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Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure "we" traded anything.

Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs.

Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010[1]. And Technology Connections is only a moderately popular channel. If you look at the bigger channels like Mark Rober it is more like 350x.

What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video.

It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people. Nothing stops people from writing blogs today. They'll probably even get roughly the same (small) number of readers that blogs pulled back in 2010.

[1]: https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist...

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> Back in the day an absolutely minuscule portion of humanity read blogs

What I think it comes down to is us, on one level, grasping the benefits of elitist gatekeeping, but, on another level, not wanting to acknowledge that such mechanisms have benefits.

The elitism I speak of isn’t one of wealth, family or schooling. Instead it’s intellectual curiosity. That seems to correlate with the foregoing; hence the discomfort (at least in democratic societies).

Simply: when the internet was peopled by the curious and clever, it was fun. When it had to—or could—cater to a lower common denominator, it did. And that gave us this crap.

Well said. In particular about the lowest common denominator and about the curious and clever. So moving it away from the Internet growing up and focusing on democratic societies, what do you think the conclusion is. What’s a better model than a non gatekeeping democratic one?

> what do you think the conclusion is. What’s a better model than a non gatekeeping democratic one?

Sort of the question for our generation. I wish I had an answer.

To get more specific - by which measurable trait would you gatekeep, if you would prefer gatekeeping? Age? Income? IQ? Some sort of social reputation score? Civics tests? What would lead to better choices but also avoid populist revolution?

Real identities as a first step?

> Real identities as a first step?

If we could answer the preceding question, we'd have solved society. People are bastards in real life. People are angels anonymously. (If anything, taking away real identities neuters the internet's celebrity tendency.)

The only gate with a track record is tendency towards exploration. When the internet was a frontier, it selected for curiosity and, if not intelligence, at least daring (for its own sake). When it became accessible, we got influencers.

> People are bastards in real life. People are angels anonymously.

This is exactly the opposite of my experience.

They must have mixed up the two?!! This is even a meme: the most measured person in real life being absolutely vicious online!

It's not just gatekeeping. Recall the "Eternal September" concept. Prior to "Eternal September", it used to be that every September, a new wave of college students got access to the internet, and they would misbehave. But eventually they learned the norms of how to behave online, and things settled down.

That suggests a plan for internet reform. Start with a small group of contributors devoted to a better internet. Let new people in at a slow rate, so they acclimatize to norms of how to behave.

Maybe strict gatekeeping isn't actually necessary, and it's just about (a) starting with something good, and (b) adjusting the rate of newcomers to ensure that they actually acclimatize. If your platform grows 1% monthly, that will produce rapid compounding, yet could still be slow enough for acclimatization.

The problem for people who preferred the text-based approach is that previously they were over-represented and found things they liked everywhere. Like you say, the vast majority of people prefer image reels, short-form video, microblogs like Twitter, or comments on aggregators like Reddit or HN. That's the truth, but that original cohort of people lost their place and there's no obvious substitute.

I think that's primarily because there's no Schelling point for this. There's no single place where everyone who preferred the other form would go to. Perhaps there are webrings out there and stuff like that, but I haven't seen anything.

I've submitted my friends' blogs to the Kagi Small Web (and I'm in there as well) and almost everything there has a human feel to it, but it does not have cluster-navigation.

That better product but with a smaller audience similar to the earlier days would feel very different in practice. It’s sad that the original cohort got overrun and lost their place, and have nowhere to go. Maybe HN is one such place. I think something similar is felt by the original cohorts of people when cities and neighborhoods and ways of life change.

One theory I had was that blogrolls were common previously and allowed for cluster navigation. My friends and I certainly had these pointing to each other because why wouldn't you? The big bloggers on HN I see are tptacek, rachelbythebay, and simonwillison and none of them have a blogroll. General wisdom in website SEO etc. is to keep the user on your page and not send them elsewhere and I thought that perhaps many people were adhering to that. However, I think blogrolls were just not common ever and I was in a bubble that had them and so thought they were.

Here's what I did to find out. I first used an RSS aggregate feed that I recall: Planet Debian. I then picked out a ten year old archive of that feed but not on September 11 itself (well because you know). And the data says that blogrolls were always rare! So it's not that.

Blogroll:

https://www.corsac.net/?rub=blog&post=1576

No Blogroll:

http://blog.alteholz.eu/

http://damog.net/

https://henrich-on-debian.blogspot.com/

http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/First_paper_version_o...

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/

https://weblog.christoph-egger.org/

https://grep.be/blog/

https://www.preining.info/blog/

http://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/

https://weblog.christoph-egger.org/Systemd_pitfalls.html

Indeterminate:

https://blog.sesse.net/blog (relaunched now, original excluded, can't be verified)

https://web.archive.org/web/20160227131501/https://enc.com.a... (not really, but he lists all other people he knows with his name, which I thought was cool)

Niches in the internet today still use webrings, you can still find them with a Google search and some navigation.

> I think that's primarily because there's no Schelling point for this. There's no single place where everyone who preferred the other form would go to.

It seems like what this needs is a search engine that actually surfaces that sort of thing, because that's not a chicken and egg problem. It can open on day one by indexing the existing non-commercial blogs and free-to-read substacks etc., which makes it immediately useful for people who are looking for that.

And then as more people use the search engine, people are more encouraged to create that kind of site because the people looking for it now have a way of actually finding it.

> What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video. It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people.

I think you're right about the waves of migration, but I disagree that the product is "better".

What we've really traded are in-person friendships for anonymous online interactions, and that's definitely worse for everyone, in my opinion.

What's distinctive of the old blogging era is that the amount of online content at the time was extremely limited. You couldn't endlessly scroll through blogs. You went online, read some stuff, and then went offline. Now people never go offline. Now the amount of online content is practically unlimited, and not only that, it's the type of content that people typically consume alone. We get sucked into spending so much time alone, our only company being online strangers who we've never met and never will meet. You talk about YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, but that million-to-one ratio of viewer to YouTuber precludes most direct human interaction.

The fact that both we and the masses in general have been sucked into this situation, this depersonalization, separation from in-person interactions, is a great societal harm. And I don't think it's ironic that I'm saying this online to anonymous strangers; I just think it's sad, another symptom of the problem.

Most of the people that hang out in normie social networks "touch grass" a lot more frequently than the types that hang out on text forums. Text forums tend to attract a high number of folks with social anxiety or other circumstances that keep them from socializing which puts them in bubbles more.

> Most of the people that hang out in normie social networks "touch grass" a lot more frequently than the types that hang out on text forums

It's missing the point to compare two types of people. You need to compare the so-called "normies" before and after. The statistics show that everyone is spending less time in-person socializing and more time online.

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., have millions or billions of users, and it's not the blog-loving old-school techies who are spending endless hours on them.

>What's distinctive of the old blogging era is that the amount of online content at the time was extremely limited. You couldn't endlessly scroll through blogs.

That is not true: when the first blog started in 1996 or so, text was being added to the web so fast that nobody could read even 1% of it. (Ditto text on the newsgroups before the rise of the web.)

The issue the grandparent post is alluding to is more a change in consumer habits and technology. Even in 2005, recommendation algorithms were barely impacting the content you saw online. Facebook was chronological until around 2009 from what I remember; you could literally go online and find a friend had filled your feed by posting status updates over and over again. YouTube similarly prioritized your subscriptions over other content, and the other content was usually just whatever other people happened to be watching. You would go online once every couple of days, see what was new, and then log off. If there wasn’t anything new, finding it required a significantly greater time investment than opening up your short form video content app of choice.

There was also probably less duplication; these days you can find dozens of Reddit threads relevant to almost any given query, but most of them will have the same kind of comments. With short form video content you’ll often see 3 variations of the same meme within 15 minutes. Back in the early 2000s a lot of queries would only return a couple of relevant results.

It wasn't just about the subscribers. Blogs were incredibly useful as long-form documentation of unique problems and experiences, too. I used to write in my blog (Standalone SysAdmin), and it had over a million hits per year a few times, and the majority of those hits which didn't come from going viral about ashtrays in airplane bathrooms were people searching for the same problems I'd encountered and written about.

> Technology Connections has 3 million subscribers. That's over 10x the number of people reading the most popular blogs in the world circa 2010

That's what's kind of insane, community forums took maybe 20-30 people to feel "active", but you can't get a big enough slice of attention from that many people to actually use forums, even though the Internet has grown massively. Discovery is really hard: it used to be that community websites were able to claw their way up Page Rank, but these days it's just hard to compete with major websites and SEO slop. Even if you manage to snag a few people, they are very likely to drop off quicker, and the "feel" is a lot different when they're all social-media-brained anyway. The proof is in the pudding: most forums are dead, and forums that are still alive are mostly ancient and very obviously less influential and smaller than they once were. People are too distracted by things that actively claw away attention, and people who are drawn in by social media tend to bring a bad kind of energy to traditional forums anyways.

It is true that you have bigger audiences nowadays with modern social media. Part of that is just the fact that the Internet is bigger (somewhere between 2x to 3x bigger) but another major part of that is the consolidation. Though, it's also worth noting that comparing YouTube subscribers to blog readers may not give the best representation. Entirely different concepts, for entirely different media.

To push back slightly, Discord says they have 19 million weekly active servers, which almost certainly outstrips the number of forums back in the day.

It just feels like there's been a shift away from the super public phpbb forum style, with distinct posts and threads of conversation.

But I'm not sure that's quite the same thing as all the communities going away.

As some examples from my own Discord:

A server for fans of pretty obscure, self published author Victoria Goddard.

A server for fans of Reiner Knizia, the world's most prolific and famous boardgame designer.

A server for fans of the Lancer RPG.

A server for people who play modern (primarily) Japanese card games.

> To push back slightly, Discord says they have 19 million weekly active servers, which almost certainly outstrips the number of forums back in the day.

Yeah, but most of the servers are very, very small. They're internet chatrooms. It's more like MSN group chats or IRC channels.

On the other hand, there were probably more small forums than most people realize, due to free forum hosts like Proboards.

Maybe most importantly, having a Discord chat is in no way the same overall effect as having a forum used to be.

It's really not that simple; the environment that allowed for the kind of appealing interactions blogs offered is much harder to come by.

Early days had a barrier to entry that made the public who would read and engage much more enjoyable to write for.

The universal internet is not the same thing as the one that naturally filtered it's participants.

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