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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Are personal blogs back? My personal blog ten years ago (even twenty years ago) received a lot of direct traffic on all sorts of things from the primary search engines and so on. Nowadays, the only search engine that delivers any traffic to my site is Kagi! Looking back, I haven't changed my style of writing very much, so I suspect the reality is that I've just fallen behind in a comparative sense. There are much better things nowadays to access.

It's probably similar to the street-side musician. In old times, he may have been the only musician around you might hear. Nowadays, he's got to compete with a perfect recording of Hotel California by the Eagles.

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I assume that search engines these days don't care as much about showing results that won't make them money. Either you bought search ads, your site is showing ads from their network, or you're SOL.

I think they do. The problem is different. It used to be that if you had a blog about something like guitar maintenance or linear algebra, that was enough to show up in the results, because no one else was directly competing with you.

Over time, a lot of companies figured out that if they start posting content-farmed articles on notionally non-commercial topics, this drives people to their website, so you ended up with billions of pages like this: thecleaningauthority . com/blog/how-to-clean/the-ultimate-guide-to-cleaning-pillows-and-pillo/ (remove spaces if you really want to).

And then LLMs brought down the marginal cost of cranking out content on any conceivable topic basically to zero, so you're all of sudden competing with 500 companies publishing spammy guitar maintenance advice. It's not that search engines want to show that stuff, but it's hard for them to tell.

I'm not sure whether we're disagreeing all that much. Your examples are of low-quality results. From a user's point of view, the one and only job of a search engine is to surface high-quality results, especially if it's hard for the engine to tell.

But the incentive for search engines to pick profitable results over quality results has only gotten stronger over time.

Just imagine a world where your one-person, part-time, labor-of-love guitar-maintenance blog were the top search result, simply because it had the best content. Democratizing access to information was the original promise of the web. I don't think we're there anymore, and I don't think it's correct to let search engines off the hook because their lucrative job has gotten harder.

Hmm, that's pretty rough. It kind of sounds like a search engine should be considered public infrastructure.

(Perhaps also the browser, email, etc? ;)

You can install your own email server without much costs, so when everyone would do that we would have fewer problems.

You may not reach the masses, but there will be an audience.

I have an RSS feed of personal blogs which I really enjoy.

I also refuse to go to LiveNation type concerts. I only go to local musicians charging $10 at the door.

I don't even do it on principle. Corporate entertainment (including blogs) often feels formulaic to me. I find that Medium sucks the life out of good writers for some reason.

Hi! I'd like some quick feedback - I just implemented RSS on my blog. ie the URL works.

Am I supposed to advertise it with the icon explicitly or is it enough if the URL works? What do you generally look for?

I haven’t noticed a huge upswing in traffic on my personal blog but efforts like mastodon have led to some nice interactions. I think there is more sense of community and people realizing that blogs need to be encouraged than there was a few years ago. Whether this is sustainable remains to be seen.

If you like this sort of thing, find a blog you like and contact the author to tell them you enjoy their work.

Your blog seems to be broken.

Huh, thank you for letting me know. What did you observe? It's running on a machine in my home office so it's entirely possible something happened for a short duration of time.

I just checked in incognito on my cellular network and it seems to be working now. If you get the chance, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know what went wrong when you visited it. Email in profile if you'd prefer that.

Also, I was just reading your blog and saw a reference to FutureMe.org. Man, that website really did survive. I searched my email for it and look at this!

> (The following is an e-mail from the past, composed on Wednesday, June 14, 2006, and sent via FutureMe.org)

And another where I say

> Hopefully, you have a child and everything is good and they are healthy. I wish you the best of luck, mate.

It worked out. Thanks for the good luck, past me! :)

Hi there! I emailed you.

Thank you :)

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