7 ms·

The Second Golden Age of Blogging

27 points by webdva 7y ago

PaulHoule 7y ago
Nah. Medium brought us an Eternal September. People who could figure out how to blog earlier on were smarter than latecomers, and had more to say. It is so sad to hear from people who are blown away because their Medium post had 75 views and then having to break it to them that I thought 180,000 views was pretty good. I was watching the first lecture of a quantitative finance class where the prof was repeating that "many smart people don't like to do repetitive math and that's OK" and maybe it is but it does make you an inferior animal, as much as the Extreme Neurotypical Phenotype has the amazing ability to come up with the same wrong answers as the other ENPs.
blakesterz 7y ago
"Those who think blogs are irrelevant today — usually Gen-Xers or older — typically underestimate the degree to which real power has evacuated traditional institutions such as academia and New York publishing houses. " I don't know that I've seen anyone say blogging is irrelevant. Maybe I just missed that. It's not the "new hotness" now, but it still gets the job done. There's no shortage of people burned out on Twitter/Facebook/etc doing some form of blogs now (I guess the new hotness is static sites again?) or blogging at something like Medium. Though I honestly have no idea how popular Medium really is. I never see it outside of HN, but I certainly don't have eyes everywhere. I've had a blog since the 90s and I still find my feedreader the best way to keep up with the news that matters to me. It's not all blogs, but it's mostly, and the writing being done on blogs is just as good and relevant now as it was 15-20 years ago.
- rchaud 7y ago
  I think what the author means is that it's irrelevant for people who are considering blogging as a stepping stone to something bigger...a book deal, a conference speaking gig, influencer marketing, etc. It sounds like your blog is a personal one, so you might not have treated it as such.
geocrasher 7y ago
I'm a Gen-Xer. I blog. I like writing, and I enjoy public feedback. But this article and its multiple references to how blogging is for the "intelligent" and the "intellectually sophisticated" individual... I couldn't get past that part. What a load of crap. Blogging is for anyone who wants to be read.
- rchaud 7y ago
  I am Gen Y and was in college during the "Golden Age" of blogging. I had to chuckle when I noticed that the author didn't mention a single blogger who got big after 2010.
  - bickeringyokel 7y ago
    "There's too many to name!"is a pretty lazy cop out.
rchaud 7y ago
> Such people think, because they don’t know many institutionalized professionals who still blog, that blogging must be dead. What they don’t realize is that the credibility premium historically enjoyed by professional institutions is plummeting toward zero. This fact is so obvious to younger Millenials and Zoomers that it goes unremarked, undebated, because it is already baked-in to their reading/watching behaviors. The idea that traditional news media is losing credibility to blogs has been around since at least the 2004 US Presidential Election, which is when regular people starting discovering blogs. The web was a lot less populated then, and large sites did not attempt to crowd out smaller sites by generating SEO-optimized content by the metric ton. Bots didn't pollute commment sections to the point where organic communities left out of exasperation. You could create a blog and be reasonably certain of developing an audience. The idea of AOL-style walled gardens seemed deeply outdated. FFWD 10 years, and now the vast majority of internet activity occurs in walled gardens, be it FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, YouTube, Twitch, you name it. People don't even bookmark sites anymore, their muscle memory causes them to open Reddit or FB and just mindlessly browse. So you start a self-owned blog in 2020. The only way to direct traffic to it is to also post on all the other walled gardens, because that's where the people are. That sounds like a lot of addtional work just to get eyeballs on a page.
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  I wouldn't say "less populated". This phrasing yields vast green pastures and the odd pioneer who could just drive a stake anywhere and claim acres upon an acres for themselves. I don't think that's a correct comparison. The Web isn't a physical commons that suddenly got crowded. It's a mesh of hypertext and interlinked pages that just keeps expanding infinitely in all directions. How information gets linked is a reflection of our collective mental model. The crux then is to control or influence where links are pointing to. Creating a hyperlink is arguably the most powerful thing you can do on the Web. Hence why true walled gardens such Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,... discourage adding links to your content. The shoddy way to add a link in a comment (if possible) is totally intentional. Then there's the fact that in the past decade billions have started using social media to publish their thoughts. But then you have to consider that those same billions never truly left those walled gardens. It's like they entered the theater but keep lingering forever in the foyer. This isn't bad in itself... unless you start to consider that all content is equal and turn this into a zero sum game: you either move towards social media, or you publish your content on your own domain. If you're a small commercial venture, arguably there's little point in investing in a 200k$ website and you're better off starting a FB page. There's nothing wrong with that. Conversely, you might derive a lot of value from publishing on your own self-hosted personal blog if that's what you're into. Which brings me to this: > So you start a self-owned blog in 2020. The only way to direct traffic to it is to also post on all the other walled gardens, because that's where the people are. That sounds like a lot of addtional work just to get eyeballs on a page. This depends entirely on how you define your own success parameters and why you want to start a blog in the first place. If your blog is meant to promote products or services, then it stands to reason that you want to drive as much traffic as possible. A blog might not be the right channel for you. If your only interested in modestly sharing a creative streak, driving traffic likely won't be your primary goal. You might already be content if 10 people see that picture you posted and 1 person makes a nice comment. The strategy you describe is called POSSE: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE It worked out well for a while, but those same walled gardens have gradually closed their API's over time. For instance, it used to be that WordPress allowed you to cross post links of your blogposts to your personal profile. This isn't possible anymore. (https://jetpack.com/support/publicize/facebook/ https://jetpack.com/support/publicize/facebook/) Such actions tell us a whole lot about those walled gardens and how their policies create a divide between the Web of hyperlinked pages at a large; and the limited "small web" they have created between their own walls. The irony is that the walled gardens are build on Large Web technologies. Sure enough, they detest the open nature of URL's and hyperlinking, but they can't easily get rid of them because they are foundational to how everything works. That's where you see how Google is leveraging it's dominance in the browser market and search market. For instance, by stopping to show the http and www prefix in the address bar. Or by not showing a proper URL in the search results. Or by pushing it's AMP technology. The goal then isn't directly to get rid of URL's immediately, but to play the long game and see they can assert control over how content gets published and linked in the long run. My point then is that self hosting your content and curating your own links is the most powerful act you can do on the Web in 2020. Because that's a token of your own independence or freedom which you can never really have when you relegate yourself to a walled garden. (Also, I think Reddit has been an outlier for a very long time because they actually make it very easy to post links and use links in content. However, their walled garden nature is asserted when you're on a mobile platform, as they aggressively push the use of their own app over a mobile browser.)
_curious_ 7y ago
As someone with a long term interest in blogging/media/publishing, I tend to gravitate towards such headlines, but I'm struggling to grasp the author's point in this piece? Did someone tell them "blogging is dead" so they went out and wrote a 500 word defense? And while I do agree with the conclusion, some data would have been nice to review, like the golden age vs. second golden age. Something more than just pure conjecture.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  It's a confusing piece that seems to be arguing that blogging had a dip in relevance due to... well it's not stated. But now it's somehow back? As if blogging hasn't been a quiet but critical substrate iterated on over and over by both individuals and businesses. I try not to be cynical about this but, within the cultural context of HN this reads a lot more like someone is trying to write "mainstream tech interest" articles get Other Life onto HN to submarine a ton of links to the new project white-nationalist info (you may recall in 2018 they declared they felt the political left was actually more rife for nationalist and fascist recruitment, hence this seemingly sharp left interview with Moldbug and a shame-and-sympathy piece about "internet trolls" in the roll).
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    But now it's somehow back? "Covid19: Giving us a new golden age of blogging as its silver lining." ;)
    - KirinDave 7y ago
      I'll believe those numbers jump when I see them. If I had to pick a media winner in all this, it's podcasts.
      - DoreenMichele 7y ago
        So, apparently, sarcasm fail and signaling fail (that's what the winky is for). Whoops. Obviously, it's too early to draw such inferences. But it's exactly the right time for people to write rambling nonsense while housebound and trying to distract themselves from a global crisis.
dangus 7y ago
Blogging is just another tool, and one that will probably never go away. People who want to publish their voice often use a multifaceted approach. I have been directed to various blogs by personalities I discovered on social media. The blog serves as a permanent, long form version of their content. If you're really looking to get your voice out there, you're probably posting to multiple places - Facebook, Instagram, blogs, YouTube, or whatever else fits your particular brand of content.
DubiousPusher 7y ago
> but writing and therefore blogging for the most intellectually sophisticated Oh boy
- KirinDave 7y ago
  I know white nationalists were swinging for the intellectual left, but this feels really heavy-handed for someone who's clearly got a lot of practice.
  - pjc50 7y ago
    I wondered "What's the white nationalist angle on this?", then clicked through the article and saw a reference to Curtis Yarvin and Instapundit :(
    - KirinDave 7y ago
      Fascinating seeing Yarvin start signaling a "leftist" identity tho. They really weren't kidding at their recruitment pivot.
robotron 7y ago
Social media links have to lead somewhere - not just videos and memes. Blogs fuel a lot of that.

27 points by webdva 7y ago

Nah. Medium brought us an Eternal September. People who could figure out how to blog earlier on were smarter than latecomers, and had more to say. It is so sad to hear from people who are blown away because their Medium post had 75 views and then having to break it to them that I thought 180,000 views was pretty good. I was watching the first lecture of a quantitative finance class where the prof was repeating that "many smart people don't like to do repetitive math and that's OK" and maybe it is but it does make you an inferior animal, as much as the Extreme Neurotypical Phenotype has the amazing ability to come up with the same wrong answers as the other ENPs.

blakesterz 7y ago

"Those who think blogs are irrelevant today — usually Gen-Xers or older — typically underestimate the degree to which real power has evacuated traditional institutions such as academia and New York publishing houses. " I don't know that I've seen anyone say blogging is irrelevant. Maybe I just missed that. It's not the "new hotness" now, but it still gets the job done. There's no shortage of people burned out on Twitter/Facebook/etc doing some form of blogs now (I guess the new hotness is static sites again?) or blogging at something like Medium. Though I honestly have no idea how popular Medium really is. I never see it outside of HN, but I certainly don't have eyes everywhere. I've had a blog since the 90s and I still find my feedreader the best way to keep up with the news that matters to me. It's not all blogs, but it's mostly, and the writing being done on blogs is just as good and relevant now as it was 15-20 years ago.

rchaud 7y ago
I think what the author means is that it's irrelevant for people who are considering blogging as a stepping stone to something bigger...a book deal, a conference speaking gig, influencer marketing, etc. It sounds like your blog is a personal one, so you might not have treated it as such.

geocrasher 7y ago

I'm a Gen-Xer. I blog. I like writing, and I enjoy public feedback. But this article and its multiple references to how blogging is for the "intelligent" and the "intellectually sophisticated" individual... I couldn't get past that part. What a load of crap. Blogging is for anyone who wants to be read.

rchaud 7y ago
I am Gen Y and was in college during the "Golden Age" of blogging. I had to chuckle when I noticed that the author didn't mention a single blogger who got big after 2010.
- bickeringyokel 7y ago
  "There's too many to name!"is a pretty lazy cop out.

rchaud 7y ago

> Such people think, because they don’t know many institutionalized professionals who still blog, that blogging must be dead. What they don’t realize is that the credibility premium historically enjoyed by professional institutions is plummeting toward zero. This fact is so obvious to younger Millenials and Zoomers that it goes unremarked, undebated, because it is already baked-in to their reading/watching behaviors. The idea that traditional news media is losing credibility to blogs has been around since at least the 2004 US Presidential Election, which is when regular people starting discovering blogs. The web was a lot less populated then, and large sites did not attempt to crowd out smaller sites by generating SEO-optimized content by the metric ton. Bots didn't pollute commment sections to the point where organic communities left out of exasperation. You could create a blog and be reasonably certain of developing an audience. The idea of AOL-style walled gardens seemed deeply outdated. FFWD 10 years, and now the vast majority of internet activity occurs in walled gardens, be it FB, IG, Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, YouTube, Twitch, you name it. People don't even bookmark sites anymore, their muscle memory causes them to open Reddit or FB and just mindlessly browse. So you start a self-owned blog in 2020. The only way to direct traffic to it is to also post on all the other walled gardens, because that's where the people are. That sounds like a lot of addtional work just to get eyeballs on a page.

CaptArmchair 7y ago
I wouldn't say "less populated". This phrasing yields vast green pastures and the odd pioneer who could just drive a stake anywhere and claim acres upon an acres for themselves. I don't think that's a correct comparison. The Web isn't a physical commons that suddenly got crowded. It's a mesh of hypertext and interlinked pages that just keeps expanding infinitely in all directions. How information gets linked is a reflection of our collective mental model. The crux then is to control or influence where links are pointing to. Creating a hyperlink is arguably the most powerful thing you can do on the Web. Hence why true walled gardens such Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,... discourage adding links to your content. The shoddy way to add a link in a comment (if possible) is totally intentional. Then there's the fact that in the past decade billions have started using social media to publish their thoughts. But then you have to consider that those same billions never truly left those walled gardens. It's like they entered the theater but keep lingering forever in the foyer. This isn't bad in itself... unless you start to consider that all content is equal and turn this into a zero sum game: you either move towards social media, or you publish your content on your own domain. If you're a small commercial venture, arguably there's little point in investing in a 200k$ website and you're better off starting a FB page. There's nothing wrong with that. Conversely, you might derive a lot of value from publishing on your own self-hosted personal blog if that's what you're into. Which brings me to this: > So you start a self-owned blog in 2020. The only way to direct traffic to it is to also post on all the other walled gardens, because that's where the people are. That sounds like a lot of addtional work just to get eyeballs on a page. This depends entirely on how you define your own success parameters and why you want to start a blog in the first place. If your blog is meant to promote products or services, then it stands to reason that you want to drive as much traffic as possible. A blog might not be the right channel for you. If your only interested in modestly sharing a creative streak, driving traffic likely won't be your primary goal. You might already be content if 10 people see that picture you posted and 1 person makes a nice comment. The strategy you describe is called POSSE: https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE It worked out well for a while, but those same walled gardens have gradually closed their API's over time. For instance, it used to be that WordPress allowed you to cross post links of your blogposts to your personal profile. This isn't possible anymore. (https://jetpack.com/support/publicize/facebook/ https://jetpack.com/support/publicize/facebook/) Such actions tell us a whole lot about those walled gardens and how their policies create a divide between the Web of hyperlinked pages at a large; and the limited "small web" they have created between their own walls. The irony is that the walled gardens are build on Large Web technologies. Sure enough, they detest the open nature of URL's and hyperlinking, but they can't easily get rid of them because they are foundational to how everything works. That's where you see how Google is leveraging it's dominance in the browser market and search market. For instance, by stopping to show the http and www prefix in the address bar. Or by not showing a proper URL in the search results. Or by pushing it's AMP technology. The goal then isn't directly to get rid of URL's immediately, but to play the long game and see they can assert control over how content gets published and linked in the long run. My point then is that self hosting your content and curating your own links is the most powerful act you can do on the Web in 2020. Because that's a token of your own independence or freedom which you can never really have when you relegate yourself to a walled garden. (Also, I think Reddit has been an outlier for a very long time because they actually make it very easy to post links and use links in content. However, their walled garden nature is asserted when you're on a mobile platform, as they aggressively push the use of their own app over a mobile browser.)

_curious_ 7y ago

As someone with a long term interest in blogging/media/publishing, I tend to gravitate towards such headlines, but I'm struggling to grasp the author's point in this piece? Did someone tell them "blogging is dead" so they went out and wrote a 500 word defense? And while I do agree with the conclusion, some data would have been nice to review, like the golden age vs. second golden age. Something more than just pure conjecture.

KirinDave 7y ago
It's a confusing piece that seems to be arguing that blogging had a dip in relevance due to... well it's not stated. But now it's somehow back? As if blogging hasn't been a quiet but critical substrate iterated on over and over by both individuals and businesses. I try not to be cynical about this but, within the cultural context of HN this reads a lot more like someone is trying to write "mainstream tech interest" articles get Other Life onto HN to submarine a ton of links to the new project white-nationalist info (you may recall in 2018 they declared they felt the political left was actually more rife for nationalist and fascist recruitment, hence this seemingly sharp left interview with Moldbug and a shame-and-sympathy piece about "internet trolls" in the roll).
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  But now it's somehow back? "Covid19: Giving us a new golden age of blogging as its silver lining." ;)
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    I'll believe those numbers jump when I see them. If I had to pick a media winner in all this, it's podcasts.
    - DoreenMichele 7y ago
      So, apparently, sarcasm fail and signaling fail (that's what the winky is for). Whoops. Obviously, it's too early to draw such inferences. But it's exactly the right time for people to write rambling nonsense while housebound and trying to distract themselves from a global crisis.

dangus 7y ago

Blogging is just another tool, and one that will probably never go away. People who want to publish their voice often use a multifaceted approach. I have been directed to various blogs by personalities I discovered on social media. The blog serves as a permanent, long form version of their content. If you're really looking to get your voice out there, you're probably posting to multiple places - Facebook, Instagram, blogs, YouTube, or whatever else fits your particular brand of content.

DubiousPusher 7y ago

> but writing and therefore blogging for the most intellectually sophisticated Oh boy

KirinDave 7y ago
I know white nationalists were swinging for the intellectual left, but this feels really heavy-handed for someone who's clearly got a lot of practice.
- pjc50 7y ago
  I wondered "What's the white nationalist angle on this?", then clicked through the article and saw a reference to Curtis Yarvin and Instapundit :(
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    Fascinating seeing Yarvin start signaling a "leftist" identity tho. They really weren't kidding at their recruitment pivot.

robotron 7y ago

Social media links have to lead somewhere - not just videos and memes. Blogs fuel a lot of that.