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Comment by SCdF | Hacker News Reader

So I'm just a simple country lad who doesn't understand the big silicon valley city, but I really don't get svbtle. This is coming from someone who is (I imagine) part of 'the masses' who has been linked posts from there but otherwise has no involvement.

It's.. a curated collection of blogs? Why can't you just have a blog? I've probably been linked a dozen or so blogs inside that network (always from HN, I've never noticed traction anywhere else), but at no point has there been any cross promotion, so the fact that it was inside svbtle barely seemed to matter.

On 'barely': so far the fast majority of posts that have come out of svbtle have not actually been very good, and the curated 'we are the cream of the internet crop' pretentious feeling you get is not that positive.

Basicially, for me, a blog being inside svbtle seems to have negligible effect, and that effect is a negative one.

Maybe I'm missing the point though.

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Even worse, it's a curated collection of blogs...that all look the same!

Dave McClure posted a really thoughtful post about late bloomers recently, and the general reaction was "Wait...Dave McClure wrote that?" Yeah, you can't tell, because his blog looks exactly like 20+ other ones! This is the same pet peeve I had with WPTouch...everything looks the same and it destroys branding. (Not hoity-toity Fortune 500 company "branding"--just your picture on the blog, or something that indicates your blog is written by, you know, you, and not some anonymous random person. Especially when you are Dave McClure.)

To add a constructive point to this: http://jobs.problogger.net/ is a way, WAY better place to hire writers than a Hacker News post. We posted a job opening for some writers on there and got back some amazing resumes, including people who had media credentials galore and who had written for top newspapers and magazines. This seems like it'd be right up Svbtle's alley.

>Dave McClure posted a really thoughtful post about late bloomers recently, and the general reaction was "Wait...Dave McClure wrote that?" Yeah, you can't tell, because his blog looks exactly like 20+ other ones!

You're supposed to id a successful blogger by his writing style, not by the looks of his blog.

Did people have trouble reading Roger Ebert or H.L Mencken, because they wrote in a newspaper in the same type and pages as other people?

Plus, with an RSS reader, all blogs look even MORE the same.

Newspapers do not look alike, for all that they're in the same type. And even then, many columnists have a photo at the top of their column.

I agree, something about it is pretentious. The title of svbtle.com is 'Svbtle : The essence of blogging' which reminds me of that advert in Zoolander where Derrick is advertising some sort of male facecream.

This, for sure. Love the Zoolander comment; that's exactly the feeling I get about Svbtle. Even the name is pretentious. It smells of Silicon Valley circle jerk.

I actually came here to post the exact opposite comment. I love all of the writers on svbtle, especially the ones that are linked often on HN (dcurtis, caldwell, etc), and I love the design.

So that's cool, different strokes for different folks and all that, and I didn't want my trace-negative (it really is very small) opinion to be the main point.

My question to you is, has the fact that it's on Svbtle changed anything about it? Do you know follow everyone on that network because you presume they will be good?

So: if I was a great writer and I made a site that looked as nice would I be better or worse off compared to if I was under Svtble's umbrella?

> So: if I was a great writer and I made a site that looked as nice would I be better or worse off compared to if I was under Svtble's umbrella?

It's a judgement the individual has to make: do the potential discovery/cross-promotion benefits (which do not seem to be clear just now) of Svbtle outweight the potential issue with getting buried amongst a sea of other great writers?

Although there's nothing stopping a writer from promoting their Svtble blog to their own existing/narrow audience - who may not know or even care that it is part of a wider network.

The benefit is mostly for the bloggers.

They get a UI which is custom-designed to focus on writing and little else. Dustin Curtis explains it here - http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle

I wonder why it's a curated list then. If the pull is that the blogging tools are really nice then it seems counter intuitive to not allow people to pay some money to use it, and instead require them to be this cool to ride the svbtle-coaster.

(the style of those blogs as a reader is OK, I've seen better and I've seen worse. If a blog has good content but is hard to read there are plenty of ways of fixing it, so design is not a big deal).

Why are there so many people here on HN to reflexively find Svtble pretentious and whatever similar adjectives they use??

When it was first shown, there was a common feeling in the posts of not being picked by a kid at school to play in the lunch time soccer team. :P

The internet, and I guess I'll say life in general, needs more curation and less dumping. We speak of design and other wonderful things yet we encourage mindless undesign dribble in apparent content creation, relationships and other ways—it strikes of me being partial whores.

A lot of the blogs on svbtle aren't very good.

That is not to disparage the platform itself -- I like the style and the emphasis it places on content -- nor Dustin, who I find pretty fascinating, but the blogs just aren't good. I don't mean 'not good' in the sense of 'oh, this is poor writing', but in the sense of 'the consumption of this content was not worth my time.'

A few examples: - Dave McClure, who I admire and respect, writing a ridiculous blog post about 'hoping to be a late bloomer.' Dude, you have a Wikipedia article about yourself.

- Dalton Caldwell, who's proved himself time and time again to be prescient (his 2010 YC speech is wonderful in its truths), has been blogging about the importance of app.net. If I'm a developer, a tweeter, and a general tech enthusiast who, after three pretty lengthy blog posts, still doesn't understand what a "decentralized real-time feed" is -- let alone why its important -- then something is wrong.

- Dozens of fluff pieces which serve as little more than porn for the SV crowd.

I want Svbtle to succeed, and honestly think it will. I don't think that success is going to come when its definition of 'curation' involves what it currently does.

> A lot of the blogs on svbtle aren't very good. I want Svbtle to succeed, and honestly think it will. I don't think that success is going to come when its definition of 'curation' involves what it currently does.

I agree with you—there needs to be a lot more than just curating who posts or at least the seemingly main prerequisite being well known in an area.

Yeah, over time once the network matures, Dustin improves upon his idea, etc, it will be much better.

The whole notion of a "curated blogging platform" is inherently pretentious. It's an assertion that the curator has better taste than me.

(And don't worry, I'm not being inconsistent; I find designers pretentious too, and design fanboys more so)

What do you think of museum and art curators? Do you find it pretentious and some dangerous assertion against you that they have better taste than you? Do you think all 'designers' are pretentious?

I'm thankful that there are people making concerted effort to improve or at least find some of the better ones. Maybe the person does have better taste than you in some regards? What's so wrong with that?

Admittedly, I find the notion of someone having better taste than someone else somewhat amusing and it's not something I particularly concern myself with and this perhaps explains some of the amazement I have with the knees of people around here. :)

>What do you think of museum and art curators?

I see curation as a necessary evil given that museums and galleries have limited space and funds. So I don't see the curators as pretentious; the job has to be done by someone, it wouldn't be feasible to let each viewer choose for themselves. And AIUI the curators are usually hired by a museum rather than self-appointed.

>Do you think all 'designers' are pretentious?

No, I exaggerated; there are good, humble designers out there. But a large proportion of both the HN crowd and designers in general seem to have a very inflated view of the importance of design, and their own abilities. If everything designers said here was true, amazon.com would have about 1/8th of a user.

> Maybe the person does have better taste than you in some regards? What's so wrong with that?

Something about this particular instance seems to cross my mental line between recommending me things to read (which I like) and telling me what to read. I think it's just that the policy seems unnecessarily exclusive; publishing a cool theme for anyone to use would be great, as would "here's a list of good blogs you might want to follow". But the undertone I'm picking up is "svbtle will contain everything worth reading". Maybe I'm reading too much into it.

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