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Comment by marssaxman | Hacker News Reader

I remember when the blogging world became "obsessed with this corpo nonsense", and it was a very strange experience. Blogs had been a kind of distributed social media, global conversation among creative weirdos, but eventually some tipping point of public awareness happened and seemingly overnight people just would not shut up about the idea of making money writing a blog, making a living as a blogger, which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant. But they were persistent, they were noisy, there were eventually more of them than there were of us, and... well. That was a long time ago now, and I wouldn't even know where to start looking for interesting blogs of the old style, if they still exist.

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Content marketing ruined blogging, just like SEO ruined search.

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.

0. https://jalammar.github.io/

> 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.

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'm just straight to the point, I don't want to waste people their time. You can check it on my profile.

You basically don’t exist unless you hustle like crazy as if you want to be a famous influencer. Like, imagine your goal is just to get people to read your work and get some feedback: good luck with that unless you’re first willing to invest a year into growing an audience from scratch. The seo and content marketing spam has buried almost all organic content and google seems to reward it instead of blacklisting those sites

I think something similar happened to forums: they stopped showing up in search results over time, and gradually died from there

There’s a lot of things we can complain about but the destruction of the blogosphere had a very specific individual cause. The death of Google Reader.

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.

I would add also that after the 2008 crisis, the precariat grew, and some bloggers found themselves in it. Once your living standard is precarious, it is a lot harder to resist the temptation to include affiliate links and get at least some material reward out of your blogging, even if you don't turn it into a full-fledged business. The shift in the culture was due to a little quiet desperation, too, not just greed.

> ... precariat ...

Thanks for teaching me a new word!

> which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant

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.

"token white person as a service" is a thing in China. It's apparently a very big deal in business circles that you have SOMEONE non-Asian in your party.

This sort of thing exists at various times and places that value appearances a lot. A description of an "uncle from Rome" as a professional mourner in mid-20th century Naples: https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/a-zio-di-rom...

(fascinating book, Naples 44)

Source?

https://www.cnbc.com/id/37759560

Money section:

"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."

> The page is blocked because of your cookie settings. To continue, please allow all cookies.

How is this legal?

How would it not be? "I refuse cookies" is not a protected class, thus a private business may discriminate it at will. Same way a business could refuse to admit patrons not wearing shoes or carrying a firearm.

Is that true under the GDPR?

GDPR does not regulate cookies, it regulates usage of PII (personally identifiable information). So blocking cookies on principle is not against it, but collecting PII without consent is. Forcing the user into accepting, such as saying "click accept or pay" also is.

[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....

US companies aren't bound by the GDPR. European courts have no jurisdiction here.

> Ok, how does an EU court enforce an EU law on a US company with US assets? They can’t.

You mean like this? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59909647

European courts have jurisdiction in the EU, and CNBC is accessible in the EU unlike some other US websites, so they have to follow GDPR at least for EU visitors. And as far as I know cookie rejection must not influence the basic functionality of the site.

Ok, how does an EU court enforce an EU law on a US company with US assets? They can’t. That’s my point.

Yes, if this company has no assets in EU and no transactions with EU entities then enforcing this may be hard.

Unless you're in the EU, or some place that also has laws against it, how is it not?

> Unless you're in the EU

I am in the EU

I'm not an expert on the GDPR (and I'm frankly sick of hearing about it) but surely what it bans is tracking cookies, and not cookies necessary for the proper function of the website?

Exactly, it regulates collection of PII, which includes most tracking cookies.

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.

That's one way of complying with GDPR. It's as legal as a paywall.

I recently finished reading Chesterton's "The Club of Queer Trades", and one of the jobs in there was a paid dinner guest who even set up the conversation so the client could make witty remarks.

How far is "professional dinner-party guest" from socialite?

I don't think a socialite is paid

Closer to escort ?

"After dinner speaker" is a very viable business: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/28/barack-obam... ; nearest thing to earning money from being a "dinner party guest".

Just like blogging, it relies on already having an audience and an air of being an authority on something.

> I wouldn't even know where to start looking for interesting blogs of the old style, if they still exist.

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.

Gemlogs are very much old style blogs for the hell of it.

gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/

At the same time blogging was on the rise and "making it as a blogger" was a thing, the print media was getting absolutely torched by downsizing, layoffs, forced retirements, and private equity buyouts.

So there was probably some vain hope that independent blogging could be a sustainable revenue stream for the reporter class. Alas, it has not.

> the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant

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 know for certain that professional dinner-party guests are a real thing that exists

It definitely existed in the past, for the very specific reason of avoiding 13 guests being seated at the table: https://medium.com/illumination/how-the-phobia-of-the-number...

Honestly it doesn’t strike me as too different from a paid dungeon master. I guess the horror is when it goes from explicitly compensation to some sort of product placement.

> which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest

I thought escorts were generally considered to have a fairly solid business model.

> “ people just would not shut up about the idea of making money writing a blog, making a living as a blogger, which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant.”

Thanks for this quote - brilliant.

isn't that just the internet (and in many ways our societies) in a nutshell?

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

There is nothing stopping you from making and sharing the old style of internet stuff right now. There's never been anything stopping people from just continue to make 90s style web sites or 2000s style blogs. Many people still do.

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?

Exploiters accumulate public goods into private caches

That’s literally capitalism

blogging never went away completely, it moved to substack, medium, and twitter notes

Medium is super annoying. Every time I end up there I immediately leave. Popups, subscription requirement "sometimes", it's the most obnoxious place.

Twitter is even more annoying for any content with more than a single paragraph.

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