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Comment by stevenicr | Hacker News Reader

There a short time when google and other search engines promoted blogs in the main results.

There was a time when sites promoted blogs via web rings and blog rolls - recent discussion -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36728870

Google penalizing sites for linking to other sites and people getting paranoid about bleeding pagerank and getting penalized for unknowingly linking to 'bad neighborhoods' - quickly changed how many people would peruse your blog..

Removing blog rolls, web rings, pingomatic, technorati... some blogs adapted, most did not.. google is the reason blogs aren't read these days.

On top of things mentioned in the post.

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Why write a blog when you can make a YouTube channel instead. You’re sure to get ranked well by Googs then. Hell, why write a blog when you can just TikTok it?

There’s lots of reasons not covered in the blog about not blogging trying to convince why to blog.

Because gaping mouth video clickbait is dumb. How often do you even see a video cover with someone having a closed mouth and normal facial expression?

Presumably if you're allowed to write a blog even though it's boring etc etc you're also well within your rights to not gape all over your YouTube thumbnail.

These days I think about 15% of the thumbnails I see are gaping mouth. That would be easy to tweak down by stopping with watching LTT.

There is plenty of space for quality and thought out content on YouTube. Especially if you don't need to make a living. The kicker to me, seems the extra time required to get production value to a tolerable point.

Good question. Let me scroll through my YouTube home page. This is every video where the cover image shows the presenter’s face and the presenter is making a natural facial expression. Sometimes the presenter’s mouth is slightly open because they are talking, but they are not outright “soyfacing” as it’s sometimes called.

https://youtu.be/PPWzsaAwOjQ

https://www.youtube.com/live/UAUg6y2UX88?feature=share

https://youtu.be/4sEFinMiSco

https://youtu.be/RdoKv0oojM8

https://youtu.be/SbeqNFHoU_8

https://youtu.be/v7CFo0XKLmo

https://youtu.be/cl-lZeLu2cg

https://youtu.be/-eJcJq2aWq8

https://youtu.be/YEW4U9DUtrw

https://youtu.be/WUwJteu_FqU

https://youtu.be/n0vLnHcz68I

https://youtu.be/FYCV5Ot4pcQ

https://youtu.be/1NZoWqs1T_s

https://youtu.be/X0QuB2v5rLw

https://youtu.be/4FRlV70lvYk

https://youtu.be/p3O6bKdPLbw

I stopped most of the way down the page. Here are the exaggerated facial expressions:

https://www.youtube.com/live/CN5bnEn9YZA?feature=share (sort of an exaggerated :|)

https://youtu.be/Iu7gAS4egEI

https://youtu.be/iQ190Bf-6J0 (the only actual “soyface” I could find)

https://youtu.be/zs6sEYEzsKo

https://youtu.be/VOVO0Mr4n-A

https://youtu.be/fpnd1OboPPs (borderline soyface maybe?)

So that’s 16 normal facial expressions, four slightly exaggerated ones, and 1, maybe 2 soyfaces. And a much larger majority of videos that didn’t show the presenter’s face on the thumbnail at all.

Edit: It occurs to me now that it’s not that easy to see a YouTube thumbnail after you click through to the actual video.

In my case, it’s because videos take a long time to make. I don’t just film stuff and put it up. Postproduction takes three or four times as long as filming.

Writing, on the other hand, seems to “just flow,” and I spend a bit of time, after publishing, correcting and tweaking the prose. Nothing, compared to video postproduction.

As it is, I have barely written anything in the last couple of years, because I have had a fairly consuming project.

Maybe you don't want to have who knows what ads forced into your content. Maybe you don't want your content to be forced into this demented "shorts" format without an option to disable it. Maybe you want more control over formatting (code snippets, embedded videos/images) and content placement. Maybe you don't want to fight the stupid copyright enforcement tools. Maybe you dislike the UI overall. Maybe you don't want interactions with your audience to happen over google platform, but more individually over e-mail. Maybe you want an ability to modify past content easily. Maybe you get your audience from outside youtube, anyway, so why send them to the youtube attention sucking vortex.

Plenty of reasons why someone would care.

You make a good point and we seem to agree that sharing content on the internet seems to be better discovered via tubes or toks than google.

I think there are plenty of great reasons to blog, and there will be more in the future.

Google really kneecapped the written word with a few sites as exceptions. Wordpress has struggled to make blogging better, along with the other publishing options..

However the written words are often a better way to communication certain things as you can have easy to follow links and more formatting that makes things sink in well.

Although 2023 is a perfect time to sing the 'video killed the radio (and written word) star' ... some things are aligning where that could shift.

Now that mobile theme styling is getting better, all it's going to take is a few changes like 'nofollow' links by default, easy to moderate web ring additions, animated talking heads and AI pics to include and we will see a re-emergence of great story sharing again, and google won't be needed for them to have impact far and wide.

I see activity pub helping with this in the future, and a few other things that are starting to get traction.

The original intent was meant tongue in cheek about the discoverability via googs. Admittedly, it seems like it was a bit too buried. I abhor googs retuning video links to something much more better suited as text. The fact people are getting better results because they took an SO answer and turned into a video of just the text with no other reinforced benefit from being a video is maddening

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