What happened to blogging for the hell of it?
blog.whiona.me
blog.whiona.me
I used to work with a lot of content marketers when it started to get hot. SEO was doing particularly poorly for a period (Google used to resist seo rather than reward it) and people realized that if you started writing "authentic" content, then people would organically link to it and it would increase your ranking.
Then social media furthered this problem by people mindlessly sharing content they never read but just looked engaging.
Marketing robots where just churning out content on blogs because eventually you would just hit search engine gold by nail the correct topic for some long tail search term. In my own domain, the atrocious "Towards Data Science" is a great example of this (except their "brilliant" innovation was to replace marketing robots with people eager to pad their resume). The content is largely garbage, but it looks about right and is easily shareable.
Today, whether you like it or not, if you want to make people to see your blog at all you have to think at least a bit like a content marketer to get seen at all. Consider Jay Alammar's fantastic blog [0], which is very high quality content, but still requires a tremendous amount of polish and marketing to survive. All of this has made it impossible to create the network required for a "global conversation among creative weirdos". Real content does get made, but has to be produced with the effort of a real marketer.
Tell me about it. The most outrageous the titles on my blog (https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/), the more views articles get.
Before I toned it down, my blog post about SSR rendering was called "SSR sucks and you (probably) shouldn't use it", tons of views.
Boring "History of " posts, meh.
But it also depends who I am writing for. Ideally if I am writing for myself, I shouldn't care about the views, right?
Counter argument to that is I am writing for people who may want to read it, and with all the noise out there, if I don't try and elevate my posts to some extent, the people who want to read them may not be able to find them.
I think something similar happened to forums: they stopped showing up in search results over time, and gradually died from there
Google Reader came onto the scene and essentially destroyed all incumbents. Even if you used an independent client, the syncing was almost certainly based on your Google Reader account.
And Google Reader also provided a social discovery component which no one even tried competing with because how could you.
The sudden death of Google Reader was followed by a glut of rushed alternatives, which meant no specific alternative could get sufficient acceptance.
There were a lot of things that hurt the blogosphere but most of them would either have naturally withered away (for instance, the commercial crowd would almost certainly have migrated to social media), or could have been figured out (spam blogs could have easily been beaten if the likes of Google were interested).
The death of Google Reader, which also happened to coincide with the rise of social media (not a coincidence since Google Reader was killed in order to promote Google’s social media offering), was something the blogosphere could not recover from.
Thanks for teaching me a new word!
I lol'd and now would like to see these work somehow
"Uber for dinner guests" if your social circle isn't sufficiently cool and there are people you are inviting you want to impress.
(fascinating book, Naples 44)
"Moxley said they were told they were working for a U.S. company based in California, a story that later turned out to be untrue. It was really just a ruse to impress the workers and the entire community — they even had the mayor at the opening — that they were some fancypants American company.
Moxley said being a fake executive has become a lucrative source of income for expats living in China. Though, sorry ladies, this is China after all — they’re only hiring men.
Moxley said he knows a half dozen men who’ve done this type of work, and since he wrote an article about his experience in The Atlantic magazine, dozens more have written to him sharing their experiences. He was recruited by a friend of a friend — a headhunter for white guys in suits, if you will — but said sometimes you can also find ads in the local classifieds for this type of work."
How is this legal?
[0] “Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment.” – Example: https://noyb.eu/en/pay-or-okay-beginning-end#:~:text=No%20%2....
You mean like this? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59909647
I am in the EU
It doesn't really regulate "refusing service due to disabling of browser features", but then again it's a complex law, so someone (even a court) might argue otherwise, but it's doubtful.
Just like blogging, it relies on already having an audience and an air of being an authority on something.
If you're looking for any sources, not necessarily massive volumes, Gemini and Gopher still host written content produced without any hope for monetary gain. gemini://medusae.space/index.gmi is a good starting point.
gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
So there was probably some vain hope that independent blogging could be a sustainable revenue stream for the reporter class. Alas, it has not.
We're laughing about this concept right now. That makes me fear that we're going to actually see people doing this professionally in the future.
I thought escorts were generally considered to have a fairly solid business model.
Thanks for this quote - brilliant.
All the people today saying the internet and content wouldnt survive without advertising and payments and some of us remember that actually the internet and content came first, then the corporations and profit seekers arrived. everyone was originally just excited to get their stuff out there and talk to other people who were passionate and knowledgeable about their stuff as well. then the corps, advertisers, seos came.
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when uber was supposed to be about being able to car share on your way to and from work and cut down on car use?
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when airbnb was about being able to share your home with someone else while you were away at someone else's so you wouldn't have to pay for hotels?
sharers -> profit seekers
remember when hackers were people who set up share drives in university halls with free music and movies, fighting for open access to books and software and info and publications? now we have saas, Steve jobs bios and hacker news is run by a startup venture capitalist firm...
i wonder what the next thing they can destroy will be...
i guess if the pattern repeats look for anything anywhere people are sharing or doing something of value amongst each other for free. they will climb on board try to expand the audience and swamp out the signal of the original community and change the narrative to entrepreneurship and making money from this was always the point, then they will lock it down with network effects and strap on parasitic payments or revenue streams, then they will optimise until they destroy the original with universal enshitification.
thinking emoji
But you can't demand to have an audience if you do that. Likewise, you as a hacker can not demand that people produce more of that style of content for your convenience.
There is no limit to the real estate of cyber space, so there is no reason to complain about the stuff online that you personally don't fancy. That stuff is not taking away any space from the stuff that you do fancy.
Let's say there's a nice old family restaurant on the corner, that you've always visited every weekend. Then a huge shopping mall opens down the street, with unappetizing fast food and non-durable consumer crap. So then you go and walk around inside that mall every day and complain how bad it is, instead of just continue to go to the nice restaurant on the corner, that still is there. Does that make sense?
That’s literally capitalism
When companies that index the web make 99.9% of their money selling ads on that index, and the index is a place where wannabes ask the question "how do I make money on a blog" ask that question, you gets something not unlike unconstrained algae growth in a badly maintained aquarium of things "popping out of the woodwork" to fill that demand. As a result, if you used that to measure "What happened" you would easily come to the conclusion that nobody does this any more, after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new?
Yeah, that would be a really cool thing but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
Yes, I'm still mad about it :-)
I'm serious. I came across some of these communities nearly a year ago while reading about solar powered servers. And after I forgot how I found them, I've thought of them about once a month and wondered what the hell is wrong with me for forgetting.
They were incredibly neat and niche spaces, full of very idiosyncratic websites and things that had no commercial point. It was fantastic.
Of course you have the interesting side effect that you only get linked to them now and then, and often it's almost "invite only" for something that's entirely public.
See:
https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
> but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that [other than ways that cut into their ads] and so decided to cancel that part of their offering.
All we have to do is pay for it (and so I ask everyone to):
This is my take with Social Media now as well, and cloud hosted LLMs.
I pay my own OpenAI API usage fee, which is less than the $20 for their official program.
I plan to pay Reddit via their API to use an open source client as well so I can consume the content (ad free) in the way I prefer.
What happened was directing people to websites put up for free with all the information they need doesn't make Google any money, as compared to a bloated POS on SquareSpace that downloads 80 MB of JavaScript to checks notes... render fucking text alongside a few dozen AdSense slots, or, perhaps more commonly, a Facebook group that has six hundred people asking the same questions in a format that doesn't allow going back to actually find the goddamn answers, which also shows ads.
The wide, weird internet still exists, but none of our corporate overlords make shit on it so it gets zero attention in the mainstream.
- nullprogram.com
- zserge.com
- eli.thegreenplace.net
- smalldatum.blogspot.com
- rachelbythebay.com
- muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
- sirupsen.com
- brooker.co.za/blog/
- jack-vanlightly.com
- utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/
- jvns.caThanks for these recommendations. :)
You could, of course, keep to the driest topics, the most tamed opinions, nothing spicier than an animal cracker, but for some this self-censorship of "your most honest, primitive, real thoughts" (to quote Naked Lunch) is tantamount to a sin, just one step up from lying to your diary.
If you are trying to keep it safe, are you truly communicating what is on your mind, or are you pasteurizing your output, homogenizing it, adding a touch of gamma radiation and a run through the freeze-drier, until the final result is palatable pablum, certainly inoffensive and low-residue, but ultimately unworth either consumption or production?
Blogging seems to have shifted on the risk/reward scale and people have responded as such. A pity.
Um, I guess. It seems to me like most of the "controversial" stuff that people get attacked for is just lame vomit about current-events political junk. No one needs yet another clueless nobody ejecting that crap on the Internet. Go write about something interesting, like old computers, or music, or I don't know, your favorite species of grass. You'll be contributing something of value, instead of more mindless current-events garbage, and you won't get attacked for it. Win-win.
I used to be on a once-popular forum which has slowly skewed to the left, and then farther, and farther. Now everything there is politicized because the Red Guard types remaining are on the continual hunt for anything at which they might take offense. These are people who go wild for the opportunity to talk about the racist origins of steampunk.
I think this has contributed to my life-long mental health problems, as I've purposely separated myself into 2 personas. To paraphrase Agent Smith...
Jelly 1 has a job and a mortgage and a Facebook, is made of matter and occupies space, and is openly lesbian, and isn't shy to talk a little about politics or her old schizophrenia diagnosis.
Jelly 2 exists only on the dark web, never grew out of enjoying hentai, delights in posting political hot takes like "gasoline should cost more, actually", lies about absolutely everything to shake off doxxers, and doesn't even use the same username on any 2 forums.
Both Jellies are miserable most of the time, since they take turns hiding the other one from one social circle or another. Jelly 2 can never hold a job. Jelly 1 isn't convinced that there's enough stuff in the real world to kill off Jelly 2 and live alone.
"One of these lives has a future..."
It's still good to lie about everything to keep stalkers off your trail. Furthermore, it contributes to the erosion of trust that everything online is literally true. People have gotten complacent in that regard.
The reasons for blogging are varied. Part of me would like to post the odd bit of how-to on an obscure technical topic, that kind of thing. And then there's writing reviews. No expectation is had of reward, but that does not preclude the kind of risk I run if some gibbering nutjob decides I am a fascist or someone else dehumanizable because the Devil's Advocate in me might want to point out that this person was not given a fair shake in this instance, or that something else is a bigger deal than we are making it, and so on.
Of course, I would like to know that there is someone who is catching my signal besides Grim Entropy and the Inverse Square Falloffs, but then you're back to moderating comments which are largely linkback blogspam.
Anyway, many years ago I added a message board to most of them so passersby could share their recollections and nostalgia. At first it was a PITA to keep out the spam. But message boards are so passe that not only is it rare to get a new comment, but it is rare to get spam too.
Unfortunately I suspect someone will break this whole category of captcha soon enough by throwing an LLM at it.
That 1% is getting massively underpaid.
Dogmatically chasing the phantom of life... disconnected from substance of life.
How easy it is to find an abuse or deprivation worth filling in with the chase for life's sensory phantom.
These people now mostly publish stuff under their own profile on Facebook, because that's where the audience is. Soon to be was.
The personal, honest and vulnerable (emotionally, not security-wise) internet is still out there, ya just got to look a bit harder for it nowadays.
I'll stick with my throwback to what websites used to be like when they were simple, quick to load and asked visitors only for their attention and not much else ;)
Oof!
Nice to find someone else who recognises explicitly that management is in no way a natural career progression path, it may have been decades ago, but in the current market we often see seniority / value confused with team management when the two need have little relation.
Also started a few tech hobbies and actually putting stuff out into the world is how the hobby grows. I've benefited from the writings and videos of others and wanted to pay that forward.
Lower down in this thread someone recommends a set of blogs to follow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37920919
In other words, maybe word-of-mouth recommendations like what you see here on HN is the best way to find blogs...
The private blogs have been the most useful for my thinking. The active private blog has no readers at the moment.
I kind of miss the period from 2004 to perhaps 2009 when there was a community around blogging. But even then I was intentionally very marginal. I have never tried to attract readers, more the opposite.
There may be benefits from writing, such as publicity. But I dom’t think that is necessary a very useful motivation on the long term.
It seems to me that the only reasonable reason for writing is that you have this internal urge to write, to understand whst you think. You will know what you want to write. It does not matter if people do not read it, because you are writing for yourself.
I’ll go from life updates to some technical thing I learned or am learning. I have various topics like keyboards, photography, typography, and other interests that I will write 2 or 3 posts about and then move onto a different topic.
I find it impressive that people can have just one topic to write about but I can’t stick to one.
I also don’t have a lot of readers. Anything between 100-200 unique visitors a month, nothing to monetize off of.
I’ve seen some folks expressing their incredulity that a writer would need to do an internet search for ideas, so I wanted to add a bit of context. I’ve got some ideas for future posts jotted down in my notes app, but nothing that I feel I am ready to go ahead with writing yet. I still wanted to write something that day just to exercise my writing “muscle,” as it were. I like to do personal journalling and write fanfiction (yeah, cringe, I know) and in both of those online communities there are lots of ways to find cool prompts from other writers for if you have writer’s block. There are whole lists of questions to answer in your journal to help jumpstart some self-reflection. In fandom spaces, there are tons of “fan weeks” (or months) where there will be a prompt or two per day, and the challenge is to write something based on that prompt. I’ve really enjoyed consulting those to spark an idea when I’m not sure what to do, and I’ve written some pieces I am really proud of based on those prompts. So I (naively, I now realize) assumed that there might be cool blogging challenges or prompts I could find out there to spark something interesting I could write about…and then I got flooded with all that nonsense and I was like, what is this?? I hate it! And I wrote about how I hated it, and here we are. :)
I am relieved to see that personal blogging is very much alive on the quieter side of the web, away from social media and SEO optimization. It’s a space I am increasingly spending time in and still figuring out how to navigate. It seems like the best way to find stuff over here is to talk to people! I’ve received some really nice emails from people sharing their blogs with me and enjoyed reading their posts. I am definitely going to check out the many recommendations in this thread! Thanks to everyone who has been so welcoming to me as a total blogging newbie, and as for answering the question in my post title: Blogging for the hell of it is alive, just much harder to find by the means I’ve been used to up until now.
As an aside, I do also think it’s really funny how people are assuming I’m a guy…I guess because I mentioned I’m playing Baldur’s Gate, and girls don’t know how to do that. ;)
I suspect it's more of an HN thing. The site is overwhelmingly male-presenting. There may be more women than it would appear, being carefully neutral about using any kind of female-coded language, and content to let the assumption be that they're male.
If you look into any of the threads on gender topics, very few women talk about their experiences. With good reason, I think: those threads are often very hostile to women.
Or a monthly "self promotion" post alongside the jobs posts
I started blogging [1] in 2012 as a kind-of documentation of my work and thought processes (especially with raspberry pi projects) because when after a year on not working with a specific technology I forgot many aspects or challenges I had to overcome and I was sick of re-googling fixes for problems I have already fixed in the past.
Blogging has been a blessing for me and I have hit the top of hacker news a few times and even though I don't monitize my blog in any way (not even affiliate links) I still feel good about other people learning things from my projects or mistakes.
For me this is the truest form of blogging
And BTW, still waiting for a visitor from Tonga.
Why is (for example) Raymond Chen's blog interesting? Because he has a real job that gives him stories to blog about and occasionally vent his frustration, and the result is entertaining but real, useful information. He doesn't spend time pondering what to write about next.
You don't need a degree in creative writing to blog. You need a real job or hobby to have something to blog about. I don't care about some rando's opinion on some video game, whether he writes like Shakespeare or not.
If you want to blog for the hell of it, then just do it. Write about whatever you want. Baldur’s Gate, whatever. I have a two-post blog about some esoteric math I thought was cool. Very few people care and that’s fine.
The demise of Google Reader didn't help matters. Google essentially killed blogging single handed.
The Planet Debian RSS aggregator is an example https://planet.debian.org/
But there's lots of blogs out there. I did stop blogging but not for a good reason: I had a server with 11 y or something uptime and when the VPS provider wanted to turn it off I'd forgotten what I did. I've got the backups, though. So one day perhaps.
Even one-two commenters a week can keep the spirit of a blog up.
But usually not one per year.
I mean, tell a Realtor that nobody gives a f2k about a Realtor in their town and you'll never get a link to a plain ordinary web site and that they should blog if they want attention and the vast majority of them will think you're insane. Except for the Realtor who runs a blog about your town and ranks #1.
https://justinlloyd.li/blog/hippos-and-ducks-are-verbotten/ https://justin-lloyd.com/ - it's not a blog, it's my C.V., and it has a space invaders game on the web page. https://github.com/JustinLloyd/retro-chores - it's a software project written like a blog
Some people like it, other people tell me they hate it (usually the space invaders game (wow! much unprofessional!1!) and it makes me un-hirable. Oddly enough the people telling me I am un-hirable are usually the people I would never consider working for, who in the next breath also try to convince me I should take a sizable pay cut to work for them.
The oodly weird and just for the sake of it are still out there, in fact, I dare say, more so than it ever was, but frequently people complain about the state of the web, and then immediately open up Facebook or Twitter or use Google to go find their next distraction. Discoverability remains a problem, especially given Google's almost hostile ecosystem of search that favours the recent and viral over the older and evergreen.
Instead of being able to follow 50 or 100 blogs and just see the new stuff daily, I tend to rotate through the same five or ten blogs hoping for something new, or else look on Twitter and similar platforms hoping for something interesting.
Right now my only blog is for my freelance consulting biz (blueferret.consulting). I've debated a Substack for a different project as well...something of a philosophy discussion, wherein I'd clarify a set of ideas out in public. Because I can, and because I think others would enjoy seeing it too.
Someone who writes a blog for money is going to
1) Spend more time on it, because it is their source of income and not a hobby. They don't have to just do it in their spare time.
2) Be motivated to write it even when they don't feel like it, therefore putting out a more consistent product and gaining more readers.
3) Be more motivated to generate an audience, meaning advertising their blog and/or writing content that will generate a lot of clicks.
In short, you are more likely to encounter blogs written by people trying to make money because they are going to do more things to get the blog in front of you, in order to make that money.
One example: was talking to my cousin the other day, there was a YouTube feature she misses called video replies. Around the 2010s, that feature was used in hair and makeup communities to share videos purely about an experience or journey. So you wouldn’t necessarily be reviewing a product for general purpose, just saying “this is how I used this thing and how it worked for me.”
Now? It is so (potentially) lucrative to be an influencer making normative statements that not doing so seems pointless, even looked down upon as possibly spreading misinformation. Something critical has been lost.
Either YouTube is going to ban them and try to claw back literally years of money from them, or this is going to explode in the news in the next 2-3 years and Google is going to have to explain to their largest advertisers where their money went.
There's some really interesting Youtube drama going on where a literal multimillionaire Twitch streamer/Youtuber doxxed another Youtuber by streaming their actual home while standing on their front yard.
Something that's extremely illegal by Californian law.
But the offending internet-celebrity has a habit of not being affected by any kind of lawsuits because they bring in millions of viewers (34M viewers on Youtube) and are too good for business to actually kick off the platform.
You are free to write about anything. And everyone is free to visit your writing. Or not to.
My first thought is that a lot of people are blogging for the hell of it (me, nonstop, for decades), but that they accidentally typed "blog post ideas" into a search engine, and got what they deserved. That is, the problem is with search engines returning trash, and not with the nonexistence of blogs that aren't trash.
The entire world wide web I guess is a good example. But people are seriously paying professional game masters to run table-top RPGs for them and so on.
Somewhat unfortunately I have been lazy/writing under some platform, which it does mean having an audience.
Once your employers became aware of your blog, they became sedated online portfolios.
Social media has obviously taken people away from long-form, too.
I just wish I could hide pinterest, quora and medium from my search result
As an example, I recently watched a video about the best weapons in Tears of the Kingdom that was over 40 minutes long, but all that information could have been a ~3000-word blog post. Yes, some of the information is best conveyed in video form (demonstrating certain effects with in-game footage), but a lot of the content was essentially just the creator explaining out loud why certain combinations work well. For the bits of information that work better as video, the author could embed a short video into the article.
It probably would've been a lot less effort for the creator to make a listicle or blog post with a section for each of the weapons shown, and it would certainly save the viewers a lot of time. But then such a blog post would probably make way less money than the Youtube video. Youtube does a better-than-average job of paying creators for popular content, and they've fostered a network effect where audiences go to Youtube when looking for certain types of information. All this means that the incentives push people to create video content even when another medium would suit the content better.
yes, some other readers tried, but nothing was as fast and as nice to use as google reader.
What really changed about blogging is that people started to care about these metrics more and more. In the early internet one wrote a blog post without really expecting anyone to read it! ( although someone stumbling upon it was paradoxically more likely before we switched to social media platforms etc ) As such I'd argue the author wrote more authentically.
2. People who do have interesting things to say deserve to get paid for their work.
3. Other platforms (e.g. TikTok) provide a more natural medium for interaction and response.
4. If you're just aiming to write, there's always journals. I journal and I find it very satisfying.
5. Obviously, people still blog, even if the scene is dominated by capital's obsession with SEO.
I couldn't disagree more. People are /fascinating/.
There's definitely a skill in figuring out what you can say that's most likely to interest other people, but that's a learnable skill.
One of the skills of a great communicator is being able to help pull the interesting stuff out of people.
2. Money happened pretty much. First people started monetising their blogs, then they turned into books, which turned into multiple books and youtube channels and then it was no longer a blog and more of a company.
and additionally:
6. The younger generation is used to having their actual face plastered all over the internet and thus feel more natural making videos with their own face and voice.
--
I, and I think a good part of the HN crowd, are in the generation where we had actual friends we only knew by their handle/nickname and never saw their face unless there was a meetup of some sort and we actually went there.
For me, using my own face, or even name, to present any sort of content just feels wrong in a visceral way.
People didn't have much interesting to say before, but they didn't have much else to do. Now with #3, other platforms, they spend a lot of time on those other places writing short quips all day.
With an online blog rather than an offline journal you can easily share it with friends. I think the main difference here between TikTok and other huge social media is that less is more. I don't see much point in a million anonymous strangers looking at my posts. I don't think there is anything "natural" about these huge social media platforms. This kind of socialization feels very unnatural to me. Mostly do to the parasocial relationships that occur from the million people to one person style interactions.