does. For starters, it means that your newsletter probably has to come out on a consistent cadence. It probably also has to be fairly narrowly focused. Nothing wrong with wanting to monetize--though the sort of success mentioned upthread is almost certainly an outlier--but you're going to need to pick a topic area, have a marketing strategy, etc.

> The biggest reason personal blogs need to make a comeback is a simple one: we should all be in control of our own platforms.

By "personal" they probably mean that you control the platform. That would imply a self-hosted blog. To be honest, it's not really clear what they mean when they say personal (they use it in a few different ways in the article, but never give a definition) so that could be wrong. But, if the above is true, then that rules out Substack.

I love personal blogs.. if you have one, please share it!

I still have a personal blog.

However, blogs were essentially a seminar where people could get caught up on topics that had escaped them elsewhere in their education.

Now that one is caught up, there seems little to add.

Aw go on, link it. I like looking at random blogs from HN contributers.

Great piece

Reply on news.ycombinator.com