How the Blog Broke the Web | Hacker News Reader

How the Blog Broke the Web

stackingthebricks.com

6 pointsmarbu7 comments

Every now and then I see a post like this one that laments that the age of web pages looking unique is gone. Sure, I can agree with that, but it's hard to say that it wasn't a good tradeoff. The original article admits that it was able to decrease the barrier for entry for writing a blog by a LOT, and while it did make customization a lot less likely, it meant that people that were not going to write anything suddenly had the ability to.

I'm thinking primarily of sites like YouTube here. Sure, we all sacrificed the ability to customize the way that we serve videos to others, or the freedom of not being on a platform that someone else owns, but some of the best people on the site are people that aren't technically focused at all. These people would not have been able to publish anything if the barrier for entry wasn't lowered.

And on the opposite side, if you look at places trying to bring back the small/old web, you run into the issue that generally everyone there has the same interest of programming or technology, since it's borderline essential to get into these places in the first place. It's sometimes surprising what kind of people you find on there, but most of the time it's just a bunch of programmers. The freedom of the old web was brought back at the cost of the diversity of people that populated it.

We probably just differ in our tastes, but I'll argue that the decreased barrier was worthless, if not actively harmful.

Look at YouTube. The things I watch on there have 10s to 100s of people-hours behind them, compared to which wrangling HTML/WebRTC/whatever would not be very significant. All the thousands of blooming flowers who are just uploading raw phone captures? That I can, and by and large do, do without.

(the best counterexample I can think of ATM are "lyrics sung to a different tune", and while it's a bit nicer to get a performance than plaintext, it's not that much better)

Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-x_1lIXh4

I accidentally run into this post while researching personal wikis. On the one hand I don't agree that the chronological log structure is that bad (it actually works quite well in many cases), on the other hand it has a point that there are other ways to organize personal pages which makes sense as well.

What the chronological structure broke (for me) was long form conversation — threads that evolve over weeks and months (in the extreme, sometimes even years).

HN is a perfect example: the dynamics of the site drive a "speed dating" feel: where hot takes are encouraged and exploration in depth takes unusual commitment by all parties to keep digging ever further back into their history just to continue a conversation.

I'm not sure this effect is caused by a chronological structure. For example here, one can use "threads" link to see if someone is responding on their comments and react no matter how old the comments are. If that feature wasn't there, I would not be writing this comment right now. What makes is hard to keep old threads alive over weeks or more is imho rather the volume of new posts and comments.

right; I'm just blaming chronological for the fact that to find your reply —even from today— I've had to manually go back in "threads"; if the site had meant to encourage long-lived threads, the new posts and comments wouldn't bury the old ones.

(compare to a mailing list, where as soon as one participant has resurrected a thread, even one from deep in the archives, it is easily replied to by all participants)

[Edit: once a week I try to go back 7 days in threads to check (most manually) for fresh replies, but it's usually a fairly quixotic affectation]

I wouldn't call that chronological, but otherwise you have a good point. This reminds me of a czech forum abclinuxu.cz I used to visit regularly using the following features:

1) dense list of discussions which you are participating in, with a quick way to find new posts there

2) one can optionally "follow" a discussion via email, this way, people sometimes noticed new posts in discussions which were months old

Both features were quite visible, so most of active users were using them to some degree. Moreover like hacker news, the discussions were threaded, which is imho another feature which helps with long lived discussion. But compared to hacker news, it has much smaller number of users and lower volume of new posts (even at it's peak), so it's not clear how much would that help given the sheer volume of posts and users there.

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