The best way to bring back blogs is to start with your own. It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN.
But that's rarely how things work.
The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'll get.
Then, nothing. You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!
You may write a few more posts, but it's always the same story. A lot of work goes in, but not much comes out.
And this is the point at which most bloggers stop. After all, how can you justify more time spent on something that doesn't pay back?
The problem is that with a blog you need to think in terms of years. You have to write regularly over the course of years before you'll get any kind of reliable following.
In the meantime, you'll notice how blogging regularly changes you. You'll notice patterns you never noticed before, especially if you stick to a particular "beat." You'll get better at choosing topics. You'll figure out ways to write faster. You'll get better at pushing through mental fog and procrastination that keeps so many others from writing.
You may also discover that you really, really hate writing. Nothing wrong with that, but understand that many people also dislike writing anything longer than a tweet. And that's why good blogs are kind of scarce. And therein lies the opportunity.
Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/... and even there with the currency of likes/comments those motivations get twisted.
Some of the internet has also shifted to a privacy centric attitude. The whole world is a big place to share intimate stories which will be indexed and used against you in job interviews or by oppressive governments.
I still think there's value in private blogging, writing just to keep your friends and family informed. Blogging doesn't always have to be sharing with the whole world. I wish there were more platforms to make this easy to do.
> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership.
Or, to put that another way: blogs are/were effectively people publicizing their diaries. (Or, in the case of a work blog, publicizing the contents of their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook).
> Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/
Not really? Facebook/Twitter/etc. are for "what you're thinking right now." Incomplete, out-of-context thoughts. Maybe conversations, where the thought plus access to the author for further questioning can "add up to" a complete, legible text.
I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for "a breakthrough in understanding you've had, and want to preserve for posterity and your own future reference; where enough context is given that you (or someone else) can recapture the whole of the idea just from the words on the page, 10+ years down the line." That's the sole province of blogging. (Or of books, journal papers, and open letters. But blogs are a lot lower-overhead than any of those.)
Twitter is not just incomplete/out of context thoughts. It can be. But not always. Follow the right people. I find it’s great for Javascript patterns and new findings. Of course the content is not discussed in great detail but you can get a quick jist from various sources.
The same with instagram for photos. I much prefer to see photos in series but quick snapshot from various sources in one platform.
This is what’s destroyed blogging mostly in my opinion, you can micro blog quickly.
People used to blog because they wanted a presence on the internet, now you can have that with social media platforms
>> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership.
Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog.
I also recall a distinction between homepages (IE where useful static information collected in one place) and blogs (personal stories not with the goal of teaching). Homepages could have lots of traffic but little real interaction (like FB today). Blogs would have lots of detailed interaction but but very little viewership.
Definitely true for me in the 2000s. My social network formed a bunch of circles with very little overlap. A blog, like the ones I and some of my friends used to have, would serve as a bridge, thanks to the sidebar linking to other people the blog author reads/recommends. Back in the day, I used to be active in a local gamedev scene, so my sidebar was mostly full of links to blogs of other hobbyist/aspiring game developers, who would in turn link back to me. If you were interested in gamedev, you could easily go from blog to blog and enumerate almost everyone in the group, but at each step you also had an opportunity to branch out to a given author's other interests.
It was a nice way of discovering new things, and a more personal one. You jumped around topics and social networks simultaneously; at every step it wasn't just a new theme, but a new person, an acqauintance of an acquaintance, someone with a name (or more likely then, a nickname) you would remember and refer back to in conversations. Even though we mostly didn't know one another except from blogs and IRC, the Internet felt much more like a village back then. Now, it feels like a strip mall.
Well, this is why I don’t have a blog. I have a lot of strong opinions that might be interesting to some people, but I don’t want to miss opportunities because some HR person googled my name and found a post they disagreed with. Or, in the future, not a real person but an algorithm.
Anecdotal counterexample: I successfully moved from development into technical writing because I had a blog that a company got in touch with me about and said, "We really like your writing. Have you considered being a technical writer?"
My honest feeling is that if you're a good writer and not just posting ranty flamebait -- and "strongly worded and highly opinionated" is not the same thing, although it can be -- blogging is valuable. Or at least it used to be. And really, I'd like to see it make more of a return, too.
Sometimes I feel like I want to write something I have strong opinions about, then I realize how much research I would have to do to actually justify my unfounded opinions and give up.
The trouble with that is that once you post something to it you can never associate it with yourself (even accidentally!) or deanonymization of everything else posted by that identity will also occur.
Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just end up getting abused, but who knows?)
What complex social problem? All I see are a few technical problems regarding security, anonymity, and interrelations between nodes on a graph. There's also a closely related ease of use (ie UX) problem regarding the convenience (or rather lack thereof) of publishing things in a reasonably anonymous manner.
All the social problems, such as the underlying reasons for wanting or needing anonymity in the first place, remain.
It is a social problem because even the strongest, most bullet-proof cryptography solution can't prevent people slipping up and making mistakes, which a motivated attacker can then use to de-anonymize and connect their various identities together.
I agree that the potential for making mistakes could contribute to a social problem, but it's one that already exists. I also wasn't proposing to solve it - hence my earlier response.
“Authorship Attribution” is an active field of research. Even if you manage to solve the problem of anonymously publishing a bunch of content under distinct anonymous pseudonyms (or completely anonymously), there’s a non-negligible probability that, as soon as the author of one work is identified, the entire body of work can be attributed to that person.
> Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just end up getting abused, but who knows?)
The downside is that as a reader you wouldn’t be able to follow your favorite authors anymore.
That's definitely true, but depending on the usecase it might not matter all that much. Also, that problem already applies to an anonymous blog anyway!
Consider the usage of semi-anonymous accounts on HN or Reddit or wherever. There's some risk of deanonymization depending on usage style and how determined the attacker is, but it's still quite different from openly publishing things in a manner that links back to you directly.
The issue for me is that (for an anonymous blog) once I decide to publish something to it the article becomes permanently and publicly linked to all the others as well. This means that I can never change my mind in the future without simultaneously changing my mind about all the other content published there. It also means that if I ever slip up (say on a non-anonymous HN account) and reveal that I'm the author then I've inadvertently and publicly tied the entire blog to myself (not just that one article).
An anonymous blog platform that offers a permanent and trusted Delete button could both let you change your mind about a former opinion and offer a fix in case of accidental slip-up
Any time bits leave your computer it would be wise to assume that they're out in the world for good. Especially for anything with a distributed architecture, presumably all you have control over is whether your personal box continues distributing it. I suppose you could set a "don't distribute" flag and hope that other hosts choose to honor it ...
I suspect that resulting articles would be, while probably reasonably safe from style analysis, awfully boring and difficult to read. Good and interesting writing style is a skill.
You could pass it through a Google Translate, or maybe a couple, then back - correct for minor errors and style has changed (maybe not that much, but enough to scare AI).
I hadn't really thought it through honestly. I'm just assuming that if an anonymized publishing service with a low barrier to entry exists that people will find creative ways to misuse it. Semi-related Google Drive usage: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19907271)
Consider all the issues that Reddit and HN have with spam and other sorts of abuse. Then again, BitTorrent and IPFS seem to work well enough. At a minimum, I suspect that issues will tend to crop up anywhere a search or other curation mechanism exists that can potentially be gamed in order to gain an audience.
I did write a lot of articles anonymously back then(was afraid due to validation/criticism as I was learning) but later I found out that my blogs are legit and people liked them. And later couldn't associate with real me.
Now making System design videos with real face and name and able to reach a subset of the audience.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn1XnDWhsLS5URXTi5wtFTA/
It'd be nice if robots.txt were actually respected so that your blog was visible to people you trackback, or from blogs that link to you, but not to search engines.
I find most of my blog entries using search engines. And I suspect I'm not alone in this. Blocking search engines gives you a serious bootstrap problem.
It seems like this is a cultural shift in society as well. There are no more hobbies, everything is a side hustle and if you can’t turn a profit from it, it’s not worth doing. I’m not an economist or sociologist so I can’t Even pretend to understand why this is, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed over the past few years.
Not my experience at all. The mods plus fanmade expansions community is bigger than ever. And so is open source. Way more stuff is free now than ever before.
It's not about giving things away for free, it's about doing things you like to do just for your own satisfaction. While there is a lot of that in the mods and open source space, there's also a lot of resume building, portfolio projects, etc. There's an insane amount of pressure to always be "shipping to production" no matter if your hobby is crocheting, gardening, writing code, blogging, building robots, playing music, painting, etc.
Patreon, Etsy, OnlyFans, Kickstarter, and even Github (just to scratch the surface) all serve to put pressure on creators to turn their hobbies into second jobs.
I'm sorry you feel this way, but I do not think this is true for most creators. Too many of my friends have made wonderful things for the sake of it. And they're so self-effacing, they won't even mention these things.
Not judging you or your friends, but perhaps those who can do hobbies just for fun are in a position of privilege (enough time, money, financial and professional security) to be able to do so? The "hustle culture" is very real and is I think a side effect of the gig economy and the end of the 9-5 secure job with its strict boundaries of work and leisure time. If you still have that kind of job it's easier to have hobbies with no outcome than personal satisfaction (assuming no other "distractions" like small children). Most creators I happen to know are hustling, whether on Github or Wordpress or Etsy or IRL, either trying to make some money on the side or building a portfolio for their career or to help them score their next gig. Those that aren't are retired or have some secure, traditional 9-5.
Is that true? Or is it just the case that people trying to make a profit have learned how to promote themselves to an extent that drowns out the hobbyists?
I had some hobby pages in the 1990s that got a lot of views and came high up in search results. None of them were ever deliberately publicised. I doubt that any of my material would show in the top 1000 of any web search today.
I've been saying for years that people need to stop pressuring themselves into being good at their hobbies. Have fun first, who cares if you can't sing/draw/paint?
It's VERY hard to make money with Google AdSense types of programs. The volume of traffic you need is so high that if you're there, it probably "pays" to sell the ads yourself and keep all the $$$. But that's hella difficult.
Almost all news organizations -- they're not bloggers but chances are they're using blogging software (mostly WordPress) -- have figured this out. And they're still not making enough money from advertising. Hence subscriptions. Bloggers can go this route directly with https://substack.com.
Google-owned YouTube's willingness to compensate those who make popular videos has fueled that service's growth and helped it draw a young audience.
The fact that Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have no way of "paying" its top performers, as it were, is interesting. You get paid in eyeballs. In exposure. Since the pay for blogs is usually non-existent, there's some value in the "likes," and most people who envision making money off of their social-media/internet presence need to get a side hustle to their side hustle -- a product they can make and sell.
I think it lives on in big platforms like Reddit, but I agree that it used to be far more prevalent on the net than it is.
Youtube is a good example. It used to be so fun to just throw up videos on the internet, without caring how far they would really go. I definitely think there are great content creators on it nowadays and I'm glad that they're being paid for their hard work, but it still feels like we've lost something.
>Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership.
This right here. You all need to calm down like you're all so unique you are all owed 1000s of views a day. Write for the sake of writing- it's rewarding in and of itself.
Facebook/Twitter is terrible for putting down ideas. You don’t control what happens to your content. Posts get lost in the sea of millions of other posts. These companies constantly change policies.
Writing is a public act. You might still be expecting some readership without the expectation of ad money or promotion of something.
What I miss most about the blogs in 90s and early 00s is the conversation between blogs by linking, quoting and commenting each other. Reading blogs involved going from one blog to another, and reading blogs of 10 people about a single issue. It was a conversation. And you would constantly discover new blogs this way.
The thing I miss most is LiveJournal. Sure, over time it kind of failed, and later having data owned by possibly nefarious new owners didn't help reputationally, but what I loved was having a small, approved set of people who could read, and getting to know other people in long form, where writing was the primary draw, rather than links, brags, and ads, like social media has become. I miss the very internal nature that the platform allowed, but it was a more naive time, where the idea that whatever was there would inevitably become public wasn't a barrier to intimacy.
> written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership
I've never really bought this line of argument. People who "write just for writing" don't publish. They write it in One Note or Evernote or Tiddlywiki or plain old text files on their laptop. They don't sign up for Wordpress accounts (or even worse, spend hours configuring some static site generator) and publish it.
People publish things because they want them to be read. Having no indication that they are being read is, understandably, discouraging for people who are publishing things.
There is of course a middle ground between 'writing for writing' and 'writing for payback'. For instance people might want to post how they did some stuff, with the hope that it helps at least one guy. That's how most blog were written.
Then internet slowly became a place where everything is a business opportunity, and blogs were relayed into the second zone. Google also somehow became much less useful when it comes to find good blogs, probably because of aggressive SEO.
This is so true... Youtube is kind of the new blog because so many people don't like writing but they love seeing themselves on screen. This made it too commercial. All the top youtubers do it just for the sponsorship. People like Linus Tech Tips etc, all this "check this out from our sponsors" crap. It really put me off Youtube. The only ones I still watch are zero punctuation and EEVBlog. Dave is also doing it as a job but at least he didn't become annoying.
Besides, I really prefer to read over watching videos as I can do it at my own pace. Except in cases where a lot is shown like EEVBlog, it makes sense there.
But easy platforms exist. Wordpress is still there :) You just have to keep it up to date like a hawk.
I wouldn't put an idea on Twitter or Facebook. That's where I put a short joke, or a pun, or some political troll meme. Then I watch the mentions and likes roll in. That's not to say that it never happens, but they aren't really well made platforms for it, outside posting a link to an actual blog.
Personally, I think the blogosphere is covered pretty well for me by the likes of Medium. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but they've made a damn good job at cornering that part of the market for those more serious posts that were previously relegated to the blogosphere. That's a place I'd put a more well-formed idea. A great example is the article, "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" by Thomas Pueyo.[1]
Outside that, blogs still exists! I still even have my own. I think the complaint is rather that they're hard to index or search. And to that end, there are many solutions and ways around it that still exist, such as syndication or even RSS.
I blog about my electronics project. It's public in that it's online and accessible but it is for me, both to ensure I think things through well enough to write them down coherently and to have a reference for decisions.
I blog my work activities on an internal wiki for similar reasons. Major decisions need to be gathered in project documentation but small decisions and daily challenges are good to have written down.
Yes - when I was overseas I kept a "blog" in the form of a website hosted at my university. I'd update it with a few pictures and some text about new things I was experiencing.
It was more of a journal and something maybe if my friends and family wanted to read, they could. A slightly extroverted way of showing your inner thoughts and life.
If, say, you blog about some social/economic/political position that is (or becomes) unpopular/unacceptable, your career may be toast. Such as, for example, happened for James Damore.
So if you're going to blog as your meatspace identity, you gotta protect your brand.
If you want to blog carelessly, you'd better do that using a persona that can't readily be linked to your meatspace identity. That's why I'm here as Mirimir.
But even then, Mirimir has a reputation to protect. And that's why I use other personas, which can't readily be linked to this one.
Can you leverage Mirimir ever in your real life? If Mirimir writes some stupendous essays but 5% of his posts are critical of say, some aspect of the LGBT community, then wouldn't it be a huge risk to your IRL reputation? Then you couldn't admit that you're Mirimir to others IRL.
But I like the idea of blogging under a fake name! This will sound ridiculous, but I'm a young individual with big ambitions. I don't want to blog, lest my future enemies figure out my psyche to use it against me.
Yes, that is indeed a limitation. Nobody IRL will ever know that I'm Mirimir. Also, I can't attend physical events as Mirimir, or do anything with audio/video.
I suppose that you could use other personas for totally non-controversial stuff. Indeed, you could have a range of them, and disclose some if you like.
There is the issue of writing style. At this point, Mirimir is my only persona that writes extensively in English. There are a few others that are basically Mirimir's pseudonyms. But my IRL identity doesn't post much in English. For some others, I've translated into other languages, using offline software.
> I don't want to blog, lest my future enemies figure out my psyche to use it against me.
I think you overestimate the sophistication of your future enemies. The bigger risk may be that by not blogging you don't figure out your psyche, to use it for you.
The world hasn't had enormous user generated content platforms (where it's reasonably common to use your real name) for very long at all. But I would say it started out in a much better state than it is now, and has been progressively getting worse. It's reasonably common to have somebody held in high esteem by the various groups that are highly concerned with political correctness, suffer catastrophic falls from grace after some ancient tweet is discovered, from back in a time when it was OK to have opinions and make jokes. Personally, I would never risk publicly voicing an opinion on any topic that was strictly technical.
As Mirimir, I have voiced opinions about such topics. I'm not dogmatic, but neither do I avoid dark humor, so I suspect that I've managed to piss off some on every "side".
Anyway, I was thinking about decades ago. There were opinions that you just didn't voice, if you cared about your reputation. Back in the 50s, communism became a dangerous topic in the US. And homosexuality was a dangerous topic there until the late 70s. Although there were some flamboyant stars, and cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny, they were just perceived as strange.
Further back, dissent among Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony led to the establishment of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.
The rest of your comment here highlights why I believe freedom of expression is so important. Society would not have progressed if it were not for people brave enough to defy those social norms. I guess the intolerance for alternative points of view has not changed, but over the past ten years or so we have seen the establishment of an entirely new set of sacred social norms, which I would characterize as a bit of a regression.
> ... over the past ten years or so we have seen the establishment of an entirely new set of sacred social norms ...
That depends on who you are, and where you hang out.
By "sacred social norms", I presume that you mean what some call the "social justice movement": liberal perspectives on "race", culture, sexuality, gender, and other human rights. It's true that those norms now apply for liberal mass media, academica, and large enterprises. And increasingly, they've become part of state and federal law.
Those norms reflect activism over at least the past 200 years. However, change hasn't been steady or even monotonic. Recent reverses occurred during the Reagan era, driven by the Moral Majority. And again during the Bush II era, driven by them and the New Right.
American society has also become increasingly polarized since the 60s. Although the mass media has become increasingly liberal, the Fox News Network and associated talk radio developed. And since the early 90s, development of the Internet has dramatically increased polarization.
So now we're in the Trump era. By 2016, American society was already so polarized that the liberal mass media was totally blind sided by Trump's election. And even after three years, they're still convinced that it was a Russian plot.
Anyway, it's hard to say whether the intolerance of the "social justice movement" has caused the backlash, or whether the backlash has driven the intolerance. But either way, both sides are ~equally intolerant.
And yes, it's a disturbing development. At some point, it may drive the US to partition. Much like India split off Pakistan, but on a larger scale.
I mostly agree with you. But I do take issue with this:
>But either way, both sides are ~equally intolerant.
When I was growing up it was the intolerance of Christian morality that prevented people from living their lives and expressing themselves the way they wanted to. The intolerance was a largely bipartisan (see the PMRC with Tipper Gore and Paula Hawkins for instance), but it was really the Democrats that gave way to social progress first, and the Republican party still today retains a reputation for Christian puritanism. The modern flavor of puritanism most certainly comes more from the other side of the isle (whether you want to call it the "social justice movement" or anything else). The basis of each of those political stances is the same. People should not be able say anything they want, or live any way they please, because allowing them to do so would risk causing offence. I've supported gay marriage since the 90s, and for the same reason that I support freedom of expression today. In the past those views (which I have not changed) aligned me much more firmly with the "left" than the "right", and the reverse is true today. I would argue that modern "progressive" (or whatever else you want to call it) politics has no room for freedom of expression, because it won't tolerate anything seen as "offensive", "hateful" or "dangerous". Which is basically the same premise that has obstructed all of our past social progress up to this point.
> In the past those views (which I have not changed) aligned me much more firmly with the "left" than the "right", and the reverse is true today.
Yeah, same here.
But arguably the "right" just talks that way because they're recruiting. If they had a lock on the government, and the mass media bagged, they'd be far less tolerant.
But in any case, that's why I'm an anonymous coward. In meatspace, I just keep my head down. Nothing to see here, move along.
I won't argue whether the (American) left is necessarily protecting free speech at all costs. That's a complicated question.
But I think it's a stretch to call the situation "reversed". You can see the right often using the very methods and talking points they seem to criticize on the left. From efforts to shut down protests, to constant usage of patriotic symbols to silence speech ("if you kneel during the anthem, you're disrespecting the flag"), to starting investigations for cases where speech didn't align with their values.
I often notice when I start writing on a particular topic, I learn more about my thoughts and opinions of it and realize my thoughts are wrong or not really novel. Halfway in I give up since I feel like, "oh, this actually isn't really adding anything new to the conversation". Then I leave with a new humbleness about my beliefs but also a sense of "when am I actually going to know enough to warrant writing about it?".
That's awesome! If only most people would do that, I think the internet would be a much more entertaining and enlightening place.
Here's the thing: write that. Go meta, just a little, and write about your journey. "I thought this, but then I found out that, and now my questions have evolved thus..."
I think it was Orson Welles who, when somebody asked him if they could write his biography, said, "No, because it will be false. You may write the story of your attempt to discover the truth of my life."
You can add tremendious value just by publishing your research and linking to the sources, even if you have not added anything, those hours you spent searching - that your readers dont have to, and likely your readers dont have the same experience as you, so they wont be able to read the sorces critically. So by not adding anything, you can still save someone years of time.
There is also nothing wrong with serving good knowelage, even if you can find the information somewhere else. Maybe your source is 10 years old, what has happened since? Or maybe its hard to understand for laymen. Or maybe the other sources will fall off the web, great websites disappears in the thousands every day.
Maybe someone is looking for a tech, but there's little info out there, even if the i info is good, it can still be dismissed. Help spread the knowledge.
Then there's the noise to signal problem. Your blog will be a light beacon - for others to navigate around all the crap.
I struggle with this too, but then I think on how many of the blogs I read basically say the same thing over and over again, or just rephrase ideas from other places.
When you're familiar with an idea, it seems to you like it's obvious and it's mentioned everywhere, but there are also lots of people out there for whom it will be new. Maybe you aren't the first one to say it, but you're the first one they heard it from. You'll inevitably put your own spin on it, too. I've been working on convincing myself that it's not necessary to come up with some completely novel thought that nobody ever thought before in order to just post something. Practically nobody does that.
I am similar but I would suggest that you could reframe your post. "I started this post with the intention of... and then realised that... (The idea is not a new one/I was wrong/changed my mind because/the idea doesn't make sense etc)." You could even link back to more informative resources on the topic.
Not everything has to be new or novel. You may add to the discussion and enhance it by writing about what informed your change of heart.
thats a great mindset, but its also funny because a lot of blog posts that do well are about rehashing basic things like "why open offices suck", or "why i chose node instead of ruby"
Yeah and when I think about writing about rehashing basic things, I realize why those basic things are so prevalent and why they actually shouldn't be rehashed. It's like a call to enlightenment.
What about when I go through this process so fast that I don't even need to write about it to realize I know nothing?
I'm 26 and I see people writing about stuff that are much younger than me and I still think "I know nothing". Maybe I have a huge case of imposter syndrome?
I have this happen too. What this means at least for me, is that I have dozens of little ideas of things to write about, usually after I’ve seen that I’ve encountered it multiple times, I really think I have a position on it, and I want to really see where they would go (those who know me on the site may have some good guesses as to what I currently have stashed for this). And then I stick that idea in a little list I call “future blog posts” and slowly add ideas to them over months (note I have not actually written anything for the blog post yet!) until they are polished the key points I really want to include and a coherent story that I want to tell with them. Then I sit down and write them, and by that time I’m very confident of which way I’m going, the rebuttals and my responses to those just flow naturally, and I generally keep that position in the future.
That happens to me too. You really thing you have something interesting to tell, and then bam, just a silly thought... good that I realized that before publishing it.
I'm curious what your silly thoughts are. How do you know that I will share your judgement of what a silly thought is? What is a silly thought to you after writing something down might be of interest to a random internet user. Is it not presumptive to assume that everyone else will share your judgement?
That's a good point. I sometimes get a feeling that only an idiot would think my thoughts were good and most people are not idiots so whatever I write about won't be useful.
I look at it as a writing exercise along the lines of "you remember 60% of what you hear and 90% of what you had to research and write". Yeah, your article probably isn't going to catch fire and open a bunch of eyes. But the exercise of writing it almost certainly improved your understanding of the problem space, so if it ends up being useful to someone or gets you some small amount of clout that's a bonus.
I'm the same way, I remember getting that feeling of sudden understanding right at the end of writing an essay in school. But I no longer had any time left to actually present my new found understanding.
> You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!
And that, right there, is the best reason to remove all analytics from your blog/website[1]. At the risk of being held guilty of self-promotion, I wrote a little blog post about just this a couple of weeks ago: https://one.mikro2nd.net/2020/05/why-no-web-analytics-are-to... (Thing is, if anybody here does go and read it, I won't even know.)
At the root of the unease is the question, "Why are you blogging?" If it's something you do for yourself, then analytics -- specifically: who is reading which posts -- is a distraction, and sure to lead you astray into the thickets and quagmire of writing mere clickbait.
If you're writing to establish "thought leadership" in some sphere, then display leadership, not followership (i.e. chasing the analytics.) It's a strange and uncomfortable feeling at first (perhaps always!) but at least you'll always know who you're writing for (yourself). If you're writing for some "payback" then I'd suggest that submitting articles to magazines is a better path/platform than blogging.
Personally I am more interested in inciting thought and discussion through my blog, so mere visitor statistics are of little interest. What would validate what I do there would be someone who reaches out to talk about something I've written. That's the real payback.
I started my own blog last month and I am following this advice 100%. I'm not using analytics or trackers of any sort, not only for believing they create they same delusion you mention in your post, but also because I try to block all types of trackers when visiting other sites.
Why would I use the very thing I'm trying so hard to avoid when surfing the web? It's basically a matter of respect to the reader. So I designed my site following the values I consider so important for websites in general: no trackers, no mandatory javascript, no obstacles between the user and the content.
Your reason -- respect for your readers, treating them as you wish to be treated yourself -- is the exact reason I started down this road. It took me a while to realise that there was this other, more subtle, benefit, too.
+1 on joining in. Perhaps we can turn it into a movement. ;)
Note that you can’t actually get rid of all knowledge of which blog posts of yours are popular, because you’ll find out in other ways: it’ll be on the front page of Hacker News or people will email you about it, or a friend will link it back to you. If you’re looking for privacy-preserving analytics, this is the ultimate in that. If you want nothing at all…yeah, there’s really no way to run away from the world after you publish something.
The publish or perish nature of blogs is one of the many reasons why I feel they're generally inferior to the personal web pages that were popular during the early web. It seems that there has been a general trend towards a constant churning of output in order to keep up the dopamine hits for users. The quality of a lot of online content reflects this.
Yeah. The antithesis of the blog is the evergreen page, where you collect and systematize information about one thing you're interested in, and keep improving it over the years. A great example is Robin Whittle's page about pink noise algorithms: http://www.firstpr.com.au/dsp/pink-noise/ It covers the topic from more angles than any single blogpost. Then at some point your page can become a collection of pages, like Bill Beaty's electricity stuff: http://amasci.com/miscon/whatis.html I think these are some of the most valuable things on the internet.
I love these types of pages. I know nothing about programming. Can you (or anyone reading this) suggest how I can go about making one? What's the bare minimum I'd need to learn to have essentially a single or a few pages with plain text, links, and photos on it, like the ones you posted? What terms should I search for to learn how to do this?
The bare minimum is to learn some HTML tags (the main ones are <a>, <p>, <img>, <h1>...<h6>), create a plain text file in Notepad and sprinkle it with these tags, save it as index.html, test it in a browser, then put it in a zip archive (along with other pages and images if you want) and upload at https://app.netlify.com/drop
> It seems that there has been a general trend towards a constant churning of output in order to keep up the dopamine hits for users.
my first thought when reading this was "yeah, that's because users don't know how to RSS". it's not that i know how to RSS that well, but i do have friends who use RSS in the style of masters. my favorite strategy that i have heard of, and what i will try to replicate in a few months, is: rss subscription >> local mail service >> inbound mail folders filled with articles from my RSS feed.
i've been practicing my own ability to use "the computer" in a way that makes me feel like a master... and we'll see if i ever get there. surely though, we are all missing out on the oldschool internet that was swallowed by the walled gardens.
I've been steadily plugging away at a semi-regular schedule (I post when I hit a milestone, but that can vary in time itself) on my writing blog. I post all my short stories there, as well as progress on the novel I'm writing. I know no one here really cares about non-tech stuff (I'm a tech guy, but I've sort of gotten more interested in philosophy and writing lately — all I used to care about was tech, so I get it), but shameless plug: https://indifferentuniverse.christopherdumas.org/?m=1.
I've only been doing it for less than a year, so I haven't reached the stuff you're talking about. I haven't even really branched out into talking about general topics yet, but I plan to soon. I'm just slowly feeling my way around, seeing what I can do and what I have time for and whatever. I don't get (m)any views that aren't myself yet though, lol.
There is a good advice for writers (bloggers are essentially writers) - write only if you can't NOT write. If you write because you can't not write, then you don't care about the number of readers.
Blogs haven't gone anywhere, now they're just "posts" on major platforms.
That's what people chose, because it's easier. They gave up content rights and many, many possibilities for the ease of posting and the near instant views and feedback.
I was thinking about this the other day - trying to come up with an idea for a way to aggregate or recommend blogs to people based on what they'd previously enjoyed or the topics they were interested in. It took me several minutes to realize I was mentally describing Medium to myself.
Still, something doesn't feel quite right about Medium to me.
I missed the Medium boat and just looked into it for the first time maybe 6 months ago.
From a reader’s perspective, the content just seems repetitive and traffic-driven. There is a certain sensationalist slant that must drive views, and the articles rapidly started to feel samey.
I’m still subscribed to it but I doubt I’ll renew.
I have a blog which I've maintained for a long time and continue to publish on. But for a lot of the material I write on a day to day basis, I can publish at online pubs/sites where I have editorial support, an established audience, and promotional machinery. I'm not limited--I can always publish by myself--but for many of the things I write about I might as well choose an existing publication.
> Then, nothing. You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!
Open source software development can be like this as well. Most of my projects ended up being useful to me alone. I started some just to see if some fundamental idea was possible: lost all motivation to actually finish the project once I proved to myself that it was.
I contributed some features to an existing project and they got a lot more attention. Interacting with fellow developers and users is a great experience. Made me care a lot more about the end result and whether it got merged.
Perhaps a personal wiki would be better than a blog. As long as the articles are useful to their writers, they should have enough motivation to keep writing.
I have some blogs that played the long game, and I must say the years thing is a fantasy for most that will likely not be realized.
Sure it's fine to do like art that could get popular after you die, or you could be found as an unknown amazing author on day..
However things with the publishing and PR industry are such that I think it would be best to get some eyeballs and feedback before you spend years writing hoping to get discovered, much like launching a product or service too late after spending too much time in pre-production.
Sadly I think it's multiple changes in google that killed blogs over the years and I don't see blogs coming back into the top search results (or blog link rolls not being penalties that scare people into never using them) and changing things.
I love blogs, and blogging - but I must admit that more success is found by tweeting or even making a meme that is shared. If you can't hope for google to give you results and never know if fbook is going to block your blog, then I don't suggest people put eggs in that basket - unless there is another side reason for doing so, like your posts are auto-added to instagram or something somehow.
Maybe if you're only doing it for fame and fortune and PR and success. But trying to do that without actually having anything interesting to get famous and successful about was always just a con-man's game.
Real blogging is about sharing your thoughts and ideas on whatever niche topic interests you with people who have the same interests, and the conversations that arise out of that. Like the friendships that form from participating in BBSes and forums over the years, the value is in the fun you have and the interesting discussions and bouncing ideas off others' viewpoints. It doesn't need to be a business to be fulfilling.
I have run my blog on joelx.com for 14 years and have thousands of posts. Very few people actually read them, but it's nice to have a history my kids could one day read.
I've been blogging on and off for the past few years now (not going to publish the link here in case it is seen as self promotion). Mainly as a way of leaving my life story and thoughts for my family to have something to remember my life when I am no longer around (My dad had some incredible life stories, and I wish we had recorded them in some form before he passed).
I think what is missing now is the rich set of tools around the ecosystem. Posterous was a great service to let you email your thoughts directly to a blog post. I am amazed there was no other competitor that sprung up when they got bought out and shut down by Twitter nearly a decade ago.
I really miss Google Reader, which was where I used to keep a curated list of the top blogs I used to read regularly. Even now, some mornings I wish I could just open my Google Reader home page and check out the latest updates from some of my favourite bloggers.
https://feedly.com/ is a good free alternative. I too miss Reader and my experience with that and Google+ made me extremely wary of Google, I frequently back up my data in case they decide to abandon Google Docs or Google Photos or who knows what else.
I gave my father a journal for the entire family to share, pass around, and make notes in when he turned 50. With the idea if our grandfather had used such a tool how cool it would be.
It’s hard getting the ideas down, but having lived long enough to lost a few email accounts from
My childhood, and other such content.
When you want to preserve for future generations I think there’s really something to be said for paper. I think Nassim Taleb had ideas about papers longevity too, the longer a technology had been around the longer it will likely stay around. As in email will likely outside Facebook simply because it’s already been around longer.
Google Reader was free. I can't afford 50 usd/yr just to read RSS feeds (yes, there's a free plan, but it's limited and at that point I'd rather stick with RSSOwl or similar -free- tools).
I once wrote up something that interested me at the moment and figured I'll post it on medium so people get to actually read it.
To my surprise, medium doesn't let you publish (write yes, not publish) anything, unless you jump through several obscure loops like "engaging with the platform for a while".
My article wasn't particularly important, so I am not too heartbroken about it. But what this tells me is that there seems to be a lot of demand for publishing posts of different nature.
I feel that rather than blogging, more people should write comments. I’ve never written one blog article, but I’ve written a novel worth of comments over the years. A comment IMO is more pure and true, and is created out of a strong desire to say something, rather than for some other extrinsic motivation.
My problem with blogging is that I can’t just write in a vacuum, I must always write in response to something and when I have something worth responding too I can write more usefully.
You can just blog a comment. Read something that moves your mind longer than the first barfed out comment? Blog it. Write down your thought process, discuss with yourself, do something thoughtful witout the stress of a public discussion.
As someone who writes a lot of comments but also now blogs a bit: blog posts for me are just long, thought out comments; often they’re an amalgamation of comments I might have left, or little bits on a topic that I keep around but have never had a place to write as a comment so I put them all together into one big one and polish it.
I agree with a lot of this. Writing for yourself is the best advice: if you write about things that interest you, maybe people with similar interests will read your blog. Also, your own understanding of the subjects you write about will grow.
I've been blogging for eight years now, and it has been very rewarding. It's great to get readers, and it is great to end up on the front page of Hacker News. But it is also really good to have a blog to point people to when you look for a job.
One thing that is still true is how much work it is to write even a short blog post. It still takes me hours of concentrated work. But I am still doing it, becuase the value outweighs the cost.
That is true even for entertainment videos on Youtube. Some people have the delusion it's effortless. PewDiePie said he was for at least 2 years posting videos for ~100 followers and a regular ~1mil views/video youtuber often spends ~12 hours for editing a 5 minute video.
I think that six months is enough time to commit. At the end of that period you'll either have the bug and want to keep blogging or know the format is not for you.
I honestly got a lot more traffic on my blogs than I thought. Mostly from Google. Writing clear answers to things I’ve ran into during my daily work seems to work pretty well
Exactly. As a 20 years blogger, I would say I wish people posted more blog posts than shitty tuits. But Twitter format made possible distribute the message better than the blogs. Back then, we used RSS aggregators and other things, nowadays its kinda rare. I still visit blogs and i still post on my own blog, though i do it everytime i need to do a longer explanation post.
Lmao.. Literally the only time I've gotten a flood of emails was from when I described my experience applying to a FAANG company. Quite sad actually, as I'd been shouting into the void about far more interesting things for years.
this is true, though with the assumption of blogging as it is in today's world where it is lonely and only a search engine can find you. if blogging was done inside a supportive community and network it could be less lonely and you could get frequent feedback and interactions.
If I was to make an analogy using your perspective on blogging with facebook or instagram - you post about yourself or post personal photos for a long time. It is futile, for a long long time, nobody sees your content... you post photos for years, and you realize it changes you. You will notice patterns, you will get better at posting photos ...
I am exaggerating to make a point and it is this, you may find yourself needing to perfect your content strategy(blog, photos or facebook-style posts) for years and the main reason it doesn't pay back is there is no network or community anymore. You shouldn't have to be a pro to get noticed.
People tried decentralized networks and that didn't work so well, because one - you need modern blogging software (newsfeed, real time comments, spam moderation, good recommendation algorithms) and it has to be managed by a centralized authority that offers a great user experience. Today, closest thing to this is facebook and twitter (and instagram). All in all you must have these for a great blogging experience: first, good software and central authority, then network. It must be focused on serving authentic bloggers, and it must be backed by a commercial solution.
That in turn means, a paid service, whose customers are bloggers. That means, how badly do you want an amazing blogging experience, where you blog with great writing tools, search, discover, and interact with others (and probably in today's world, be able to hop on a video chat with your viewers and share that in comments). Yes, so how much do you desire to have it, would you pay $5/month? $30/month? $100/month? It comes down to this.
If there was monetary backing, this problem could be solved with a 'solution'. Chances are that not enough many people want it, and people are content with free posting on instagram, twitter, or facebook, and happy to live with ads. If this was a high demand service, chances are that it would have already been built, or existing ones would already be prospering (tumblr didn't make money and got acquired, blogger shut down, medium serving writers looking to make money, recreational blogging is not their target and so on). So is this a real problem to solve or not?
Maybe people don't know they want it and aren't organized enough to support it, - if you built an amazing experience maybe lots of bloggers will pay for it, then it will become another, facebook where the network is funded by its users.
You appear to be describing Medium in the latter half of your post, which seems to have gone through multiple business models at this point.
As for a network and aggregation, back in the day there were decentralized solutions. We had RSS and pingbacks and Google News, which in the early days was largely a blog search engine. There were things like Reddit and StumbleUpon for finding new blogs, in addition to slashdot and Hacker News. Many of these sites have changed in terms of content since then, but originally a lot of what they linked to was blogs.
Thanks for the comment - Medium is aiming to help writers to monetize (IMO its not working) and not serving recreational bloggers. Yes there were all these mechanisms to find and interact with blogs. But don't you think they can be modernized, and centralized? RSS works, but how many people can use RSS? They just want to press a follow button.
Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic.
Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the list slowly grows.
Blogs and forums stopped being a thing when Google flushed them out sometime between 2009-2012 (with the Panda update? I'm not an SEO guy so I wasn't really following it at the time).
Anyway, it felt like a bunch of places went from having active communities to stagnating or dying outright overnight. People forget just how much general innovation was being driven by these sites - Styleforum and AskAndy for men's fashion, BB.com for health and wellness (ignoring misc), Something Awful also comes to mind.
Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative, but it just really hasn't happened.
I’m not sure if the premise is correct here. What metric is Reddit being judged by? What if the various fashion subreddits, in aggregate, have more users, more content (both good and bad), and more innovation than websites like AskAndy?
I suspect what you’re looking for is:
1. The intimate small town feel of the early internet, and
2. The higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain specificity, and demonstrated expertise.
Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon. Great content is interspersed with what is essentially “noob spam.” Even if it has a greater aggregate amount of quality content, it doesn’t have the same feel as older forums.
Reddit can try to fix this by grouping people together into social clusters. If there is a subreddit with 2 million people, why not create many smaller “breakout” groups that coexist with the main thread? Of course, this is easier said than done, but I’m sure it’s possible to execute this idea well.
I think VR meeting rooms will be the ultimate solution. They will be intimate by definition, and people will sort into their favorite social groups. An American scientist might join an international “scientist salon” and socialize with scientists everywhere from Germany to Japan. A bulletin would contain and display static text posts by the members of the salon. It would also display things like plebiscites and summaries of important meetings. You’d be able to bounce around different groups with a different subject matter any time you want. Some will have barriers to entry and identity verification, most won’t. Some groups will be purely social and defined more by the members than by any subject matter. Altogether that would make the internet feel more like a collection of physical spaces inhabited by communities of people.
What I’m describing ideally shouldn’t be run by one corporation like Facebook or Reddit. The communities should be strung together by a shared backbone under an Internet 3.0. Visiting one should be like visiting a different website. We can use the formation of the original 2D internet as a template for how to proceed in creating a VR internet.
The issue with Reddit is that there's little to no user engagement with older content. Comments on posts older than a day in pretty much every reasonably active subreddit are ignored. This is also an issue on HN.
This kills informed discussion - some topics need more than one or two minutes of thought for a thoughtful and articulated response. This simply isn't possible when you know that the person you're replying to likely won't respond if you take more than a couple of hours to reply, that the conversation thread will be hidden behind a 'read more' button after one or two responses, and that the post itself will be buried shortly thereafter.
The average post quality on most forums was awful, as much or more so than what you see now on Reddit or HN. The difference is that it was possible for informed posts to persist as the center of discussion for years, if needed.
As an example, I don't see how a group of people can become interested and collaboratively participate in something like designing an amplifier circuit on Reddit without moving to a third party site, and in doing so cutting off contact and visibility with potential collaborators who happen to find the discussion a couple of hours too late. That's the level of connectivity and cooperation that was possible through forums and bulletin boards for a bunch of different niche topics, and it's basically been lost now that the 2chan/Digg style format (Reddit) has taken over.
For a discussion site, Reddit's a really shitty discussion site. Good conversations rarely even begin, and die rapidly. I've discussed this a few times and places.
It was a problem I'd identified when first trialing a Reddit-as-blog dynamic:
The Reddit Notifications dynamic is proving to be a very strong negative. Something Google+ got right is to keep re-engaging people with active, productive, posts. Days, weeks, months, even years later. This isn't something you want in _all cases (and can opt out of), but it is often useful, and means that conversations can develop. Reddit, sadly (after some five years or so of trying) is proving to be a Flying Purple Conversation Eater. This is a major site frustration.
This is super awful when you’re trying to have a potentially controversial discussion with someone. Even if both of you are interested in the discussion it gets to a point where why bother continuing because no one is going to see it when they have to click “load more comments” and follow the thread for hours or days. Forums like Reddit and HN actively encourage short pithy sound bites that sound interesting but are actually shallow so they’re easy to write and easy to consume and also uncontroversial so your comment(and the following discussion) isn’t hidden after one or two downvotes.
Reddit, at least, has an active reply notification system, so while this is rare, at least it's possible to have a conversation, even if it's probably only visible to its participants.
HN's lack of an active reply notification means that, unless you're checking the [threads] link obsessively, replies can easily go unnoticed, so writing here is more performative.
How that intersects with the rest of the site's dynamics, I'm not sure.
Yes, though it operates at the post level only. There's absolutely no indication that a post in which you've already indicated strong interest by participating in it has ongoing discussion. If you've received a reply notification to your comment, my own, immediately adjacent, receives no such notice: the tpost is effectively dead. Visiting a subreddit gives no clues as to recently-active posts.
Mind, inbox replies for any activity on, say, /r/funny or /r/politcs would get old fast. But some indication of 'this thread is still live* would be tremendously useful. Again, from Google+, I (and other) users frequently "lived" in the Notifications pane. I'd customised that through CSSso that it was large and functional enough to do that.
Twitter's TweetDeck and the similar Mastodon web client similarly feature a Notifications pane as a principle feature, and much engagement can be transacted from it. One of Ello's iterations had a similar and incredibly fluid design making following up very lightweight, unfortunately later abandoned.
HN's "Threads" view is ... similar, but crippled (lack of context within the subthread I'm replying to being a constant annoyance). Reddit's notifications suffer similarly.
You're fortunate to even get to. this stage. In my experience, on both large and small subs, even this very rarely happens.
Part of this is the fault of threaded presentation -- very useful for following a specific subthread, but horrible for seeing where a discussion remains live. HN suffers from this as well. Unless you can alternate flexibly between various threaded vs. flat time-ordered presentations, or even randomly-selected contributions, you're not going to break out of this.
A real challenge is that as conversation, functional scale is low. At least one person, more usually at least 2. I've noticed that panels with more than three participants (live, radio, TV), and usually as host/moderator + two guests, do poorly, often due to the timeslicing problem -- an "airtime hour" is effectively ony 50 minutes, with a Q&A and after introductions, speaking time is often only 20-40 minutes. Divide that among participants, and by the time you're at 4-8 minutes per participant with 5 panelists, fewer still with more. Usually the form devolves to a loosely coupled set of short serial speeches or lectures rather than actual engagement.
With more time -- hours at a symposium, Socratic lectures, a long dinner discussion, an academic seminar -- it might be possible to bump the size up slightly -- there's more time to discuss, or (academic) more focus. But even here the ideal size is 5-15 participants (see for example: https://sites.google.com/site/entelequiafilosofiapratica/aco...).
Text gives the potential for expanding this ... slightly. Maybe about 50 people, possibly double that with an excellent moderator. Yonatan Zunger at Google+ is among the best I've personally witnessed. Sadly the archived conversations at the Internet Archive preserve only a small number of comments.
Group size, intragroup relations (do participants know and respect one another, even where they disagree?), avoiding perils of groupthink (self-selection, unconscious group bias, self-censorship, privilege, cultual mythologies, etc.), and a fair-but-firm moderation, are all critical. And you're still lucky to apprach, let alone exceed, Dunbar's number (about 150).
Last I checked, there were slightly more than 150 people online. This means that there'd have to be on the order of 10^7 individual conversations, minimum, more likely 10^8. FOMO much? Group concesus and information sharing are ... profoundly limited.
HN has, as I understand, has on the order of 10,000 registered users. (A very rough guesstimate.) As of 2013, daily uniques was about 200,000 (see, with interesting discussion of some site-design parameters: https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne...). Looking over the list of just the top 100 users (https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders), I recognise many, a few personally, and shave one, but ... really can't say I've got a relationship with the vast majority. And that's ~0.01% of registered users, 0.0005% of daily visitors.
And just to note: I'm agreeing with your comments. I just see them as the tip of the iceberg and part of a problem that goes far deeper than mere technical aspects.
> The issue with Reddit is that there's little to no user engagement with older content. Comments on posts older than a day in pretty much every reasonably active subreddit are ignored. This is also an issue on HN.
This is even worse with communities using live chat platforms like Discord and IRC. Live chat is an atrocious medium for community building as you constantly have to be involved to keep up or if you just check it for 5 mins you don't actually get anything if there is no conversation at the moment or the conversation isn't interesting.
You're definitely right, although a day of reply-time is pretty good by internet standards. Back when I used Facebook, I noticed that the only way for a comment to get noticed was if it was added in the first 10 - 20 minutes of a post's lifetime. Once an hour has elapsed, anything you write will probably be never seen by anyone. This is the big problem with online communication; it's reduced everything to small tidbits that nobody has time to have nuanced discussions about. You've got to be quick and to the point, or you're out.
HN intentionally makes it worse by forcing you to choose between only starting new conversations (or participating in currently-live existing conversations), or obsessively checking all your posts for replies.
With modern forums the flow of discussion is different. If you have something for a dated discussion, you just open a new thread. Here on HN you often see those indirect responses happening.
Reddit on the other side used to have a better response-interface. You get a message for new responses and can discuss things over weeks and months if it just happen so. New redfit-interface killed yhis a bit.
Forums were crap for that, too. If you commented on an ancient thread, a moderator might flame you at best, ban you at worst, for necroposting. Most forums were ran like North Korea and people just dealt with it, heatedly defended the absolute authoritarianism even.
> Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon.
I find Reddit is still one of my favorite resources to search for help. If I need help on how to do some home DIY thing or help on making a particular decision, I'll Google for "how to decide blah Reddit" and I'll get much, much better signal than just Googling for "how to decide blah". In the latter case I'll get a bunch of ad-filled garbage and an article that was probably written by an algorithm.
Reddit is great when the original poster or one or two of the immediate replies are insightful and informative. It's awful when either the original post isn't that great to begin with, or if a knowledgeable comment comes too late or happens to be a reply of a reply of a reply.
Case in point, my original post, which was one of the first ten-fifteen comments, has a bunch of up votes. There's no way this would be true if I missed the original post by an hour or if it was the n'th response in a large comment chain.
Stack Exchange is even better, for sites with sufficiently large communities. Stack Overflow and Ask Different are amazing.
But low-traffic SE sites just don't compete. I wish SE would change their account system and/or design so that their smaller sites became a better resource.
I edit and improve hundreds of posts on Stack Overflow.
I want to edit posts on SuperUser too... but SE won't let me. Despite having enough rep for complete trust on SO, I'm a bit short of 2000 on Super User.
If I try to edit a post, it goes into a queue for review by high-rep SU users. But there aren't enough of those, because the site is lower-traffic. So it takes hours to review. High-rep SO users, of which there are MANY, cannot contribute to this queue.
The questions and answers and culture between Stack Overflow, Super User, Ask Different, and their other "tech" sites are essentially exactly the same. There's no reason I couldn't contribute to any of those sites. But their multiple account system makes it impossible.
> The higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain specificity, and demonstrated expertise.
But this should be easy to get back in the same way blogs always did -- have individual blogs. Even if there are now a million blogs full of "noob spam" the good ones should still exist because their authors are the same people they ever were.
You still have the discovery problem, but that's kind of the OP's point -- it all falls apart if you can no longer separate the wheat from the chaff because of SEO and anti-SEO.
While the discoverability issue may have accelerated the decline of blogs, I suspect that it’s not the main problem. It takes more cognitive overhead to follow and visit multiple blogs as opposed to following multiple subreddits. Even if you are willing to expend that cognitive overhead, most people aren’t nowadays. Because of that, bloggers are less likely to publish (smaller audience + less engagement = smaller incentive to publish). That lowers the average quality of blogs, turning away even their most ardent advocates.
This was all inevitable. The mere existence of a popular meta-forum attenuates traditional blogs and forums.
> Even if you are willing to expend that cognitive overhead, most people aren’t nowadays.
Shouldn't this cancel out against there being more people though? If people are 90% less likely to want to read long blog posts but there are ten times more people on the internet, you should still have about the same number of readers, all else equal.
> Because of that, bloggers are less likely to publish (smaller audience + less engagement = smaller incentive to publish). That lowers the average quality of blogs, turning away even their most ardent advocates.
This conclusion may be right but it's also explained by the discoverability problem. If people can't find you then your audience is too small and you give up.
> This was all inevitable. The mere existence of a popular meta-forum attenuates traditional blogs and forums.
Not to mention after a certain number of 'followed' subreddits, Reddit will actually only show you a subset each day on your front page. It allows for smaller subreddits to bubble up occasionally, but you're never guaranteed to see the latest from everything you've subscribed to.
1) there is no real "tragedy of the commons" in the general case. Google Elinor Ostrum to verify. Even Garret Hardin (originator of the concept) has conceded this, at least in part. The crux is that the "commons" as described by Hardin has essentially never existed in the form that he wrote about - things that are "commons"-like are actually always a complex mixture of law, tradition, culture and social sanctions governing their use. When people screw up "the commons", it's not because there are no mechanisms to prevent it, it is because these people have chosen to ignore them, and have made extra effort to do so.
2) You're seriously claiming that Reddit, a privately held company with sysadmins, subreddit moderation and user voting, could be a venue in which what happens is "a tragedy of the commons" (should such a thing actually exist)?
Reddit is privately held but has quite of an impact on the public. Facebook is the same, as are other notable walled garden/social networks. There’s a term for that: utility company.
This is exactly right. I had a blog for many months, shared it from my website and social media accounts, and it never showed up in Google search. After a couple months of speaking to an audience of 20 people, I decided it wasn't worth it. Meanwhile everything else I have tried shows up on the first page of results: Facebook page, Twitter account, Soundcloud, etc.
Google heavily biases their results to two things: the top 1000 sites on the internet, and clickbait (callout posts and threads slandering someone rank like you wouldn't believe; no backlinks required). Maybe if you keep at your blog for 2+ years, manage to land a few HN frontpage story links, it might eventually show up. But who is going to invest that time and effort instead of just setting up a Facebook page instead?
I've been thinking. It might be an interesting experiment to build an "average" search engine. Put average websites first. Drop down websites that get too popular.
I think Reddit getting big also killed a lot of the old forums. The frictionlessness of joining a community made it hard to compete. And the general lack of personality to user profiles in Reddit avoided the "cool kid's clique" issue that happens with a lot of forums where everyone knows each other.
I remember in the "dying days" of some of the forums I was on the conversation had largely devolved into reposting and discussing memes and things that were happening on Reddit. From there it's just a matter of time before the discussion moved to Reddit too. This fate perhaps could have been avoided if "Sign in with Google" type capabilities were more widely available at the time, or if we had a more universal login/forum scheme like Disqus back then, but they all came around too late.
> I remember in the "dying days" of some of the forums I was on the conversation had largely devolved into reposting and discussing memes and things that were happening on Reddit.
I get the same sad feeling from Sasha Chua's weekly Emacs News these days, where half of the entries are now links to posts on Reddit's r/emacs. You can see the dwindling of any diverse ecosystem for discussion.
Don't discount Instagram killing many of those communities.
So much easier to take a picture on your phone and post it to your Instagram page or story. Better dopamine rush, too, from a bunch of Like/Comment notifications rather than maybe a single forum reply hours later.
Social media in general -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. -- have made it easier than a blog to get your thoughts onto the internet, and the extremely social nature of those services and the instant feedback and conversation they encourage (the social part) is very compelling.
Even though the major blog platforms (Movable Type, WordPress, Blogger/Blogspot, etc.) had a social component in the form of comments, the big social media sites -- including Reddit -- took it up quite a few notches. People like the feedback and the conversation. Blogs can be much more of an island. Some like that, too.
Yep. I ran a great little community cycling forum from 2005 - met so many friends (real and virtual) over those years - then about 2011 or 2012 Google just dropped it. Our traffic fell off a cliff - now - the regulars stayed on for quite a while, but without an influx of new members and questions and discussions, things just died out - regular members need the stimulus of new members, even if it can be taxing moderating etc... Was actually a really disappointing decline in many ways. It really opened my eyes up to how much control we gave away, and how much content is now in these big walled garden silos. I can't help but get nostalgic.
I characterize Reddit as true neutral. It has the potential to be any alignment, but it's mostly the will of the moderator to impose what alignment any subreddit will be. It's the only place on the Internet that still has the feel occaisionally of the 90s/00s.
Reddit is a waste of time with its "answers locked after 6 months" policy. This also violates netiquette for those situations when necroposting is the appropriate thing to do.
Reddit is almost unreadable now, though. You have to click and click and click to expand things, and be careful not to click on the wrong thing which will take you to a different topic.
I much, much, much prefer Reddit when it was more like HN, back when HN was modelled after Reddit & Digg. Today, any time I see a Reddit link, I exit immediately after I've gotten whatever information I require - and even that is rare.
I think where it breaks down is when you have to run plugins that identify the kind of person a user is. I find that reduces the crapiness of the interactions if I can see someone is a POS without investing much time in finding that out. It's a step that shouldn't be necessary, but the faster that can be discerned the less I find myself second guessing their intent.
You could say that the current karma system is sort of supposed to be that, but at least it does not affect comments visibility as far as I know.
Having a parallel unofficial social credit system looks like one thing that would just create unnecessary conflicts in communities that do not have a strong troll problem.
One forum that seems to have bucked many trends is for music software: kvraudio.com[0]
Started about 20 years ago, It’s totally vibrant, despite an old school UI. Some threads keep going for years.
Sure, the signal to noise ratio isn’t always perfect either, but there’s still a continuing flow of golden nuggets of deeper industry information, helpful howto answers, and thoughtful commentary and feedback around music software.
In some ways it’s a little like HN, but in some ways I find it superior, like baked in notifications and being able to mute those that are too annoying. It probably helps that it’s adjunct to arguably the best music software directory, with imperfect, yet useful taxonomy, and old school advertising that’s highly relevant to the community.
Many thousands (maybe even millions) of still-relevant older posts on my company's forum are simply no longer even indexed by Google. I guess it's a part of the deep web now.
Yep, that seems about right. I have had two forums since 2002, and while they still have a small user base, everybody switched to Facebook and the like. Not sure if I blame Google as much in the case of forums. I have enjoyed seeing notifications in the browser added, as the browser is starting to have similar powers to apps. Of course, Apple is having none of that, as they love apps and the app store sales.
> Blogs and forums stopped being a thing when Google flushed them out sometime between 2009-2012… Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative,
Are you suggesting Google had a plan to promote reddit? or what do you mean by "was supposed to"?
RSS is truly a blessing, and it's such a shame that the side effect of Google is to essentially corrupt a vast portion of the internet such that most of the stuff you see and read has the sole purpose of pleasing the search engine, not the reader. That relationship is the wrong way round.
I'm just re-setting up my own blog (to complement a Youtube channel). Without designing one from scratch (with a static site generator or some such), it's quite difficult to get an off the shelf one that isn't bloated as hell though. I should suck it up but design isn't my strong-suit, and I'd rather just get straight to writing and recording.
Whatever you do, just don't use Medium. Ghost or Hugo (With Netlify, https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/) are both very low effort solutions and most of them come with themes that don't look too bad from the get go. It's very quick to get something up and running even though it's technically a static site generator.
There’s a lot of non nerd solutions. Ghost, Wordpress, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr are all very easy to Süd- platforms. There’s a variety of free and paid platforms. The existing solutions are not the problems.
I do have a Hugo blog, and I agree that pretty much all static-site generators are too nerdy for most potential users.
WordPress is still around, and I recommend it. It's more "social" than ever in some ways, and the built-in comments are looking better and better as the years go by. (I use Disqus to moderate the comments for more than a dozen blogs in one network, but for an individual blog, I prefer the native WP comments.)
About a year ago I started blogging, and wanted something really simple, flexible and that didn't require any sort of server/database maintenance.
After some reasearch I decided to go with Jekyll + GitHub Pages, forked a theme that seemed Ok and made some style changes, nothing fancy. Must say I'm really happy with my choice.
There's one thing though, I'm writing posts using markdown in an IDE. Don't really consider that a disadvantage though, and I guess most developers would be really fine with that.
Here's the link to the repository in case you'd like to take a look and try it out: https://github.com/TCGV/blog
I just searched for some relatively focused topics I’ve written about years ago, and Google found my blog posts just fine (mostly among the top results). I don’t know how popular those posts are (I don’t use analytics at all and since the blog has been hosted on GitHub Pages since forever ago I don’t even have server logs to analyze) but I do know quite a few were never discussed elsewhere.
I guess it’s hard to find blogs these days when you just type “blog” into the search engine, or search for a keyword that a million people compete on in order to sell you stuff. But if you have actual, say technical questions, you’ll land on interesting blog posts in no time, sometimes not even on the dumpster fire that is Medium, and written by people who aren’t writing merely to bolster their online presence.
SEO is the problem. Most authors figure out at some point that nobody goes to their website. So, they move to different channels (linkedin, facebook, medium, etc.) and at best might cross post to their blog and those channels.
When it comes to reaching people, the odds are stacked against you on your personal website because of multi billion dollar companies optimizing for ad revenue and vastly preferring directing people to ad equipped channels of their choice rather than your website. This is also the real reason Google killed Google Reader: they wanted to capture the ad revenue and instead force content producers to use those. Which is why all news publishers bend over backwards to ensure their news shows up in Google news.
It's that simple. Any click that goes to your website directs the user away from their money making channels. So, they don't. With RSS readers, most of your potential audience will never find you unless they subscribed to your article or it randomly shows up as a link in some channel they follow. Getting lucky on HN helps. But most people don't get that lucky.
So-called influencers basically try to manipulate the odds by doing what they think yields the best results. That's why clickbait exists, why your twitter and facebook feeds are filled with crap, and why it is so hard to find channels that contain curated content. That's also why we all love HN.
Grumpy is amazing! We very much enjoy their content and actually got inspired by that site in the first place. Theres a link to them on our About page:
Thanks, that's awesome, just spent 20 minutes reading on there.
But quite frequently as I was trying to read, everything on screen jumped upwards, by a few lines or half a page, apparently because stuff below it was loading. Normally I wouldn't complain, the site has taught me not to put up silently with such things. Don't think I've seen that behaviour before. (Am using latest version of FF)
I'm increasingly running into blogs that sadly don't have RSS, but just today I discovered a cool open source project to generate RSS based on visual scraping: https://politepol.com/en/
I wrote a tool to do something similar a while ago for sites that didn't work with these ready-made tools, it's a bit more effort as you'd have to implemented a custom scraping plugin for the target website: https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge
Google has an unusual situation where search now only needs to be good enough. They are much more focused on the knowledge engine of providing direct answers and the advertising business.
With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality
I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.
A good chunk of that is that more and more info is locked into walled gardens (in some App, on Facebook/Instagram/TicTok), but also a lot of what people want to find in todays world just isn't on the internet anymore, except places like the web archive, where Google isn't allowed to venture...
> I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.
I think that's not the case: There's a lot more people with more diverse backgrounds, from different locations and cultures online now than it was the case 10 years ago. It's just harder to find the places through a "globalized" search that is mostly aiming at commercial offers. From time to time I stumble upon absolute niche blogs (Example from my feed reader: https://singapore60smusic.blogspot.com) and it reminds me that there's a lot of good resources out there if you find them somehow).
>I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.
Isn't think kind of a feedback loop though? Search gets bad, so people don't bother putting useful, relevant, and high effort content since nobody will find it. Thus, search gets worse since there is less useful content to crawl. Thus even more of the content out there starts leaning towards clickbait and SEO rather than thoughtful writing. And so on and so forth.
I find that all Google results are increasingly useless spam. Even searching for programming Q&A is becoming less viable and I end up landing on one of those "you need to upgrade your flash player" phishing sites at least once or twice a week.
The open web has had a great run but it too is being brought to its knees by spam just like every other open platform.
I never realized how bad Google spam could be for technical content until I had to start searching for solution to some Windows issues. Almost without fail, the first page would be littered would spam sites posing as informative answers. Many of them were just duplicating content from official Windows documentation with minor modification. The more sophisticated ones would provide enough real content to entice you into thinking the page had the solution only to reveal you had to sign up to access the full content of the page.
I've never encountered this before when searching for linux or programming topics. In those cases, Google results always include relevant stack overflow postings and links to the appropriate section of documentation.
I'm surprised Google hasn't penalized these spam pages, but I'd imagine there are some perverse incentives to keep them around. Wouldn't surprise me if many of these sites show adds through a Google-owned affiliate program or are in another way tied into Google's ad tech empire.
> What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?
Ban (yes, legally) collecting & monetizing most information about users. But do that generally, not just for the Internet. Or at least make holding such data incredibly risky (enormous company-ending fines for leaks or misuse).
No loading third-party domain content in browsers. At all. No images, no scripts. You can link to it. That’s it.
Limit scripting to defining custom sorts for tables, custom regexes for form fields, and... that’s about it. Too easy to spy or do shit without the user’s express permission otherwise.
That should take care of the worst of the bad incentives that have made the web so hostile and shitty.
You are forgetting the other half of the equation. The web must have a first class payment system. Nothing is free; money will be made overtly or covertly. If there is no honest overt method, there will be a dishonest covert method.
Maybe. Most of the best parts of the web are totally free, donationware (wikipedia), or illegal to begin with (library genesis). Ads served 1st party and aimed at a reading demographic, not at individuals, like all ads except junk mail before the web, would be possible regardless.
But yes some kind of payment flow that is just about entirely controlled by the browser—special UI pages cannot mimic, a “you’ll find a way to accept what this form sends you, or you won’t take payments” attitude from the spec—might be OK. I’d have to think it through some more. It’d be easy to screw up in a way that let the Nu Web become overrun with bad incentives and dangerous garbage again (watch the “non-computer-literate”, which is a lot of people and yes that includes the next generation now entering adulthood, not just old folks, try to use the web to accomplish any task at all if you don’t get what I mean by “dangerous”)
>What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?
Ads blocked by default on all browsers. The original sin with a lot of these comes from the fact that incentives drive towards maximizing clicks over building a subscriber base. Ads themselves aren't really the problem either. Magazine style ads, where you just buy space on the strength of a subscriber/distribution reach rather than paying per click, wouldn't be perfect but they'd align incentives between readers and writers much better than the current situation does.
The core problem is that the metrics are too granular, so there's too much room to game them at the margins.
Not sure you need a whole new internet. Maybe a search engine aggressively excluding commercial results. Even blogs with ads. Anything with ads or selling something would not be listed.
Ban advertising. Users could pay for the websites they use by proportion of time spent per billing cycle for their internet plan. Popular sites with more demanding server requirements would be paid for by the very users who induce that demand directly, rather than through more dubious advertising.
Imho, try to keep it from going mainstream. If there aren't enough viewers to make advertising profitable, then many of the problems filling the current internet would not appear in the first place.
Not gatekeeping, I phrased my idea badly before, and I'm sorry about that. I would like to make it clear that I feel very strongly against gatekeeping, and against censorship.
More like not pushing for more acceptance. Allow a community to form, but do not try to market your way into a larger community.
Obviously this approach is not sustainable, at least on the first try, as the Internet itself shows.
However, now that the internet already exists, a parallel internet so to speak would not have as much/any appeal to the average consumer/corporation, which ideally would lead to only those who are interested in the community/content arriving there.
How is that different from subreddits - Or communities like HN? Those aren't technical decisions, but social ones, so why do we need a new internet to implement them?
We don't necessarily need a new internet. However, it could provide another line of "defense" against corporate interests.
If the only barrier to joining is a technical one, than anyone who wanted to could join, but the majority of people would not have interest in joining. Ideally, this would prevent AdTech from taking an interest.
As for the fact that these are primarily social issues, I agree. A social solution is going to be much longer lasting and effective then any technical solution. However, it is also much more difficult to implement.
Either that, or have separate webs for different disciplines (maybe one for academia, one for arts, one for jounralism, one for programming, etc.) that are kept separate from each other. I'm not sure how it could be implemented, but a forced partitioning like that could probably serve the same purpose without gatekeeping (if the partitions are small enough).
I've been collecting blogs I'm interested in via. HN, lobste.rs, reddit, or just random links all around, and am now at around 50 feeds, all of which at least have once had content that I'm genuinely interested in. Then I use `newsboat` for reading and keeping track of what I've seen.
Overall I'm very happy with this extremely simple setup, and am almost annoyed that I didn't spend those few seconds it is to set something like this up years ago.
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As to the original link posted, blogs obviously never went anywhere, but they aren't (anymore) in the places that you are.
I feel this comes close to the frustration some people have that "nobody is reading books anymore because everyone are streaming movies and series instead". Books never went anywhere, and they're probably more accessible than ever. If you're not reading books now, that's on you.
Similarly with blogs: if you're not reading and/or following blogs, it's just because you don't want to.
From my (subjective) perspective, I also feel like something strange happened with Google search when it comes to blogs.
My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google).
I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad.
Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/
I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead.
Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).
Is this your site? It's really nice! I have something similar (although without all of the features on this site). I also scrape a bunch of blogs that doesn't have rss.
One thing, people really like https, especially when sending form data such as the signup.
Speaking of discoverability, I found the author's writing interesting and wanted to subscribe to new articles. I usually do this by following the author's twitter account. Sadly, the one that he links to does not exist: twitter.com/TTTThiscom
That's the first time I'm hearing that problem, are you sure it's from the site? It's basically just a generated static html site with no JS except a tiny analytics snippet.
This article makes... no sense to me. Blogs are still around, everywhere, and show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query. And bloggers still list other blogs in sidebars.
I genuinely don't understand the author's complaint. The only thing I can imagine is that there are a lot more alternatives for self-expression on the internet now, e.g. Instagram, Twitter, podcasts, etc. So blogs are perhaps a smaller percentage.
But given that you could never read even 0.1% of all the blog posts ever written, the percentage is irrelevant. There are more unique, quirky, individualist blogs out there than the author could ever get to the end of.
So I don't understand what the problem is. It's not even factual. The author claims Blogger was shut down... but it still exists. The author claims there's no way to find blogs... but it's pretty easy. The author claims nobody is writing blogs... but obviously they are.
I guess the main complaint is that you can't find quirky random blogs by searching Google for the search term "blog"? Not much of a complaint to me. If you want a curated list of quirky blogs, there are lots of lists out there of people's favorites.
> Blogs ... show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query.
No, they don't. This comes down to two main changes in how Google operates: 1) Google no longer respects search operators so that users can get fine-grained results, and 2) Google has chosen to progressively delist old content, even if many blog posts from the early millennium remain just as relevant today because no one has posted at length on the subject in the years since.
Thus, people are unable to find a great deal of content through Google even if they search for the exact strings which appear in those posts. You might see some blogs in search results, but they are a miniscule representation of the whole blog ecosystem.
Today Google kinda, sorta respects minus signs. You are right that you can often get a different set of results by including one. However, Google does not strictly interpret those operators anymore, which you can verify for yourself by trying to search for exact strings in pages from a range of times.
That is an odd example. You are comparing the search for js with the search of js vscode.
Everyday I run into a Google hell. Tonight I was trying to find info on how Github uses let's encrypt for https on custom domains. The only thing that comes up are questions about how to enable it.
I switched my default search to duckduckgo. I always thought DDG would never catch Google, but never realized Google would make their results so useless as to make DDG competitive. (Sorry DDG, I love you.)
No, I wanted to get results which doesn't mention vscode and it worked just fine. Try "pandas" and "pandas -python"
If on some rare occasions I don't find what I want in Google, I just assume either my mental model is broken or the topic doesn't exists. I also try other engines in same cases, but when I'm that lost it doesn't help, I change something else.
Yesterday I was trying to find code examples using the d3 join() and each() functions. I tried searching "join(" "each(", but apparently Google completely removes parenthesis, even when inside quotes. Github's code search does the same thing :-(
Not that I don't believe you, but that just hasn't been my experience with Google at all, and I use it extensively for research tracking down fairly obscure sources with presumably close-to-zero traffic by putting in quoted sentence fragments.
Do you have an example of a website that is linked to from other sites (so Google can find it) where a quoted search for a unique sentence fragment from it doesn't list it as a result?
I've just never heard authoritatively of Google removing old content from results, especially since it seems antithetical to the company's mission of organizing all the world's information. And seeing how so much of the value of search (and purchasing and content and so much else) is in the "long tail", it seems like it would be an extremely counterproductive strategy.
I don’t have a source right now, but what the previous poster said is precisely true. The span of time google will actually search for has been consistently shrinking. I had a very frustrating one not long ago, where I bookmarked a post and could not for the love of god find it again using google, even with an exact quote that produced 0 results. That’s what led me onto researching about how bad the situation is and reaching similar conclusions.
You’ll also notice that you can’t really navigate to “page 13” of a google search anymore. Despite “xx million results”, they only display the top hundreds or so.
Blogs and forums are so deranged that you have to either know the domain and use that on the search, or use multiple keywords like “forum” or something specific to surface them. The only blogs you’ll ever see naturally surfacing are hosted in Medium, WP and “noticed” by bots because they were linked from reddit, Pinterest or some other aggregator.
I'm not so sure, my blog shows up as the first result for the following terms in Google, while it doesn't even show up for the first few pages in DuckDuckGo. It seems to suggest that Google prioritizes blogs.
Ah yes I remember that one, thanks for finding that.
Giving the article and comments a quick-rebrowse, it honestly seems extremely circumstantial -- that they're mostly explainable due to content moving, URL's without any links pointing to them, etc. -- generally stuff that can be identified and fixed in Search Console for your site.
It hardly looks like any confirmable trend or policy, not even remotely. Just Google doing its best to rank the most useful search results with the heuristics it has, but not excluding anything it's able to find. And jumping to the conclusion that any de-ranking has to do with age is pure speculation.
So unfortunately I just don't see any real evidence to support the up-comment assertion that Google delists content due to its age. And again, it flies in the face of its business model which is to return useful results so it can show advertising next to them. There's no plausible business motive here.
Google 100% removes viable entries from their index. I have a blog and I can see via the Google Search Console [1] that several of my posts are marked as "Crawled - currently not indexed". Meaning, Google was led to the page via my sitemap.xml or some other source, crawled it, and then chose not to include it in their search index. It's very discouraging, particularly when it happens to posts that, personally, I'm quite fond of [2]. If it matters, Google has recorded 1,085 clicks from their search results to my blog, in general, over the course of the past 3 months.
Essentially the author is longing for a day before social media existed, but the world has changed fast - and that's ok.
The medium has diversified away from just blogs, but the amount mediums and creators has exploded.
Many of those people who used to blog on Blogspot have moved on to YouTube, TikTok Twitter, Instagram, Medium, WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, and more.
So the whole premise is bunk. "Blogs" in their 2005 term may have changed. But the amount of people publishing 280+ character content on Twitter, Instagram (as video or image descriptions), and all others is more than ever.
Instagram and YouTube are where many of the eyeballs are.
The author longs for self-expression in blog format, the self-expression is there more than ever, just not in the one strict format that existed that way for a brief moment.
Part of it is where the eyeballs are, and part of it is what the content creators are using.
Blogs were written and read on computers. Now people consume, and increasingly produce, on phones. Hence blogs (long-form text) -> social media (short-form text) -> vlogs (long-form video) -> tiktok (short-form video)
Author's point about blogs is that Twitter, Instagram, etc aren't blogs and that's what he wants. Author's failure is that he is wrong, as blogs do still exist, including the Blogger service.
People publishing blogs were not “creators”. They were ordinary people publishing their personal, not-fashionable, unfiltered ramblings. That’s what we lost. It’s obvious that with the growth of internet access “variety” has grown exponentially, but it’s the same kind of variety you get from supermarket products, not real life experiences.
> just not in the one strict format
It’s exactly the other way around. 95% of all “content” on the platforms you mentioned looks the same today. The goal is now success, not sharing for the sake of sharing, and that severely limits how much you express yourself.
That last point is wrong, it doesn’t make any sense, for example, Banksy. He’s not sharing for the sake of sharing and he has no trouble expressing himself, even pissing off the governments of the world more often than not
Yep I'm also very confused when I hear people talk about how blogs and rss readers are dead. I get more articles in my rss reader each day than I can keep up with and always have to go pare down my subscriptions. There is so much stuff to read out there.
Thank you, I'm glad I'm not the only one to think this. I have a blog on blogspot (formerly blogger), and I had to go check it to make sure it wasn't wiped... definitely still there lol.
I found (possibly) this guy's blog by googling 'passthejoe blog'. I don't think it was the Blogger blog they were talking about, though so I made another search with (presumably) their real name and word blog. Bang,there it is. Picked one post from 2011 and searched its opening line "I’m no Backports guru, though I’d like to become one" (with quotes). The post came up as the second search result.
I think he mean the general trend of the internet talking, writing or ranking something about blogs is generally dwindled, replaced by social media account. You can find 'Top 10 Beauty guru Youtuber' or 'Top Tiktok rising stars' everywhere on the internet, media and websites post about it, promote it, in easy to read format, interesting writeup, with spectacular pictures in said article. The attention and money was pours into creating that, to make people 'discover' interesting creator.
but ranking blogs? It's more like personal attempt nowadays(e.g. your list) and not really the main focus of internet anymore.
I wasn't the person who replied with that list, I was just sticking up for that person. It really grinds my gears when someone asks for something, seemingly in good faith, and then proceeds to treat a person who goes out their way to answer them uncharitably.
The request was examples of people compiling blogs on a subject, and an example of that was given.
I don't get the point you guys are making. Yes, BuzzFeed style lists of "best blogs" don't exist. So what? There are plenty of blogs and plenty of ways to discover them.
> The other day I searched for an hour and couldn't find even one. They used to be endless.
Oh there are still endless blogs. There are definitely a lot of defunct ones - but many have become active again recently. I review the unknown ones I come across here: https://www.kickscondor.com/hrefhunt/ (I skip software and startup blogs, because they are so numerous.)
You just can’t use the old avenues (Google searches, casual social media mentions) to find them. HN is a good source, Indieweb circles are good, and Pinboard and Are.na are other good catalogs. Once you find a few blogs you like, you’ll find your way to many more.
Hi kicks! I didn’t know you were on HN, ever since discovering it I’ve been promoting the IndieWeb, and yours was the first site I came across; to me the IndieWeb and microformats is the web we should have gotten instead of one dominated by platforms.
...on a platform (it was a tweet), ironically. I tore my jekyll-based site down earlier this year because I have a bad habit of redesigning it every other Tuesday.
it’s a strange compulsion, but your site and a few others I found on indieweb.xyz have been some good motivation to work towards some degree of content permanence that I own and control (plus a general frustration and growing loss of patience with the platform)
Twitter is fine by me. The Indieweb is a cool ideal. But I’ve still made great discoveries through Twitter as well. (Perhaps that speaks to the ingenuity of humans despite the platform tho...)
It force content creators to write it in a certain way that in many cases might be way too long and not ’to the point’.
I dont remember the last time I searched for something on Google and it showed me a high quality opinion article in a random blog.
nowadays everything is around SEO and blogs, as much as I understand why google does that, I think it's the main reason for why blogs are not that popular anymore
Instead of an introduction and a recipe, you get a massive wall of text, such that you have to scroll for what seems like an eternity until you get to the actual recipe. Drives me nuts!
Recipes aren't good either. I noticed good sites like serious eats almost never come up. The same sites always come up, nytimes, all recipes, food.com.
I guess search engines aren't the best place to get recipes, you need someone to vet and review them.
Actually.. that might be an interesting thing to do heh
everything honestly has become elongated garbage. youtube videos are the same. 20+ minutes of rambling for 2 minutes of quality because thats the only way youtubers actually make any money. the internet is still a much more efficient tool than reading a textbook to find some information, but its getting to the point that it might be more interesting to sift through a textbook to find the info I want because at least im sifting through useful/more or less accurate info, instead of just pure filler nonsense that exists on the web today
I would argue Google also focuses on large corporations. I have a post on my blog that ranks really high (currently spot 3 for its keyword) in the bing/yahoo/ddg world but ranks after stack overflow, medium, reddit, youtube, etc. on google for the same keyword. (I did nothing to on this post for SEO it just organically showed up high on bing/yahoo/ddg)
I should also mention I have no ads of any kind on my blog.
For a long, long time, I have blogged without worrying about SEO or Google or even traffic. I write what I want. I don't look at analytics, and for my self-hosted sites, I don't have any analytics to look at.
Writing for SEO and trying to game Google is not interesting to me. There comes a point where the only think that keeps you going is the desire/compulsion to write.
I miss the days where Google would give me a relevant result with a minimal query, these days it's not helping me find what I'm looking for, it's 90% businesses trying to tell me something and low on content, high on SEO results. I guess this is how they do monetization but I often feel I'm unable to find content that must be out there.
I think news aggregators are more responsible for a changed blogging culture than Google with its search results and Reader killing.
I think the primary discovery mechanism should be blogrolls but few blogs have that today. My website does not have one either. Why? Because I don't follow my feed reader that deeply anymore. Instead I rely on Hacker News and other aggregators. The advantage of aggregators are that a human filter further reduces the noise.
A secondary mechanism should be links in articles. This requires articles to be comments on other articles. However, commenting mostly happens on the aggregators these days. When did you see a blog post which was a response to another blog post?
A healthy blogging culture requires a web of relationships between bloggers. Unfortunately, these relationships are mostly replaced by more efficient aggregator platforms.
In some sense blogging is dead: I see no discussions between bloggers anymore. On the other hand blogging is still alive: Lots of people write blogs but the intended audience is usually an anonymous community of aggregator commentators.
In short: Discussions do not happen in the blogosphere anymore but on aggregators and thus the relations between blogs have nearly disappeared.
I agree with you. That’s what I like about HN. I often read comments here that would be detailed and interesting enough to be blog articles. Most of the time the comments are even better than the original content.
As for content discovery I find that Google is irrelevant. Most of the time I want to read on topics I don’t know much about. Hence I would not even know what to search for. I rely on the power of the community to bring to light the best pieces of content. If I was still using RSS I would need to be subscribed to specific websites and would not read anything outside that bubble.
On a final note I think blogging is alive and well. This community proves it as much of the top posts are from blogs.
The degree to which my blogging gets so much hostility from people does not mesh with articles like this one claiming they wish blogs still existed. I can't get traffic for my blogs. No one shares them but me and then I get crap for doing that.
If you want that kind of internet, foster it. Look in the mirror. It's not just choices made by big companies or whatever that shape this space.
You shape it with your actions. And I get a fuck ton of accusations that if I advocate for something, it's "content marketing" and not my actual opinion. And the many people who know I'm dirt poor and most of my blogs have no ads, etc, usually don't bother to come forward to defend me or make sure to post first before some random internet stranger can thread shit.
Downvotes: Ironic evidence of the veracity of my claims.
it's a figurative euphemism - when a big company buys a blogging platform, changes the privacy policies and bans content, you can say they "shut it down".. like how the cops can shutdown a house party
Perhaps I'm a fool, but I don't want to be part of that kind of internet. Most of my blogs have no ads. There are no paywalls. There is no subscription.
I am trying to monetize it with Patreon and tips because I want that information to be freely available, but I have bills to pay. I gotta eat and I'm frequently broke.
I'm flat broke right now. That's an all too common occurrence.
So I'm pretty fed up with hearing people decry the evils of ads on the internet, decry paywalls and on and on because the same crowd that does all that turns around and tells me "Get a real job. Writing doesn't pay." and sees zero connection between their desire for free writing and my intractable poverty.
Meanwhile, local papers are going out of business left and right and it's a threat to political freedom.
I do everything I can to be an independent voice on various topics and people who bitch and moan endlessly about the loss of such do nothing but kick me in the teeth and tell me to stop whining about my problems.
If you want independent voices, support their Patreon. Give them tips. Don't kick the shit of them for posting their own stuff. Share their stuff.
Etc.
This is the world you are helping to create. You can be part of the solution or part of the problem. I have been desperately trying for years to be part of the solution and it isn't paying my bills, making me any friends, etc.
The evils of ads and the brokenness of pay walls are a lot more nuanced than that.
Ads have created an ecosystem where no one is willing to pay for media because we have gotten it free in exchange for our privacy. This hurts you, small publications, large publications. No one wants to pay for shit and we are tracked everywhere we go.
Paywalls are broken because of the credit card system. Publishers can not charge a reasonable rate for an article. Due to minimums, our financial system really only makes sense to have subscriptions. I do not want to pay $5 per month recurring. I want to pay 25 cents per article. That is not possible though. Pop up a pay wall for 25 cents and I will pay it. Good luck having that make sense with Stripe fees though.
I try to monetize my work with Patreon as well. It is difficult work. Fuck ads though. That's not the world I want. I have other income though.
The picture is certainly a lot more complicated than I have covered here. I get tired of repeating the same points, but it boils down this:
1. The current status quo is that there are no acceptable ways for me to monetize my writing: People hate ads and use ad blockers, people hate Patreon, people hate tips, people hate it if you are using your writing to sell other products (aka "content marketing") etc ad nauseum. There is no means to monetize writing that doesn't get hated on, so people de facto expect writers to work for free.
2. I'm tired of trying to analyze it to death and prove my point. I'm more focused on "Where do we go from here?" and less focused on "How did we get here and why is this so messed up?" If you hate it, help me find a path forward and forge a new model we can spread.
I increasingly try to focus on "If you hate the status quo, do something about it and vote with your wallet instead of bitching on the internet and then acting like this is inevitable and we can't change it."
If I could bring one thing back it would be just plain old _websites_, when people would make a place on the internet dedicated to some topic that was organized in a way _other than_ chronological order, and just became a great resource where important information was always easy to surface.
Here's a great example that will probably trigger some nostalgia for anyone who grew up on the late 90s internet:
I was just looking for good academic websites in my field, and I found that for the most part, they're gone. They still exist, especially Google sites. It's just that they're purely for promotion. Almost entirely things an employer would look for. 20 years ago, you'd have academics putting material on their websites to provide information to others.
Apparently, they've stopped posting it. I'm referring to things like advice, introduction to the field, a bibliography of the important papers in the field, why they love their research topic, and that sort of thing.
I would bring back RSS. The good parts of twitter (you can follow what lots of people have to say and aggregate it in a single feed) without the bad parts (character limits, "you stink" and other snarky comments, control of a centralised platform over who can say what, etc).
I use RSS everyday, and follow several hundred sites using it. One thing that gets overlooked when discussing RSS is that the nature of feeds themselves lends to scripting. I have one single source of aggregated data that I can run queries against, automate scripts with, generate alerts from etc. It's nice.
Yeah, I don't get what people mean when they say "bring back RSS"—-it's still around. The thing that disappeared was Google Reader, which I guess was a signal of super mainstream popularity of RSS.
Feedly is a great app that I use regularly to keep up with RSS, and there are other RSS readers too. It's not like we're talking about a dead protocol like Gopher, here.
RSS feeds are still widely generated, but they are not encouraged and overt links to them have been removed. I know that many proprietors of monetized blogs keep RSS feed generation turned on because they think it is important for SEO, but they don't want readers using it because it clashes with their monetization strategy -- users are supposed to be drawn straight to the main website where they can then be upsold through popup modals and shit. I recall one blog where even mentioning in the comments feed that you subscribe to the site through RSS would lead to a permaban.
I'd even say it's working much better than in the golden days as pretty much everyone is using an off-the-shelf blog engine which does RSS just fine, whereas in the old times a good half of the blogs were something homegrown/obscure/opt-in rss.
We sure do spend a lot of time brooding about how to generate, write about, and share ideas with an unknown online audience. What would happen if instead of spending hours and hours researching whether we should use WordPress or Ghost or Jekyll, we spent that time reading and writing and reflecting?
We all know too much about one another these days. It doesn't seem to matter to whom we address our writing. There is something to writing for yourself, writing offline, writing as a means of forming a private life and a private consciousness. And what about writing for the experience of writing itself? Forget publishing.
Ours is a society that says so little about nearly everything, and most commentary on the web today isn't worth reading. Furthermore, all content is ephemeral, people share gentle opinions instead of strong convictions because it is safer for one's public reputation, nobody is good at or cares about typography, self-editing is not a skill that people have, and you can never tell where the delusional self-promotion ends and the truthful personal expression begins.
We have become so sensitive to other people's personalities, accomplishments, productivity habits, recommendations, and advice for life. To what end?
I don't know. Reading blogs is not my idea of quality time.
There is just a problem with self curated content in general. There used to be a lot of experts making their own sites with information that was never available before. It was easy to just upload some HTML files somewhere. Now this information is being put in inaccessible areas like Facebook Groups. Then people tried running their own sites with wordpress and stuff but that becomes hard as you are usually on a crappy shared host, and get hacked the minute an exploit comes out.
As technologists, I think we could help by making it easier for people to publish to the open web with just plain HTML. Static site generators like Hugo go a long way there. CDNs like cloudfront are cheap now so no servers needed. We should make it easy for people by having something that can do it all for them. Get a domain, CDN, and SSL cert then a simple local editing tool and one button publish.
> Now this information is being put in inaccessible areas like Facebook Groups.
I hate that Facebook groups hide a lot of info this way. Back then google found blog posts and forum posts about a particular subject. Now if they are in a closed facebook group (is this the default?) then google won't see it.
I don't know if google indexes public facebook groups.
I'd suspect not. I sometimes will get a FB result for businesses (with nagging box for me to join Facebook taking up 33% of the screen). I Google a lot of stuff and never get results for FB groups public or private as a non Facebook user.
I agree and have personally found it quite easy to setup small websites hosted on AWS using Route53, Certificate Manager, S3, and CloudFront. They cost nearly nothing at low scale and are quite cost efficient until you hit serious scale, which few personal website ever achieve.
Yet, I don't think most people are going to want to go this route and it would take a fair amount of tooling to automate everything. It's not sufficient to just abstract away the cloud provider, people also need tools for creating and managing content. In theory you could run such tools locally, but I think most people would expect a web interface similar to that provided by Wordpress and medium.
Further, there's a big difference between free and essentially zero cost. How many people are going to be motivated to pull out their credit card to create blog when free alternatives already exist? Not only are existing blogging sites free, but they also promise the opportunity to actually make money through their affiliate program if the site becomes popular.
The layman has blogger/wordpress.com for free and one-click wordpress installer at any hosting provider of choice, so the tooling is a done thing (mostly Softaculous now but it's not a monopoly).
It’s not so much that blogging died but that commenting on them directly did, and with it blog culture. Commenting now takes place in other venues, not visible to the blog’s reader unless that venue is where they came from.
I wrote my own blog engine in Python (https://github.com/betodealmeida/nefelibata). It generates static pages, but publishes a snippet to Twitter/Mastodon/etc., linking back to the blog post.
I have four new interns who recently started in my team. I'm setting them up for blogging and made the same point to them (almost verbatim).
Another thing that died is the practice of linking to each other like it's going out of style. These days the majority of backlinks are earned through aggressive SEO techniques, not organically like 10-15 years ago. This penalizes regular blogs in favor of crappy blogs run by SEO experts.
I still believe in blogging and I think that the lesser competition, in a roundabout way, makes it easier to stand out. However, discoverability in Google can be a frustrating process both for readers and publishers.
I think most wordpress blogs with commentariats just use Disqus now. It's buggy and unreliable, but the commenting capability is still there generally.
I use commento.io, which allows anonymous commenting. More than half of the comments on my blog are anonymous commenters. I think it's about reducing the initial friction as much as possible.
Blogs are all over the place and I don't find any of the arguments as to why they might not be as popular well founded nor compelling.
Running a blog is either free or nearly free. With Github pages, Blogger, Netlify, and many more platforms, the only cost you're going to incur is a domain name and even that isn't mandatory. If you do want one, you can easily get a domain name for a tenner a year or less.
Technicality isn't a convincing argument either, there are many ways to get started with just a push of a button and the range of options spans far and wide if you want more. Premade templates, static site generators, WYSIWYG editors and more have made the barrier to entry lower than ever.
Which brings me to my last point, audience. Audience is one of the most recurring themes of woes and, I would say, the most childish. Wanting to be heard is a reasonable wish, along with wanting to belong and many other basic traits. However, demanding to be heard is something else entirely. Your blog wont attract thousands of regular readers from day one and in hoping so, you're simply setting yourself up for failure. The truth is, if you write good content, the readers will come.
Even with that said, I would argue that having readers isn't a good end for your means in and of itself. Much like chasing popularity just because, obsessing over SEO, analytics and all that other jazz is simply trying to feed your ego. Tame your ego, and write about what matters to you. If you're only writing for others, then maybe writing isn't the best way to use your time.
Fully agreed. When the blogs died one of the richest and most interesting parts of the internet died with it. The good news is that Wordpress.com and Blogspot still exist so the information was not lost, but almost all of the blogs haven't been updated in 5+ years. I'd love to see a concerted effort to have them rebooted -- maybe Google could up-rank them, or CPMs could increase, or Patreon-like models could be built in, who knows.
fwiw I don't see Medium as being a replacement for blogs. It's gotten quite bad from a user standpoint and kills the relationship with the reader in the same way that "blogging" on Linkedin or Facebook does (not quite as bad because at least it's findable on the open web).
I don't think blogs are dead, just hidden from view. That's why I obsessively bookmark blogs when I see them posted to HN or Reddit, since I know I'll never be able to find them again if I lose the link.
It was weird reading this. My blog's been around for 16 years, always on my own platform(s), never on Blogger, Wordpress or the like (I have a presence on Medium, but post very seldom since I see little value in it).
Most of the 200-odd RSS feeds I follow are unique voices (albeit 50 or so are "mass market" stuff like Anandtech, The Verge, etc., just so that I know what is making the headlines).
We've always been here. Search results and social networks have added a lot of noise, but you can still get signal.
It sounds exactly like what the OP is looking for. In addition to being a easy-to-use (micro)blogger-focused platform (no ads, $5/month basic plan for hosting), the fact that they allow you to host everything on your own domain and cross post to more widely used platforms like Twitter and Medium seems like the best of both worlds. My current flow is writing in iA Writer and saving to Dropbox (for long term archiving). iA Writer allows publishing directly to micro.blog. Following other people through RSS feels like a breath of fresh air after being used to the Twitter feed for too long. I thought that RSS was dead for a long time, but checking out NetNewsWire and the default feeds there restored a bit of faith for me.
I hope and believe that blogging is going to survive this current centralized social media boom, and come out stronger in the end.
Blogs exist, they just morphed. People with things to say moved to platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Twitch, or Medium.
This is because there's no point in self-hosting; using a platform is free and gives you some degree of discoverability.
Nobody wants to self-host on their own domain because it costs money and you need at least some rudimentary tech/sysadmin skills. Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work.
Facebook makes your content virtually inaccessible and discoverable from those outside Facebook. They are the opposite of the way things were on the open web. Medium "is easy" but they are gradually asking more and more of people visiting too. Twitter is a good platform for streams of thought but it is a terrible "blogging" platform. Having "a series of tweets" does not make for a blog. It is hard to read and terrible.
But you are right. People feel they don't need to self host because these things are there. The problem is you then no longer own your content distribution and are at the whim of them walling it off or shutting down.
I’d really like to see a “Medium minus the bullshit” service. Those pages are so full of js garbage they just feel awful to read and most of the interactions Medium tries to lead you toward are even more painful.
>I'm actually working on something with that spirit.
Sincere question, not trying to be snarky. Since much (though not all) of the bullshit in Medium is their weak attempts at monetization, what's the bullshit-free alternative business plan to sustain and scale pluma over the long term?
Since we won't track users, sell data, or use ads... the only ethical option is having paying customers.
If you look at Ghost, WPEngine, etc, there are a lot of people willing to pay for being able to blog independently. We are betting that within that market there is a niche of people that want to do it as easily as possible, which I think is Medium's best feature.
I’m curious. Have any company or anyone implemented something like this? Basically let people blog and let author themselves pay (instead of being paid by ads) subscription fee to pay cloud machine that hosts their content.
I think something does exist in Ethereum platform but why it doesn’t exist out there anywhere else.
This was the model back in the 2000s before monetization was big on the internet. This is really the key issue, not whether RSS feeds or dead or if it is too hard for people to self-host blogs.
The internet has changed a lot in the last ten years. People have realized that popular content has a big monetary potential, and it is far easier now to get compensated (remember when YouTube content creators couldn't monetize?). More content is created as a income source, than out of passion or interest. Search results are gamed by commerical blogs. The average hobby blogger can't compete with that.
LiveJournal went closed source in 2014. It was also bought by Russians, relocated its servers to Russia, and began enforcing Russian law in 2017, which included laws against "gay propaganda", which was when me and my remaining friends abandoned the service for good.
Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work.
I started blogging in 1999 (and sadly there are the Wayback Machine archives to prove how juvenile I was!) and it was either self host or use Blogger.
Discoverability was pretty interesting. Most blogs' traffic didn't come from search engines (Google existed but it was pretty much geeks only) or platforms, but from other blogs whether by being referenced in a post, via a sidebar link, or via a webring or similar device. Getting over 100 visitors a day to your blog would be a big deal! Getting other bloggers' attention via linking to them was a big part of things or leaving comments on their blog. These things barely move the needle anymore.
While I have a lot of nostalgia for those days, I think there's actually a lot of other ways to be discovered now. Sites like Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Designer News, etc. provide opportunities to be found within various sub-communities. Most people have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social profiles on which they can share their links, often findable via hashtags people are monitoring. There are 1001 email newsletters that are always seeking out interesting things to link to.
So, I dunno, is discovery really a problem nowadays? I don't think it is, but maybe I'm too "in the game" to see the problems people are having with it. If anything, I think there's just too much to do nowadays and we're really competing with there being 100x more people online than 20 years ago.
You bring up a good point I hadn't really thought about. I was thinking purely about discoverability in terms of the blogger's perspective rather than the reader. You're right, unless you're already following the people who are broadcasting their blogs in all of these various places or live on Reddit/Hacker News/etc., you're going to struggle to find them more now than ever before.
Right but this creates a new issue, those platforms can moderate what you can say, and not every controversial statement is wrong or bad, but to avoid liability these platforms moderate it away. Then the other related issue is on the chance that what wasn't previously controversial becomes controversial they can go back and scrub older posts. Hosting your own blog protects you from this.
They have offered a lot of benefits but they also have the ability to censor.
If you think the biggest problem of blogging is that nobody will read your work, you're not blogging, you're angling for popularity (or ad dollars, which comes out to the same in the end). If you have something interesting to write, write it in a blog. If you care more about having people read it, write on social media.
To me it's more that Blogs vanished and the people that spent time with it moved their attention onto different media, especially Twitter. Both exploring and maintaining blogs is an effort, and I think what's left are tech blogs and blogs attached to news or magazine websites that are written by professional Journalists. Medium and Youtube also seems more like something for people who spent a lot of effort on this.
I think most people resorted to platforms for hosting the blogs. Not sure if it's so important if many people read something as long as it's interesting for some people.
The challenge with platforms is that they have big incentives to push small, regular updates and posts, to increase impressions. Thoughtful, considered content and engaged responses are lost in the noise.
The bloggers went to places where the eyeballs are. If you read a good book, make photo and post it with a comment on instagram. You will get much more reaction than with a blogpost on your private blog. Same for forums. If you are looking for a community with a special interest you will have more luck to find an active facebook group than a independent forum/message board somewhere else.
People don't read blogs anymore, but they still read blog posts. Let me explain: In the past people may have visited certain blogs directly, or maybe they followed a blog through an RSS feed. Nowadays, a more likely scenario is someone google's something and a blog post on the topic pops up in their search results. That's where I find myself consuming blog posts. Likewise, all of the traffic for my blog comes from search engine traffic as well.
I mean you're free to start a site with neither upvotes nor targeted advertising... And while I'm sure you'll find an audience, the vast majority of the population enjoys upvoting, and actually prefers targeted adverts over untargeted ones.
I doubt anyone enjoys targeted advertising. Any slim benefits it brings comes with the huge disadvantage of mass emotional manipulation for political ends.
Upvoting is a difficult one. Undoubtedly it's enjoyable. But given enough money and time any private or public organisation can game it for the same political ends.
If you can use targeted mass advertising to play on people's fears or give the illusion of group acceptance, then you have an incredibly powerful tool, and especially so in a democracy.
Same here. It may be basic and crappy, but if you want to read an unsuccessful blog with no attempt at monetization or ads or even visitor counting, mine[1] is where you should feel right at home.
But I guess the author means a platform, not loose websites without a collective 'new' feed. I remember looking for one when wanting to make a new blog and I haven't found a platform that felt right, at least back then (probably ~2015). Heck, I couldn't even find software to install: everything is either super heavy stuff that requires caching or at least a beefy CPU to survive the HN homepage (with custom software, HN can be survived on an ancient Atom CPU even if you use PHP (also pre-PHP7) and do multiple SQL queries per pageload) or some static generators that I wasn't looking for.
Edit: While we're at it, another blog I read is Robert Heaton's one[2], and I'm subscribed to a few others but they don't seem to post anymore since I stopped getting email notifications. I remember Coding Horror[3] was also nice to read but he posts very infrequently now (for those who don't know, that's by the co-founder of Stack Overflow). Finally, Cryptography Engineering[4] might be nice if you're into that sort of thing. But I suppose those can all be mostly considered successful in that they all have a following.
Blog never went away. There are plenty of it, and very good one.
Just like there is still good music today.
The problem is discovering it.
Before internet became a medium for mass sharing pictures of inspiration quotes and kitten, blogs had a change to stand out.
Now, theyr are completly dwarfed by other usages, and most users don't find it a popular format anyway. Search engine rarely put them in top of search results either, because they rarely quickly answer and direct question or provide the popular untertainment du jour.
So if you want to help bring blog back, you gotta find a way to make them more visible, and get people interested in them.
Good luck with that. Videos store instantly became more popular than libraries IRL, and I don't see a reason why suddenly blogs would win against Youtube. Same with equivalent to Facebook, Twitter, etc.
When the perception of what’s out there is filtered through so few sources, then it’s bound to be skewed. The blogosphere is as vibrant as ever. The blogs that have staying power, that are well done, are still there. Finding them through search engines is not going to provide you with the instant discovery you’re looking for.
HackerNews and other niche sites, word-of-mouth, and serendipity, play a bigger role in blog discovery for me. It’s a slow process but the results are stronger.
There’s no instant tech-effort solution to this in my opinion. If you want a good blog to stick around, express your thanks and gratitude to the blogger. Buy them a coffee. Encourage them.
Go now to your favourite blogger and send them a message of appreciation.
If I could bring one thing back to the internet, it would be to have people with little technical knowledge to be brave and listen less to [disparaging remarks from] geeks. Go to https://wordpress.com/start/user (or https://www.blogger.com/, nobody actually shut it down) and create your blog!
Blogging, when introduced, was marvelous. People sharing their personal takes and learnings, unfettered by the desire to earn from them.
If you were into bicycles, you find a blog by a cycling-fanatic and start following along and engaging (remember inter-blog "pings"?). If you were into any topic, you could find enthusiasts writing on it. And it'd have a bit of personal touch, which is very valuable!
"Planets" were great as a starting point, and you still have those at Planet Gnome (I think one of the original ones, at least it had custom software done for it), Planet Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora...
It was the true decentralised discussion forum bliss that Internet always promised!
Alas, platforms like Blogger and Wordpress actually diminished the true essence because they promoted siloing in.
And being there from early on, I can promise you that "blogs" (web logs) were not personal diaries put public. People did that a long time before blogs and called them, surprisingly, diaries.
It was already a point where web was becoming too big, and search engines were becoming useless, so it was, imho, a "log of the web" — every early blog post was pointing to a hidden gem elsewhere on the web which you'd never reach through a search engine. It's just that the term was taken and switched to "any regularly updated set of articles" without any other constraints (technical or topical) that defined the early blogs. As if that did not exist before "blogs".
I still can't forgive Google for killing reader. There are plenty of replacements, but none have became as popular, and culture of subscribing to RSS feeds died with it. You can still do that, but you can't count on your readers doing it en masse; so all content creators that want to find an audience moved to Twitter, FB, and other platforms, and gradually changed their content to fit these social networks accordingly.
Unfortunately blogs are missing a strong feedback loop. If RSS was the notification mechanism, then what was it that closed the loop so the blogger got great info on what was being read, liked, disliked? Chen gets this right here:
https://andrewchen.co/the-death-of-rss-in-a-single-graph/
The internet is full of people with incredible ideas, many of which are writing them down, but the problem is discovery. How to connect them. If you can unify blogs with a feedback mechanism, with the immediacy of social media then that would be progress.
Unfortunately most mechanisms for discovery are hopelessly low SnR or totally contaminated with advertising or articles gaming some search algorithm. Funnily enough I write a little about it here within the context of one platform which could have been good, but wasn’t.
https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
It's still up from what I can tell, the blogs hosted there still work, and the Wikipedia page still lists it as active.
That said, I definitely wish blogs were more popular again. Finding individual people's blogs used to be a great thing, and the way they've basically been buried by Google is depressing as hell.
Is it really the case that blogs are dead? It seems that a decent chunk of the posts on HN are from blogs.
The reason I don't blog as much as I used to is because nobody reads anything I write. The traffic is a joke. Thus is doesn't seem like a wise investment unless there is some ulterior motive (eg. demonstrate proficiency in some field).
Also anything I feel compelled to write about is generally something controversial, especially relating to politics or work culture, and it would be career suicide to write that under my real name. Therefore if I want to write anything that's actually interesting, I have to write under a pseudonym.
If I could bring anything back to the internet, it would be internet forums. Real communities. Reddit and HN serve their purpose, but there's no sense of any real community.
Blogs aren't dead, but they've become a niche product the last 5 years. In 2006, pretty much every stay-at-home mom with an Internet connection would have a blog, but as social media gained more traction most of those with small reader numbers moved to those platforms instead, as they we're more efficient to reach small groups of acquaintances.
There are still a lot of blogs around, but they seem to be targeted at specific groups, with technically minded people and fashionistas being the two largest.
Twitter killed blogging. Not just the popularity of it, but the expectations of both the writer and reader. When Twitter launched, it was described as a "micro-blog", because that's what it is, really, before morphing into its own thing: a tweet.
We all know what a tweet is: A short polemic statement, usually emotional, biased or opinionated, but expressed as self-evident without any justification, explanation or thorough analysis, which simply wouldn't fit.
I was an avid blogger at the time Twitter started, thousands of daily readers, and relatively influential in my tech niche. I had every reason to continue. And yet after I started tweeting regularly, my blogging slowed and then stopped. That day had passed, and now my blog sits on my website like a monument to the 2000s. Many others were like this as well.
The reason is pretty simple: When you blog regularly, there's a certain itch to express an idea or an opinion that builds up and you want to scratch it by writing a post. But you'd ruminate on it for a while, so that it could be a decent sized post with rationale for your thought.
But tweeting could scratch that itch instantly - no need to save up enough of an idea to write a full blog post of a few paragraphs, you could just write, "Wow, foo sucks. Totally prefer bar instead." And the feeling was satisfied.
You'd think at the time that you'd save up some ideas and write a longer post later, and at first you did, but as time went by, later never seemed to come. And then, when it did, you'd be so used to culling your opinion down to the essential idea for a pithy tweet, fully expressing your thought became harder. Besides, the more open-ended a tweet was, the more opinionated, the more it would get reactions. It seemed that expressing fully formed ideas wasn't worth as much.
It was a vicious cycle, you'd blog less. And others who used to blog their ideas or leave comments wrote less as well, and that great feedback loop stalled as everything moved to tweets. Intelligent analysis was replaced by emotional exclamations and hard opinion. There's no room for nuance in a tweet.
And that's where we are now. With a president who's a master of tweeting unjustified, irrational opinion and lies and a society that responds in kind because doing otherwise takes too much time and effort.
Blogging is never coming back. Even this comment is probably too long for most HN readers to do anything more than just skim. And if they don't like a word or two, they'll downvote and move on, rather than write their thoughts out in a coherent manner.
Two weeks ago I decided to set up one for myself as I have all these conversations where I instructed someone to do some obscure thing so thought to package them into public tutorials I could easily share.
Wanted my own domain, didn't want to deal with content moderation by someone else, wanted the ability to easily customize things, didn't want to show crappy ads, didn't want editors being able to hold up things, etc.
I spent a good 10 hours configuring all the basics for that between SSL certificates, DNS, domain name, etc. The barrier to entry seems to be substantial if you just want a simple clean interface that you yourself control and that is still building everything on top of WordPress.
I found something called WordOps (.org I think) and they make that trivial. Even win set up the letsencrypt. I don’t even use my own scripts any more- just theirs.
Blogs are too monetised today. For example, if you need some solution for Django (+ORM) - as of today it’s much easier to end up on some mediocre blog website than on official docs.
All authors tend to do so to re-create the same content in a different form and publish it. I assume taking most popular answer from Stack Overflow and writing a blog post about could be one of their strategies.
Basically blogging today is all race to infinite splits of the initial pie.
I have to admit I often true to keep blogs published on Hacker News because they usually do contain some unique content. However that is no longer the majority. An average blog today is equivalent to an average Facebook profile - it has nothing interesting per se.
No mention of Twitter, Facebook or Instagram? It seems obvious to me that that is where the blogs went. People don't create content so that people they don't know have something to do in their spare time, they do it for the recognition, and social acceptance. In other words; they do it for the likes. The blogs dried up because the audience's attention coalesced on the few sites and apps that people used the most. Blogs won't come back unless people read blogs, and people won't read blogs unless doing so it easier than Twitter and Facebook. They don't care about censorship, or even privacy (apparently), just the sweet sweet dopamine rush.
I think RSS should be better built in to browsers. Make it as simple as a follow button is on centralised websites.
e.g.:
A little RSS icon pops up when RSS is available on a page, press it and you're now following that feed. Feeds window in the browser shows your feeds, and a small alert icon shows up somewhere when there's unread content. Your subscriptions are saved to your account. If you want to read the article, you click the link and read it directly on the source website. It doesn't need to be any more complex than that.
Firefox had "Live Bookmarks" for RSS but it was relatively terrible, and eventually got removed.
Heh. I remember the days before blogs. Everyone posted on community forums. You'd get some amazing, long, and lasting conversations that way. Then everyone who posted in the forums started blogging, and I saw the forums dry up. Sure, part of it was that teenagers grew up and went to college and didn't have time for the forums, but a good portion was due to blogs.
I suppose good communities still exist out there, somewhere... But, like the OP said about blogs being hyper focused, there don't seem to be many general forums. I've mostly stumbled across tech related forums.
I agree. Forums and old school personal web sites were much better for quality content than blogs or social media. Things went in the direction of mental junk food, focusing on getting a lot of new content as quick as possible.
It's not a tooling problem. There are several high quality forum tools out there. Discourse being one of them. But getting people to actually participate seems impossible. I've had a Discourse instance running for family for over a year now. It's basically empty.
I've tried inviting friends to a another instance, and only one ever showed up.
I blog a lot. I do it mostly when I do a fun hobby project and want to write down what I did. It's kind of like a public journal with some pics. They're usually esoteric enough that when someone searches for the thing I was writing about, they'll find it. I get a few hundred hits on a handful of pages per month. Not going to make it big with this, but it is fun and I just love publishing hobby stuff on the internet for some reason.
I also find it kind of fun when I'm searching for something and my own blog comes up reminding me how I did something 6 years ago.
I have recently been enjoying exploring gemini [1] - a new gopher-like web protocol that has been mentioned a couple of times in recent days here on HN. There's not a great deal of content at the moment, but that which does exist does tend to be of a personal, blog-style nature, and also remarkably interesting - if, that is, like me, you're fond of beer and steel framed bicycles (fill in your own stereotype here...).
What do you mean "back"? Blogs very well exist. I read a number of them. I write one, for heaven's sake (probably a dozen people or so reads it but it's ok that's how it is meant to be). They are living in the shadow of facebooks and twitters of the world, but who cares. Turns out, popularity is not everything, and unless you plan to make living out of it (which I most definitely don't) you don't need to compete with anybody on anything.
> Nowadays people won't share content simply because they don't trust the internet to share content to it.
What the author speaks of sounds a lot like I2P.
Years ago I played around with I2P. I2P was pretty interesting, it was a traffic obfuscator like Tor that had the express goal of not connecting to anyone else who wasn't also on I2P. (Of course people can and did run outproxies where you could connect to the web through them).
If you made a site available on I2P you had to keep the local I2P router running. You could register your node with a I2P hosts maintainer if you wanted and that was as far as DNS went (it was pass around the hosts text-file style).
The couple sites I found were a lot like the web in the early 90's as far as style and content. Before I stopped messing around with it, someone had created a Twitter clone and made it available. At that point it was very slow. This was probably 2011.
Overall, there's nothing preventing people from trading lists of URLs, and nothing preventing anyone from putting these in local a searchable database. It's completely possible to do this without Google. Google made it much easier and spoiled us, but there was a world before Google and there can be one afterward.
Blogs are fun. On a dare, I booked a domain in my name in 2001 and started writing a lot. Being an n00b in everything, I wrote anything that fancies me. Macromedia (then Adobe) noticed and had it on their site front-n-center alongside some of the best sites of that time.
The site was well visited, approaching million-month hits at times. Advertisements on the site supported me while I bootstrap my Startup (failed later).
Now, I write but very far and in between. If a topic/idea comes to mind, I search/research and found that someone has done a better job and so I don’t write. Trivial things are ignored because it is trivial and everyone would have known. I don't think I even have analytics enabled or it is just that I never cared to look at Analytics anymore.
People emailed me about missing/non-working links, open-sourced files missing, thanking me, etc once in a while but that's it.
The bar for a good article has hit the ceiling and I’d rather not write than write like I used to write long ago.
I miss blogs too, not just reading but the writing of them. I've been trying to start up again, and recently wrote this take on Twitter's role in all this:
> I turn to Twitter even though it is just about the worst platform imaginable for the exposition of ideas. In its favor: the barrier to publication is extremely low, and there is no shortage of engagement with others to be found. The negative: that engagement is often of the worst kind. Nevertheless, for all its flaws, Twitter is immediate and just sufficiently gratifying that once you’ve blurted out a half-formed, typo-ridden, uneditable utterance, you might find your original communicative impulse satisfied enough that you’ll never take the time to turn it into a more polished and complete work in the form of a blog post.
I disagree with the author’s idea that blogs shouldn’t have a focus. I think the best blogs are these sort:
1. By an expert in a specific domain.
2. Blogs by someone in the process of developing expertise, documenting what they learned along the way. The idea is it really helps the learning process to learn something well enough to write about it cogently and teach others.
On the second point, the ones that really appealed to me were the indie game dev blogs. They would figure out a unique mechanic or way of implementing a nice graphical effect, and then do a short post about it. Then other developers might pick up on it and adapt it for their projects. Most of the time those blogs were eventually abandoned along with the games they were trying to make but I think that a lot of indie games that have been released probably learnt a lot and sourced inspiration from those blogs. I wouldn't be surprised if a game like Terraria found a lot of inspiration from all the procedural generation blog posts after Minecraft came out.
I've had a blog for 5+ years but typically it had one or two intro articles then nothing. I found that I wanted to write perfection before publishing. Lately I've just been putting up information that I have found helpful in short form and found my visitors went from flat to several dozens a day getting utility.
Everyone should consider making their own blog! Kind of like everyone should consider baking their own bread, at least once.
Having a blog that I built that is truly “mine,” with a domain name that I own, is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done. Even though I don’t write that often and don’t have that many readers.
I currently host it on github pages, but I could move it somewhere else in a weekend if I wanted to.
Depending on your motivations, discoverability by strangers may be overrated. I’ve had good success just telling people that I respect that I wrote something and getting feedback from them. I’m not selling anything on my blog, so that’s worth a lot more to me than anonymous attention.
Social media like HN, Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook may also help for getting the word out about your writing while still letting you own the space where your writing lives.
I think MySpace should've focused on the blog, and kept the feel of having 'my space'. I think it could have thrived. It would've been better than whatever it is now anyway, some crappy pop music ghost town thing.
Imagine a search site that is dedicated to nothing but sci-fi, and it includes blogs, reviews, and discussions from a curated list of smaller and independent publications. No large, ad-heavy, seo gimmicky sites are indexed.
YaCy (https://yacy.net) seems like a reasonable option for this.
I run an instance (non-peered) internally on my network. I index smaller blogs, mostly around music reviews. While I like to use RSS to get updates, I find having a search engine is great to go back and find something or to seek out something new. I only index with a depth of 1, so I get the origin site plus any direct links to external sites. For my purposes, it has been working really well and is easy to maintain.
I've maintained a blog regularly for two decades without worrying about promotion, or whether anyone would read it. I knew that some of my friends and students would read it, but that was about it.
I still treat it as a way for me to gather my personal/professional thoughts or provide a summary of a topic or technology that others may find useful. And no, I don't give a rat's ass whether it's politically correct.
But over the past 2 decades, I've received hundreds of emails from people who came across it from all around the world. And some of my blogs have even been posted here on Hacker News. It's http://jasoneckert.net (which forwards to a longer URL that is secured) in case you are interested.
At the moment blogs have been failed about a few things:
1. Walled gardens (this include medium). Basically they've self decided that content should be here and they keep your audience there. Also, they tend to self select what opinions the community is to keep. This is a huge concern for freedom of expression.
2. The networks aren't there. We need a way to have neutral aggrigation and federating against many other blogs for commenting, replying, and annotation of existing content. (Give people a reward for being in a community, reddit does this with karma, but they also try to wall off the users)
3. RSS has been badly treated. This is a great standard for syndicating updates to your channel.
4. Build good networks to remove the spam. Basically the baby was thrown out of the bathwater rather than to fix the problem.
These days, light and responsive client app/interfaces with little Javascript (service worker) scripts could be busy UUen/decoding and uploading/downloading all those distributed binaries and 'news' with ease! ;)
You find interesting blogs by chance or via blogroll of blogs you like.
What really has changed are stock related news. Recently I went back into stock trading and was shocked. Basically 90% of the stock related news on google seems to be AI/ML created bullshit with zero value.
I think a lot of this type of writing shifted to Twitter and Instagram, but I agree this microblogging is not the same... it lacks the immersiveness of a good long story.
On the other hand it has never been easier to set up your own blog with services like Netlify, Jekyll, Pelican etc.
I recently started my own blog in this way, however it requires some coding skills... I know it’s a shameless plug, but here it is: https://haltakov.net/blog
To not be too selfish, let me also share one of my favorite blogs of a guy telling amazing stories about his hikes and adventures (unfortunately, he hasn’t written in a while): https://www.otherhand.org
"I am nostalgic for the heyday of the blogosphere before social media surpassed it, even though in an absolute sense the blogosphere is larger and more vibrant than ever, and I have only myself to blame for using social media more than I read blogs"
Very curious to hear – how do people actually discover blogs?
A friend and I have a blog based upon our experiences scaling product/engineering at a startup (we've been fortunate enough to see several growth stages over ~8 years). But it's challenging to get in front of readers who might be interested, outside of places like HN or Reddit.
When I look at the blogs that I read regularly myself, it tends to be a small subset of names that I've collected over the years from Hacker News, Quora, and friends sharing articles. I'd like to find more but don't really know the best place to start. I'm sure that there's tons of content that I would really enjoy but discovery is difficult.
Okay which planet internet is this author living on? I regularly follow two cybersecurity blogs, two science fiction blogs and a photography blog? Searching for an hour and not finding any blogs? Credibility evaporated with that sentence.
There are real issues with discoverability, anonymity, archival and freedom of expression. That’s what the post is about. The fact you have found five blogs to follow doesn’t make his point any less valid.
Since a good portion of this article is about platforming issues I thought I would highlight one of the good guys who is doing it right: Archive of Our Own. It does not have a recommendation engine or try to optimize for any consumer psychology networks. It does have an elaborate tagging that you can use to find something you'll be interested in and it's pretty good at displaying text on the internet. I also don't think it's going to get purchased by Yahoo and have a bunch of subcultures get dumpstered out of nowhere.
Ao3 for blogs? That'd be nice. I mean, does anyone actually like clicking into a Medium link?
Blogs died when blog specific search engines disappeared, particularly 'Google Blog search' which was quietly killed off in 2014.
Technorati the other popular option for searching blogs, also went dark in 2014.
This is so weird to read. As a rare language native (Hungarian) I was never part of The Glorious Blogsphere That One Day Disappeared. I ran my blog because I wanted to make it, to tinker with it, to write, to create.
Those that went dark only because search engines now don't find them feel like they never done it for these values.
I've long wanted to build a search engine of only personal blogs. I am less familiar with the field of information retrieval so I haven't gotten started yet, but it's always been a dream of mine and if anyone is interested please contact me at [redacted] [at] the world's largest email provider.
Discovering unknown parts and blogs on the internet is one of the enduring goals of a newsletter that I run [1], which provides a single link to an interesting article every day, usually by lesser-known authors and blogs across the internet.
My blog does this. Not because I want to hide it. Since RSS is a standard, I expect anyone wanting to add my blog to their RSS would just use the current URL and the reader will grab the alt meta tag. I have multiple feeds, one for each tag, so if a reader uses a blog post URL they'll be given a choice on what tag to subscribe to (or everything). Having separate RSS links on the page for this would add clutter.
Before, Firefox used to show the RSS icon but they killed it. It really should be a browser-level thing, it's no different from favicons, rather than requiring users to hunt down a link somewhere on the page.
I blog on Facebook and it works really well for me because I have a built in audience that is interested in what I have to say. I can tell stories about my life that my kids and parents enjoy. I have no need for NSFW posts. I avoid politics. I keep it fun and interesting. Hot takes on local issues sometimes. I have 60 followers who I don't know and don't understand why they follow me, although I do try to explain the latest technology trends to my immediate family, being the lone geek, and maybe other people find that helpful.
I'm not sure how you define a blog. Could you clarify? I often delete or edit posts, so I have control. I download my FB data so I have an archive. I have a link to my FB on my Twitter and all my posts are public and I get people from Twitter reading it. I have 60 followers I don't know who read it. Not sure what else it needs to be to meet your definition of a blog.
I don't expect a free site to be available for eternity. That's why I archive it. The archive is a pretty nice format. I can load it up in a browser from an index file and browse my entire history. I could host it somewhere else if I wanted. I could use a parser to extract the content and repost it in a new format. I still maintain it is a blog.
It's kind of ironic, but a blog I follow recently said I'm moving everything into youtube and social media now, and the blog will just be a permalink archive with transcripts to those youtube and social media posts, because that where everyone is now.
If I want to find random rare opinion X from a casual person, now I have to search youtube to find something useful unfortunately. Youtube videos are a lot slower to digest than the equivalent blog article, and take more time to make. But since youtube can give you money, thats where people go.
I am not convinced that there is enough good content to sustain blogs. Even in the current blogging minimum I see a lot of repetitive self-selling blogs from the usual suspects and a performative aspirational blogs from nobodies. The people who I would read are mostly doing work and, if the are writing, it is about the state of their current work (Brian Goetz for example) rather than broader thoughts about the state of the industry, priorities and challenges. Technical content and informed perspectives are sadly in short supply.
Bloggers might be interested in knowing… we're bringing back iBlogger for iPhone (and now, iPad) this week, an all-new product built in Swift for iOS 13. The core text posting features will be free for all blog types (WordPress compatibility in this new release), with a subscriber In-App Purchase option to keep the product in active development.
If you want to join the TestFlight which will start within the next few days, find @illumineX on Twitter.
(I founded illumineX in 1998, and iBlogger was one of the first apps on the iPhone App Store in 2008.)
> It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN. But that's rarely how things work.
This happened to me. One of my first blog posts pre-2005 made it to the front page of Digg/Reddit. With only AdSense ads I managed to make $20-$30 day for a few days. I tried writing a few follow ups but never again "caught lightening in a bottle".
IF I had kept blogging consistently, I'd now most likely have a nice side income.
I've noticed that a lot of Japanese blogs here something akin to a blog webring[0] on their blogs. It'a called Blog Mura (Blog Village) and is basically a blog aggregator. It a provides rankings, let's you search by categories and even a way for you to contact an author that does not have contact information on their own page.
Maybe we need to bring back a webrings but with a modern spin.
This is exactly what I wanted to post as well. Maybe that should be my next sideproject, it seems fun. I wonder if enough people have blogs about a specific topic that this would work.
I moved mine from Wordpress to GitHub pages, and basically stopped using it; I could either pay Wordpress to not show gross ads, or host a mostly static site on GitHub.
If you don't mind sharing, why did you stop using your blog on GitHub?
I went from Drupal based blog to Hugo and then I stopped blogging. I used to write a post every six months or so. This was long enough to forget how to use Hugo, so I stopped. Lame excuse I know.
I stopped blogging because I don't think the world needs - or wants - my hot takes. I re-posted some things[0] that I refer to in the outside world; right now I'm digging into Honda Telematics[1]. That might end up on the blog, or I might leave it as a gist.
I feel similarly to this author. A few weeks ago, I built a small tool that surfaces submitted blogs to a "Ask HN" thread.
It's delightful! I've discovered so many cool blogs! It made building the tool take twice as long as it should have, as I kept finding myself reading extensively from a delightful personal blog.
Self-promoting that I have a blog with scattered thoughts here: https://mlu.red/
Also built with a custom static site generator (https://github.com/owenshen24/Volta), like many other blogs in the comments here. Woot for customizability and self-expression.
Today’s vlogs are similar to the blogs of 10 years ago. They’re day-in-the-life snippets from normal people doing mundane or semi-interesting things. Some of them are famous and are run like businesses with financial motives, but most aren’t. And you can find vlogs on all kinds of topics: travel, parenting, running, and even unicycling.
If you miss the old days of blogging I think you’ll enjoy watching vlogs.
The main problem I have with vlogs (and podcasts for that matter) is that they are linear, and they are long. When I read a blog, I can skim, scan for keywords, I can take it at my own pace. It's a very different experience, even if the raw content is the same.
They still exist, many people are sharing valuable gems over there, but searching for blogs it's hard(you can find blog posts on HN then you follow the blog if you like it) + here are some blogs on HN :
When I hit a problem and solve it I'll usually make a blog post about it on my personal blog. I try to share as many random learnings and other tidbits from my career on my blog. There are even some search terms where my blog comes up in the top 1-5.
There aren't any less blogs now than there ever have been, other content is just more prolific these days.
I think there could be more fun and experimental content on the web. I'm working on a side project called https://taaalk.co, where people have long and continuous text based conversations. Please check it out if you're looking for something new on the web. (Feedback welcomed)
I’ve learned a lot from blog posts and still follow a handful of outstanding blogs by experts in specific domains.
That said, I rarely read company blog posts any more as many companies seem to be phoning it in. Writing high quality blog posts likely to be useful to an audience is a lot of work.
I’d love to see the return of blogs as a priority not an after thought done mostly for SEO.
I just don't think there's ever going to be a platform that won't be at risk of being corrupted or shut down. If you care about control of your own blog, host it yourself. I realize not everyone can do this, but it's getting easier and easier. With static site generators and services like Netlify, it's practically free too.
In the blog post it says "Blogger was shut down by Google years ago" which is not true as far as I know. Google just did a big update to the Blogger interface, which is not something they do to (the many) platforms they abandon. I blog frequently about games and art and have a steady audience of between 3k and 4k readers monthly.
It seems to me that blogs have been replaced with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Social Media platforms let you express yourself in similar ways that blogs did, with the added benefit of immediate and easy feedback from your followers. I don’t see blogging returning unless it becomes far more interactive then traditional blogs were.
I blog. Have for a long time. The key is to own your own domain. Then your works cannot be taken away, and they are visible to all instead of risking becoming trapped in a walled garden. It doesn't cost much and it is not that hard. See http://dwheeler.com
Blog used to be a cool thing for teenagers a long time ago. Since YouTube, fb, insta are coming out, users are more inclined to images and videos instead of text.
Blog can never go back to be the most popular media. However, blogs will continue to specialize in long form articles, e.g. tutorials, how-to, reviews, ebook, courses, etc
I started to blog in 2003-4 but these days I rarely write long form. I feel that the the rise of social media and 'micro blogging' platforms have changed reading habits of the masses and people, in general, now prefer to skim through a thread of tweets than reading a long form blog post of 2000+ words.
I'm working on Pressdown https://github.com/lucianmarin/pressdown to do just that, bring back blogs on a easy to setup and use CMS. It's inspired from Jekyll and has less to do with WordPress.
They haven't gone anywhere. And the small ones are just as hard to find as before.
Furthermore, most people choose to "blog" on the major platforms, probably because it's easier and they don't care about ownership of content or monetisation or anything.
Sad imo, but it's just a reflection of how the majority thinks.
I use blogger, the thing the article claims doesn't exist.
I have a zillion blogs. I'm telling you from firsthand experience that it's hard to get traffic, it's hard to monetize, etc. So it's unsurprising that some people go "Fuck it. I don't care. I'm just going to talk somewhere on the internet."
And the irony is even if you go that route, people will give you hell. One of the most common criticisms I get on HN boils down to "Bitch, go start a blog and stop leaving long comments on HN telling us about your life." when I have a zillion blogs and I'm pretty choosy about what I say here.
This is the reason platforms are far more popular than blogs - people don't have this knowledge of setting up web servers that we take for granted. And even if they did, there's no benefit.
I've got a blog but I haven't brought it back up: The reason is that our attention spans have lowered and outside Hacker News, there isn't a lot of people willing to read up opposing or interesting views, or detailed descriptions of things - or what people feel when they go around their lives.
I have used RSS every day for years - far more controllable than social media as I can filter out anything I wish. With RSS-Bridge, RSSbox and the likes I use it for everything, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, HN, Reddit etc etc
I recommend Bazqux as the aggregator- much more power user friendly than Feedly
I wonder when writing does the content have to provide something to the reader eg. teach them something. I like to just write as I build something but I think people don't want to read it if it's not cleaned up/packaged and has value.
I think of it like a live stream where you just tune in for noise.
Why don't we have a modern, laymen version, universal replacement for RSS? The hurdle with RSS at the end of it's popularity is it required a special tool to subscribe, and a little technical knowledge to make sense of it all. My mother wouldn't ever be able to figure it out.
I wouldn't being it back. The platform was merely abused by scammers/advertisers/illegal activities. Most of the blogs were cool and had their own style but the majority was used by someone who couldn't bother to buy a domain, install WordPress and write quality stuff
I was just thinking that we need to revitalize the culture of blogrolls. Those sections on the sidebars pointing to other blogs the author reads. That used to be a nice "feature" helping discovering blogs. Also, RSS. Many new blogs just don't support RSS :/.
Agreed, I try to encourage people to create their own blogs whenever I can, but very few see past the year. I think the main problem is that the temptation to buy into a centralized platform is very great - cost, maintenance, customization, out-of-the-box functionality.
Well you can have a link to my unsuccessful unfocused blog. I have posted fairly recently though. Software music mountaineering etc http://omnisplore.wordpress.com
...though when I say unsuccessful I should clarify I'm being tongue in cheek. Sharing ideas makes me happy whether or not it brings me any material benefit :)
I'd bring back screen names. Some sites are nice and isolated like HN but most aren't. It's much easier to ignore death threats and racist tirades when they come from xXBonerLord420Xx than when they come from Steve Smith.
What's the origin for the fascination with blogging in the tech/software world?
I used to maintain one (mostly because I worked with other engineers who fetishized blogging and encouraged everybody to blog). I eventually lost interest.
In retrospect, it appears that the death of Google Reader ended up doing a ton of damage to blog readership. Nothing truly stepped into the void for discovery and distribution of blogs, and instead other sources of content took over.
One blog that TTTThis talks about right here: lostbookofsales.com
Writing for years, and only now I start to see more visitors per day as well as other sorts of traction. Don’t be discouraged and write something that you yourself would enjoy reading.
Maybe something akin to webrings and blogrolls could help alleviate the discovery challenge. And this could be solved through culture, without any special newfangled technology. Blogger, support your fellow bloggers!
This gives me an idea for a curated blog which highlights defunct blogs. Waybackmachine is full of long-dead blogs with interesting thoughts. It would be cool to dig them up and (naturally) blog about them.
I so miss the deep veins of content in blogs and forums. So much niche, rich knowledge lost. Not have to resort and gag on highly monetized social forums for a fraction of depth or worse Medium.
I don't get it. When was the last time you looked?
There's more good stuff to read online than you could ever read. There are probably even more blogs than ever before, blogs just don't have the same slice of the pie that they once did.
Seems like when people complain there's nothing good to watch anymore. I suspect that they are so accustomed to having so much material to watch that they confuse their lack of looking for lack of content as they're so used to the next thing to do served to them by recommendation engines.
In other words, this just sounds like another "ugh nothing is good" circlejerk, a subject unfortunately destined for upvotes on HN.
I suspect you’re below 30 years of age? It’s quite interesting how quickly the memory of the internet has faded and this became the new normal. Sometimes it pays to look a little deeper.
Nope. Probably older than you, but I wouldn't use that to suggest I have better insights here than you.
It's very popular on HN to yearn for the good old days of the internet instead of realizing that we're in them right now.
More importantly, it's also likely you that's changing more than the internet. Maybe a decade or two ago you were looking for blogs while these days you just stop by Reddit and HN. And assume anything you don't find on Reddit/HN is probably dead or dying, you're not going to look. In fact I guarantee that's what going on most of the time in these posts.
Kinda like how almost everyone reading this who used to use an RSS reader doesn't use one anymore. Not because RSS is dead or all of the blogs evaporated overnight. But because we just don't use the internet like that anymore.
I think TFA is closer to a nostalgic obituary for how OP used to use the internet, and they remember those as good ol days, and they are mistaking this flicker of nostalgia for some overarching commentary on the New Internet.
> you just stop by Reddit and HN. And assume anything you don't find on Reddit/HN is probably dead or dying, you're not going to look
So you saying that browsing reddit had replaced the “old ways”. That is exactly the problem, this was not an option. If those blogs or sites never appear in search engines, blogrolls are gone, archives have been deleted (eg Tumblr), delicious/stumbleupon/etc are gone, how do you find them? The internet and how content is distributed has changed a lot, it’s disingenuous to just dismiss it as nostalgia.
On RSS, maybe you forgot that google mangled it in 2013? They shut down the most popular RSS reader without warning, and around the same time most large platforms stopped providing full content via feeds, to drive traffic to their site == ad revenue. RSS went from being a major source of traffic for blogs, to 1-2% of visitors. Of course people will stop using it if stops giving you content and your software is gone.
Twitter is absolutely the worst thing to happen to the internet. Low effort, inherently self-aggrandizing and standoffish, literally impossible to express a complex or nuanced thought. The only people I know who regularly engage with Twitter are extreme narcissists and conformist thinkers, and yet all of Twitter considers themselves to be the Important People. This mentality has crept into all spheres of public life.
Good blogging requires effort, effective communication and something interesting and original to say. Those days are long gone.
I agree. Not to mention tweeting seems to carry the highest risk of destroying your career and/or social life of pretty much any other online medium. It probably has something to do with the whole "casual communication" focus. People tend to put a lot more thought (and time) into a blog post.
I think it's been years since I posted anything on twitter.
My honest recommendation for Twitter: Don't use the built-in systems to follow anyone. Keep bookmarks on people's profiles and visit manually if you want to know what they're up to. The timeline is a terrible idea. Twitter works really well for me because of this.
tweetdeck.twitter.com[0] works really well for this. It does not "filter" your feed in any way (as far as I know). You follow a hashtag you see every tweet for that hashtag. You follow a user and you can filter out "retweets" and "likes" to only see what the user posts (I wanted to see what @POTUS tweets and it's nothing only retweets).
A column in tweetdeck can be a user, a search, a list, a hashtag, and more. Every column shows ever tweet and they mostly come in realtime.
I'm not sure I understand, what's the problem with following people and using the timeline (maybe even in a third party client that sorts it chronologically)? What do you gain by only navigating to profiles manually?
The timeline is controlled via algorithm, and either filters or selects things to show you based on an uncontrollable process which is likely just meant to make you more outraged, annoyed, etc. to keep you engaged with the platform. Not only is that unhealthy, but it doesn’t make for an enjoyable experience almost by definition.
Can't you just set the timeline to show latest tweets first to avoid this? The alternative is certainly terrible (though mostly because it hides a bunch of tweets I actually wanted to view rather than because of any outrage), but the option to disable it is there.
Counterpoint: Twitter is the preferred social media among scientists, and a good place to keep up with the latest papers and developments. The quality of discussion on science twitter can be pretty good too, despite the character limit.
I'm skeptical that anybody's Twitter is on par with the quality and engagement you see from something like Terrance Tao's WordPress blog. Unless you're including the linked content for preprints and the like, I just don't see it. The depth just isn't there. As a way to survey news in a field, sure, twitter definitely has value but the content on Twitter itself isn't really what I'd consider quality.
I think the popularity of Twitter is due to people not wanting to express complex or nuanced thoughts. If it weren't Twitter, somebody else would be in that space. It seems to me that the ones who are participating in such networks never intended to put too much effort into their communication or arguments anyway.
It's a supply and demand issue, not a tool's existence.
If you carefully curate who you follow, Twitter can be more like a bunch of subreddits, with the added signal of knowing who's posting. So it ends up a being great way to keep up with small communities.
I really understand your feelings. A ton of misinformation, disinformation, and fake news, make Twitter a terrible platform. It looks much better than Facebook. Many people are being controlled something to say what some want to hear. Attacking and harassing users is what I see every day.
I don't know where we can find another platform that gives and updates us.
Twitter is great for pushing current events or initiating discussion on less well thought out topics.
It's not a good place for conversation. And that's ok, as long as users understand these limitations and there's an alternative (blogs or forums) that interested participants can turn to.
I have never understood the appeal of Twitter. (Or short Facebook/G+ status update type content) I mean, what is so great about seeing lots of really short posts? You can't say anything truly meaningful. It's just a bunch of pointless noise.
Honestly, the only thing I really like about Twitter is Moments. They aggregate the current trend from various tweets and compile a good enough summary to get you upto speed. But this is so deeply buried in the UI, it's a shame.
Twitter is the best because it's about the individual , not the groupthink. Most aggregators fail hard because groupthink destroys them, but on twitter you can follow individuals and ignore everyone else. You are not forced to follow trends (like in most aggregators, even here) , and you can even follow people banished from most aggregators (e.g. Trump)
The discovery? I am interested in humanist side of software development. With writing once every 2 months for 3.5 years, this small but impactful finding changed my life and focus.
There are countless blogging platforms, but surprisingly, I don't think anything hits the nail yet, which is why I think blogs are dying.
There's WordPress, Ghost, and static site builders, all amazing self-hosted solutions. They're hosted on your own domain, meaning you own your content and control your audience. This type of decentralized blogging makes it difficult for writers to find audiences, and it's typically hard for readers to find relevant content. These blogs are all over the internet, and only a few can make it to the top of Google. Setup, maintenance, and server administration are large barriers for those simply looking for a place to write something.
Of course, there's also Tumblr and Medium. I'm actually a fan of the idea of having more centralized blogging platforms, because they give writers audiences right out of the box. It takes just a few minutes to start a blog and begin writing your first post. But these platforms limit creators' ability to own their content, and even go to lengths to make content less accessible to readers. I especially don't like Medium's paywall approach, nor their policy towards not allowing custom domains.
Issue is that different "agents" ruined blogging: war of misinformation, politics, fake news, conspiracy theories, corporate advertisement fake stories, quick money earning scheme, phishing sites, AI created pages, etc.
Nowadays, there is so many of above that simply finding meaningful read is really hard work. I guess we are race of attention seekers (money and fame), some of them justifiably as they have really new inspiring ideas, other not so much. One Flappy Bird and gazillion clones. Issue is in global world with 5 billion connected, top of the pyramid is very limited space. And to get into that space is very, very hard.
Anonymity never worked, as because of shared data across cookies and huge number of cross referencing vectors, it is easy do identify any person. GDPR does not help much. So, do I agree of anonymity no, maybe for a change everything should be transparent, if you have crazy idea, and you wish to say, because you broadcasting to wide population then you have to be prepared to face consequences. Also if people would bully writer because of what s/he said they should post their comments only as identifiable personas.
Definitely!
It was fun discovering bloggers' content before the era of social media. Social media platforms created silos, and limited discovery options. Now people share their content behind paywall (e.g. medium) or force you to register to the platform (e.g. facebook) to see the content.
But that's rarely how things work.
The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'll get.
Then, nothing. You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!
You may write a few more posts, but it's always the same story. A lot of work goes in, but not much comes out.
And this is the point at which most bloggers stop. After all, how can you justify more time spent on something that doesn't pay back?
The problem is that with a blog you need to think in terms of years. You have to write regularly over the course of years before you'll get any kind of reliable following.
In the meantime, you'll notice how blogging regularly changes you. You'll notice patterns you never noticed before, especially if you stick to a particular "beat." You'll get better at choosing topics. You'll figure out ways to write faster. You'll get better at pushing through mental fog and procrastination that keeps so many others from writing.
You may also discover that you really, really hate writing. Nothing wrong with that, but understand that many people also dislike writing anything longer than a tweet. And that's why good blogs are kind of scarce. And therein lies the opportunity.