6 ms·

Small b blogging

35 points by topcat31 9y ago

weinzierl 9y ago
I‘m torn about this. I really wish there was a renaissance of the blog or even better, the niche website [1]. I don‘t believe this will happen. The effort to write a high quality article is the same whether you post it on your own small b blog or on Medium. So why not opt for the larger audience if it has so few disadvantages. There was a little window in time when there were no gatekeepers and the technical savy could reach a large and quickly growing audience. But this is over and the gatekeepers will never go away again. [1] Like the Juggling Information Service. How many hours did I spend on this site? I don’t know, but fun times...
- akkartik 9y ago
  He's not really talking about where you write. He's just talking about changing expectations for writing. They're independent ideas. Also, it's a canard that Medium gives you a larger audience. Even if everybody is there, everybody isn't going to be reading what you wrote. Bottomline: smaller targeted audience > larger unfocused audience. Step 1: write about what you find interesting. Step 2: find your homies and show it to them. They're hard to find, but they aren't captive to any single gatekeeper.
- dkarl 9y ago
  I feel some nostalgia for the days when I visited individual blogs and web sites, but I think there are practical reasons they aren't a focal point for community any more. First, stability: Blogging and maintaining a web site are big time commitments, and most people who make a great site or a great blog fade as their interests and commitments change. Sites like Reddit or Hacker News tend to have a longer useful life than sites built by an individual or a handful of individuals. Diversity: A blog can have guest contributors, but if you want real dissent, you have to go to the comments, and that's something blogs don't do well. Reddit and Hacker News have their orthodoxies and groupthink, but various opposing viewpoints are present as well. In addition, there are diversities of perspective, back end versus front end, social media startup versus Wall Street finance, that increase the range of discussion. Efficiency: A successful blogger or website creator knows that they have to give their visitors a complete experience, as well as regular updates. That can translate into a lot of fluff. You can't just say the new thing you learned. You have to create context, make a few jokes, draw out your point so it has time to sink in before your readers move on. On Reddit or Hacker News, effort goes towards the opposite: boiling down your point to make it quickly understandable in the context of the discussion. This comes naturally to most people — it's a lot like oral conversation in groups - so you don't need to have special writing skills (or the time, taste, and expertise to insert stock photos and periodically refresh your site design) like you do for blogging. That reduced barrier attracts participation from people who don't have the time or inclination to make a blog post but might drop a quick experience bomb in a comment. Different tools for different purposes: A blog or niche web site used to be a platform for publishing short writing, a place for readers to discover new things, and a forum for community discussion. Now, Twitter and sites like Reddit and HN are where we discover things, and Reddit and Hacker News are where we discuss them. As a result, you don't even need a consistent place to publish your thoughts. You can publish them anywhere that can render them in a readable way to people who follow links from Twitter or HN. People who used to use a blog as a way of cultivating a durable identity on the web have various social media platforms to choose from. I think blogs and niche web sites will continue to exist, because people will still have needs that they meet best, but I think overall we benefit by letting them be replaced by a loose collection of specialized services.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
I do this and I have for years. I don't feel it has accomplished much of anything. I have 6 years of college. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for a time. I was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project at one time. I was a moderator on Cyburbia at one time. Those last two gigs helped me attend related conferences affordably, though I was a homemaker and student. My blogging has led to no serious career traction, in spite of being interviewed by reporters repeatedly regarding one of my projects. Most of those interviews never published. The one that did misgendered me and outright made up specious quotes. After 8.5 years on HN, I have exactly zero strong personal connections here. There are like 3 people who email occasionally. I have zero actual friends here. I have zero serious professional connections. I was not homeless when I joined. At that time, I had a corporate job and an apartment. So, no, that doesn't really explain it. I do get hit on by men who know of me through HN. But that is about it. When I comment that 99% of men have only one reason they would ever really talk to me, it gets described as an offensive exaggeration. [1] I am not claiming 99% of men do this to all women. Just me. It is firsthand testimony regarding my own life. It is not an exaggeration. Think how offensive it feels to me to be treated that way to begin with. Now add in dire poverty that I cannot solve and then being told I am offensive for remarking on the reality of my life. So I find myself unable to draw any conclusion other than "sexism is alive and well." I wish I could find another explanation. The only thing I need to make my life work is a middle class income. That's it. But that simply isn't happening and no amount of effort or other virtue from my end is resolving the issue. So my feeling at this point is "Maybe that (little b blogging to network) works if you are a guy. It sure as hell has not worked for me and I very strongly suspect that my gender is a significant factor in that undesirable outcome." I assume that means it doesn't work for most women. I assume that in part because I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the HN leaderboard. If there are scads of women here successfully networking via HN and/or little b blogging to further their career goals, please speak up. Toss me a clue. (Email is fine. You don't have to say it publicly.) Given my background, I remain dumbfounded that this problem remains so intractable. I don't think it should be this hard to turn my knowledge and skills into an adequate income. But I consistently find that it backfires to tell people "No, I actually am that competent" and no one ever seems to conclude it on their own, much less vouch for me or promote me. I see men promote other men here all the time. I don't get any of that. It just doesn't happen. Asking for help has not worked. Patiently waiting for 8.5 years to be noticed has not worked. Complaining about my poverty gets ugly reactions to the effect of "Shut up and go away." Trying to figure out how to turn my work into income gets routinely pissed on. My favorite: some jerk on Metafilter said I was panhandling the internet for trying to figure out how to earn a living online. If someone would just show me the secret handshake, that would be awesome. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389666#16394963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389666#16394963
ArneBab 9y ago
This sounds like blogging to a specialized audience -- which only works to your professional benefit when you blog for the ones who pay you (maybe indirectly by blogging to your professional peers). It indicates a hierarchization of communication: you can only reach those you already "won". A somewhat related problem for blogs nowadays is that policing spam takes a lot of time and effort -- you depend on the big platforms for that if you don’t have a lot of time. The web became a much more hostile place, to the big players’ benefit. That removes low-overhead communication among peers from the benefit of blogs.

35 points by topcat31 9y ago

I‘m torn about this. I really wish there was a renaissance of the blog or even better, the niche website [1]. I don‘t believe this will happen. The effort to write a high quality article is the same whether you post it on your own small b blog or on Medium. So why not opt for the larger audience if it has so few disadvantages. There was a little window in time when there were no gatekeepers and the technical savy could reach a large and quickly growing audience. But this is over and the gatekeepers will never go away again. [1] Like the Juggling Information Service. How many hours did I spend on this site? I don’t know, but fun times...

akkartik 9y ago
He's not really talking about where you write. He's just talking about changing expectations for writing. They're independent ideas. Also, it's a canard that Medium gives you a larger audience. Even if everybody is there, everybody isn't going to be reading what you wrote. Bottomline: smaller targeted audience > larger unfocused audience. Step 1: write about what you find interesting. Step 2: find your homies and show it to them. They're hard to find, but they aren't captive to any single gatekeeper.
dkarl 9y ago
I feel some nostalgia for the days when I visited individual blogs and web sites, but I think there are practical reasons they aren't a focal point for community any more. First, stability: Blogging and maintaining a web site are big time commitments, and most people who make a great site or a great blog fade as their interests and commitments change. Sites like Reddit or Hacker News tend to have a longer useful life than sites built by an individual or a handful of individuals. Diversity: A blog can have guest contributors, but if you want real dissent, you have to go to the comments, and that's something blogs don't do well. Reddit and Hacker News have their orthodoxies and groupthink, but various opposing viewpoints are present as well. In addition, there are diversities of perspective, back end versus front end, social media startup versus Wall Street finance, that increase the range of discussion. Efficiency: A successful blogger or website creator knows that they have to give their visitors a complete experience, as well as regular updates. That can translate into a lot of fluff. You can't just say the new thing you learned. You have to create context, make a few jokes, draw out your point so it has time to sink in before your readers move on. On Reddit or Hacker News, effort goes towards the opposite: boiling down your point to make it quickly understandable in the context of the discussion. This comes naturally to most people — it's a lot like oral conversation in groups - so you don't need to have special writing skills (or the time, taste, and expertise to insert stock photos and periodically refresh your site design) like you do for blogging. That reduced barrier attracts participation from people who don't have the time or inclination to make a blog post but might drop a quick experience bomb in a comment. Different tools for different purposes: A blog or niche web site used to be a platform for publishing short writing, a place for readers to discover new things, and a forum for community discussion. Now, Twitter and sites like Reddit and HN are where we discover things, and Reddit and Hacker News are where we discuss them. As a result, you don't even need a consistent place to publish your thoughts. You can publish them anywhere that can render them in a readable way to people who follow links from Twitter or HN. People who used to use a blog as a way of cultivating a durable identity on the web have various social media platforms to choose from. I think blogs and niche web sites will continue to exist, because people will still have needs that they meet best, but I think overall we benefit by letting them be replaced by a loose collection of specialized services.

DoreenMichele 9y ago

I do this and I have for years. I don't feel it has accomplished much of anything. I have 6 years of college. I worked at a Fortune 500 company for a time. I was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project at one time. I was a moderator on Cyburbia at one time. Those last two gigs helped me attend related conferences affordably, though I was a homemaker and student. My blogging has led to no serious career traction, in spite of being interviewed by reporters repeatedly regarding one of my projects. Most of those interviews never published. The one that did misgendered me and outright made up specious quotes. After 8.5 years on HN, I have exactly zero strong personal connections here. There are like 3 people who email occasionally. I have zero actual friends here. I have zero serious professional connections. I was not homeless when I joined. At that time, I had a corporate job and an apartment. So, no, that doesn't really explain it. I do get hit on by men who know of me through HN. But that is about it. When I comment that 99% of men have only one reason they would ever really talk to me, it gets described as an offensive exaggeration. [1] I am not claiming 99% of men do this to all women. Just me. It is firsthand testimony regarding my own life. It is not an exaggeration. Think how offensive it feels to me to be treated that way to begin with. Now add in dire poverty that I cannot solve and then being told I am offensive for remarking on the reality of my life. So I find myself unable to draw any conclusion other than "sexism is alive and well." I wish I could find another explanation. The only thing I need to make my life work is a middle class income. That's it. But that simply isn't happening and no amount of effort or other virtue from my end is resolving the issue. So my feeling at this point is "Maybe that (little b blogging to network) works if you are a guy. It sure as hell has not worked for me and I very strongly suspect that my gender is a significant factor in that undesirable outcome." I assume that means it doesn't work for most women. I assume that in part because I appear to be the only woman to have ever made the HN leaderboard. If there are scads of women here successfully networking via HN and/or little b blogging to further their career goals, please speak up. Toss me a clue. (Email is fine. You don't have to say it publicly.) Given my background, I remain dumbfounded that this problem remains so intractable. I don't think it should be this hard to turn my knowledge and skills into an adequate income. But I consistently find that it backfires to tell people "No, I actually am that competent" and no one ever seems to conclude it on their own, much less vouch for me or promote me. I see men promote other men here all the time. I don't get any of that. It just doesn't happen. Asking for help has not worked. Patiently waiting for 8.5 years to be noticed has not worked. Complaining about my poverty gets ugly reactions to the effect of "Shut up and go away." Trying to figure out how to turn my work into income gets routinely pissed on. My favorite: some jerk on Metafilter said I was panhandling the internet for trying to figure out how to earn a living online. If someone would just show me the secret handshake, that would be awesome. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389666#16394963 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16389666#16394963

ArneBab 9y ago

This sounds like blogging to a specialized audience -- which only works to your professional benefit when you blog for the ones who pay you (maybe indirectly by blogging to your professional peers). It indicates a hierarchization of communication: you can only reach those you already "won". A somewhat related problem for blogs nowadays is that policing spam takes a lot of time and effort -- you depend on the big platforms for that if you don’t have a lot of time. The web became a much more hostile place, to the big players’ benefit. That removes low-overhead communication among peers from the benefit of blogs.