31 ms·

If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

• pavelmark 6y ago
  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).
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • benrbray 6y ago
    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.
  • starpilot 6y ago
    Remember E/N sites? Everything/nothing. Just a blip.
  • XCSme 6y ago
    The thing about WordPress is that the majority of WordPress sites are presentational websites, landing pages or e-commerce sites, not actual blogs.
• sideshowb 6y ago
  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 http://omnisplore.wordpress.com
  • sideshowb 6y ago
    ...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 :)
• jjjbokma 6y ago
  I am still blogging [0][1]. And I thought static blog generators where quite the thing, I even wrote my own [2]. [0] https://plurrrr.com/ https://plurrrr.com/ [1] http://johnbokma.com/blog/ http://johnbokma.com/blog/ [2] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog
  • lucgommans 6y ago
    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. [1] https://lucgommans.nl/blog https://lucgommans.nl/blog [2] https://robertheaton.com https://robertheaton.com [3] https://blog.codinghorror.com https://blog.codinghorror.com [4] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com
• RyJones 6y ago
  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.
  • mmsimanga 6y ago
    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.
    • RyJones 6y ago
      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. [0]: https://blog.ryjones.org/ https://blog.ryjones.org/ [1]: https://gist.github.com/ryjones/73739f6a7e662b9ed9ba64d9141ffcc9 https://gist.github.com/ryjones/73739f6a7e662b9ed9ba64d9141f...
• kickscondor 6y ago
  > 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/ 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.
  • dvtrn 6y ago
    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.
    • kickscondor 6y ago
      Where are you promoting things, dvtrn? Good to meet you.
      • dvtrn 6y ago
        Where are you promoting things ...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)
        • kickscondor 6y ago
          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...) If you get your own site up, let me know!
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  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.
  • dhimes 6y ago
    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.
  • sireat 6y ago
    Blogs can be static. Netlify static hosting has a very low barrier of entry (just drop a folder if you don't have a git repo). You get a fast SSL enabled site. Adding your own domain is just going to your domain registrar as usual and pointing to the appropriate address. Now, if you go over 100GB a month it could get pricey. https://www.netlify.com/pricing/ https://www.netlify.com/pricing/ Still for a simple text oriented blog that could be a fantastic option.
• gk1 6y ago
  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.
  • 5986043handy 6y ago
    What are some good vlogs?
  • radmarshallb 6y ago
    Personally I hate the trend toward video content. I prefer to read as I can skim and highlight the important content as I see fit.
  • pmlnr 6y ago
    I always disliked video content with minor, rare exceptions. Text survived hundreds (sometimes thousands) of years; I don't think video will.
  • alisonatwork 6y ago
    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.
• specialp 6y ago
  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.
  • dmortin 6y ago
    > 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.
    • specialp 6y ago
      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.
  • hagy 6y ago
    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.
• Semaphor 6y ago
  90% of my RSS feeds are blogs. Of those I’d say around 80% are private ones.
  • jobigoud 6y ago
    What do you mean by private blogs?
    • pmlnr 6y ago
      Hidden; sort of. These days if I want to get the RSS for a site, I need to look for 'alternate' links in the code.
      • Semaphor 6y ago
        I almost never encounter that. Just pasting the main site into TT-RSS discovers the feeds pretty much every time.
      • Hedja 6y ago
        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.
    • Semaphor 6y ago
      Not by a company or paid writers.
• krapht 6y ago
  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.
  • specialp 6y ago
    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.
    • ordinaryradical 6y ago
      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.
      • christiansakai 6y ago
        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.
        • DarrenDev 6y ago
• jack_pp 6y ago
  The only blog I follow is https://slatestarcodex.com/ https://slatestarcodex.com/
• cm2187 6y ago
  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).
  • JJMcJ 6y ago
    Twitter - ephemeral, too condensed or else a huge thread Blogs - permanent, can explore at depth RSS - Multiple chances to go back and read something if you don't right away
  • naavis 6y ago
    I don't think RSS has gone anywhere. Most half-decent blogs still support it, I think.
    • jeffkeen 6y ago
      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.
      • BlueTemplar 6y ago
        IMHO Feedly is barely adequate.
        • beambot 6y ago
          Give NewsBlur a try.
    • cm2187 6y ago
      Yes but most people broadcast their views or interesting findings on twitter because that’s where the audience is.
• ss64 6y ago
  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.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • pmlnr 6y ago
    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.
  • interestica 6y ago
    Remember when google bought blogger? I don't know if they ever really grew it. Having a blogger account did give me early access to Gmail though.
• 5986043handy 6y ago
  I think the way to solve this would be a sort of blog index - an easily discoverable directory of personal blogs
• decompiled_dev 6y ago
  Seems like the problem isn't the lack of blogs, but ways to find new ones. Kinda weird reading a blog post about no blog posts, like it being read disproves its point a little bit. I think they are there as long as you know where to look.
• heavenlyblue 6y ago
  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.
• Topgamer7 6y ago
  This blog in particular needs to increase the line spacing. Makes reading it a bit painful for me at least. Firefox reader view to the rescue.
• bochoh 6y ago
  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.
• thereyougo 6y ago
  The problem as I see it is the Google algorithm. 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
  • rement 6y ago
    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.
  • learc83 6y ago
    >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’. This is a huge problem and google definitely makes it worse, but this has always been a problem. From magazine writers who are paid by the word to technical books that are padded out to be 400 pages when they could have been 50.
  • GordonS 6y ago
    Food blogs are the perfect example of this. 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!
    • volkk 6y ago
      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
• dewey 6y ago
  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. Wrote a tiny bit about my setup on my blog: https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/rss-is-luckily-not-dead-yet/ https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/rss-is-luckily-not-dead-ye... I also recently started a new blog where a friend and me are blogging about annoying things: https://annoying.technology https://annoying.technology
  • api 6y ago
    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.
    • saalweachter 6y ago
      "Let's throw one away" thought experiment. You're rebuilding the internet, if not from the ground up, then {UDP,TCP}/IP up. What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?
      • Shared404 6y ago
        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.
        • cameronbrown 6y ago
          Gatekeeping then?
• neonate 6y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20200516183004/http://tttthis.com/edit/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-the-internet-it-would-be-blogs https://web.archive.org/web/20200516183004/http://tttthis.co...
  • jph00 6y ago
    The OP link should probably be changed to: http://tttthis.com/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-the-internet-it-would-be-blogs http://tttthis.com/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-t... Currently it's linking to the "edit" page.
    • dang 6y ago
      Changed from http://tttthis.com/edit/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back-to-the-internet-it-would-be-blogs http://tttthis.com/edit/blog/if-i-could-bring-one-thing-back.... Thanks!
  • podestapizza 6y ago
    I made a website that does as the article mentions: you can immediately blog with just an e-mail. It also supports HTML, CSS and Javascript for instant hosting. https://podesta.pizza/ https://podesta.pizza/
    • arthurcolle 6y ago
      Is the URL supposed to be funny?
      • losvedir 6y ago
        I don't see a problem with it? The poster's name is probably Podesta, and pizza is a fun TLD.
        • svantana 6y ago
          It's possible but more likely it's a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
• angel_j 6y ago
  We should be able to dial up folks' computers directly and look inside their /public or /www folder.
  • stagas 6y ago
    This, and seamlessly mirrored in IPFS whenever I'm offline.
  • cameronbrown 6y ago
    Normal people don't have computers anymore. 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.
    • angel_j 6y ago
      exactly, because you need knowledge to do with files systems what we have been able to do with phone numbers for 100 years
  • pmlnr 6y ago
    Opera tried it, it didn't work: https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands/ https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands... Current attempts: DAT: https://dat.foundation/ https://dat.foundation/ Zeronet: https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/ Secure Scuttlebutt: https://scuttlebutt.nz/ https://scuttlebutt.nz/
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • angel_j 6y ago
      imo we need personal, public IP addresses, not labyrinthine decentralized p2p projects
• okareaman 6y ago
  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.
  • pmlnr 6y ago
    > I blog on Facebook That is not a blog. You don't have control over it, you don't have archives, and it's not world readable. None of what you listed is a reason to not to use a real blog.
    • okareaman 6y ago
      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.
      • pmlnr 6y ago
        Short answers: https://indieweb.org/site-deaths https://indieweb.org/site-deaths and https://indieweb.org/Facebook https://indieweb.org/Facebook
        • okareaman 6y ago
          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.
• agustif 6y ago
  ```Resource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.``` Ohh boy, right here why blogs might not be best suited for this hyper-connected global world we live in... HN Hug of death is real I guess
• dang 6y ago
  Is this something that a new search engine could solve? or is it that countering SEO is so hard that not even Google can do it?
• pmlnr 6y ago
  Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22800136
• tarkin2 6y ago
  If I could take two things away, it would be upvotes and targeted advertising. They allow for manipulation of the new commons and the societies of the people therein. The manipulation existed before, but not in such an effective way. US army in Eglin, various Russian bot farms, and effective private firms are open to deep-pocketed millionaires. There must be a way that's /less/ open to manipulation. Or at least a way that openly expresses this happens. As the world comes even more digital, the bigger risks this manipulation has on society.
  • londons_explore 6y ago
    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.
    • tarkin2 6y ago
      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.
• nolawi89 6y ago
  isnt medioum blogs
• hirako2000 6y ago
  Is it not what steemit is for? It also provides ways to tip authors for their good writings. Other that or ipfs.
• mrcartmenez 6y ago
  You lost me at nowadays especially
• Mizza 6y ago
  Flip side: I would destroy Twitter. 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.
  • SpaceManNabs 6y ago
    I find twitter great for following astrophysics researchers and optimization/DL researchers.
  • grenoire 6y ago
    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.
  • _bxg1 6y ago
    All you have to do is viciously mute/unfollow people and words that are remotely in the sphere of something someone might get angry about. My twitter feed is 95% weird humor and cool art/tech projects. It takes some work but it's doable.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • zhdc1 6y ago
    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.
• decasteve 6y ago
  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.
• wincent 6y 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. https://wincent.com/blog/something-to-say https://wincent.com/blog/something-to-say
• Klipi 6y ago
  I recently fell in love with https://micro.blog https://micro.blog 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.
  • addajones 6y ago
    I’d love to check out your blog if you have a link for it please. Thanks!
• owenshen24 6y ago
  Self-promoting that I have a blog with scattered thoughts here: https://mlu.red/ https://mlu.red/ Also built with a custom static site generator (https://github.com/owenshen24/Volta https://github.com/owenshen24/Volta), like many other blogs in the comments here. Woot for customizability and self-expression.
• DennisArslan 6y ago
  I wrote a blog article about reading books and blog articles instead of watching YouTube videos, ergo using addictive, low-quality, negative social internet: https://dennisarslan.nl/you-should-read-books-and-blog-articles-instead-of-youtube-videos/ https://dennisarslan.nl/you-should-read-books-and-blog-artic... You can still use https://www.inoreader.com/ https://www.inoreader.com/ for blogs and use Google to find good-quality blogs in your niche. The fact that blogs aren't so popular anymore could also force them to write higher quality content to gain popularity.
• knorker 6y ago
  So read them. I do.
• asplake 6y ago
  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. HN is part of that of course.
  • acangiano 6y ago
    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.
  • roberto 6y ago
    Shameless plug: I wrote my own blog engine in Python (https://github.com/betodealmeida/nefelibata https://github.com/betodealmeida/nefelibata). It generates static pages, but publishes a snippet to Twitter/Mastodon/etc., linking back to the blog post. People can only comment on the social media sites, and periodically the comments get scraped and appended to the blog post. Here's an example: https://blog.taoetc.org/mastodon_integration/index.html https://blog.taoetc.org/mastodon_integration/index.html This way, people can comment in the other venues where they're used to, and comments get persisted past the lifetime of these venues.
    • passthejoe 6y ago
      This is a great way to go -- bringing self-hosted blogging and social media together.
    • cxqtheresh 6y ago
      Worth checking https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention and https://brid.gy https://brid.gy
• golergka 6y ago
  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.
• ezoe 6y ago
  The blog is not gone. You can start writing your own blog now and it cost no money at all as there are plenty of free of charge blog hosting services. What I miss is the public forum and chat. True, it still exists in English, but in my native language, Japanese, these are long lost in the Internet.
• pmlnr 6y ago
  > Also, the platform must be profitable or promise future profit This is arguable. The very idea and existence of non-profit organisations are proof.
• jwmerrill 6y ago
  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.
  • stOneskull 6y ago
    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.
• jerrac 6y ago
  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.
  • juststeve 6y ago
    My feeling is that a lot of tech forums have become Q and A / code support, and not a place for discussion.
    • DoreenMichele 6y ago
      The art of conversation is more or less dead.
  • Chathamization 6y ago
    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.
    • jerrac 6y ago
      It makes me wonder, how could we rebuild things? 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.
• Animats 6y ago
  Blogs are still around. They may even be up, since Medium started insisting that you sign in to read. Try searching with Bing. Bing is years behind Google, and that's a good thing.
• grecy 6y ago
  I've been blogging regularly for almost a decade, and I've just made the decision to move to YouTube. I feel like the internet moved on from reading walls of text, and if I don't get with the times, I'll just become irrelevant.
• Giorgi 6y ago
  Like, personal blogs? There are shitton of generic blogs
• ge96 6y ago
  Personal thought: 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.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  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.
  • noobaccount 6y ago
    It’s not something most people care about anymore, and it was nice when it was.
    • AndrewKemendo 6y ago
      More people in total care about it now than ever before. It's just not as large of a percentage of the overall web as it was. So longer form blogging on a unique site [yourname.com or wordpress.yourname.com] didn't grow as quickly as posting pics on Titter/IG/Snap etc... That makes sense to me, most people aren't putting effort into writing.
  • qznc 6y ago
    Could give examples how finding blogs is easy and "lots of lists out there of people's favorites"?
    • darekkay 6y ago
      Here's a huge list of front-end related blogs: https://github.com/impressivewebs/frontend-feeds https://github.com/impressivewebs/frontend-feeds
• bondolo 6y ago
  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.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  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.
• bArray 6y ago
  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.
• barkingcat 6y ago
  Blogs are still here ...
• ourcat 6y ago
  Usenet / NNTP. That's what needs 'reviving'. 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! ;)
  • RyJones 6y ago
    I've long argued that RSS should have been NNTP. I never get far with that, though.
    • ourcat 6y ago
      *nods. I was friends with Dave once too.
• BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Hmm, Mastodon sounds to be the kind of "platform" you are searching for ?
• DC-3 6y 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...). [1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
  • anthk 6y ago
    Check sdf.org too. A lot of people overlap, because of Pubnixen/Gopher.
• aazaa 6y ago
  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.
  • mawise 6y ago
    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.
    • pmlnr 6y ago
• alexashka 6y ago
  The author might be surprised by the amount of high quality literature that's been created over the past thousand years, that no blog can compare to.
• imagetic 6y ago
  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.
• imagetic 6y ago
  and isn't the death of the traditional blog just linked to the death of the personal website?
• DoreenMichele 6y ago
  But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago Nope. It still exists and I use it. And I'm given hell for it. 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.
  • gfody 6y ago
    in other words Google shut it the fuck down, you forgot to abandon ship man. fwiw all that hostility is likely just automation shaping the sentiment curve around and away from your signal - nothing to take personally.
    • DoreenMichele 6y ago
      Google did not shut it down. https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2018/11/not-closing-blogger-service-comments-google.html https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2018/11/not-closing-... It is maintained and has new templates. I am in the process of setting up a new blog on it currently because I have a new idea.
      • gfody 6y ago
        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
        • DoreenMichele 6y ago
• CM30 6y ago
  Not entirely sure what they mean here: > But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago 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.
• exolymph 6y ago
  "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" there I fixed it
• fady 6y ago
  We have many search engines these days. Use any other than Google's search, and you may find some luck.
• kaydub 6y ago
  There are still blogs. 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.
• saadalem 6y ago
  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 : Ask HN: What niche blogs are worthwhile to follow? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21928170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21928170
• qznc 6y ago
  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. Update: After writing this comment, I felt bad about not having a blogroll. Fixed that: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/blogs_en.html http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/blogs_en.html
  • human 6y ago
    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.
• nunodonato 6y ago
  Funny enough, I just re-started my blog today. I love blogs AND don't forget RSS for a truly open internet. No closed platforms BS
• BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  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.
• PerilousD 6y ago
  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.
  • jiofih 6y ago
    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.
• jotm 6y ago
  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.
  • DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Sad imo, but it's just a reflection of how the majority thinks. It's a huge uphill battle if you do care about such things. Don't go blaming them. That sounds an awful lot like victim blaming. You want to see more blogging, help people succeed instead of adding more baggage to their path.
    • jotm 6y ago
      There's no blame, it's just an observation. One could use WordPress or Hugo. Or a Reddit account. The latter brings instant viewership and feedback. The former gives you more control. There's no fight here, people choose what they want.
      • DoreenMichele 6y ago
        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.
• hackitup7 6y ago
  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.
  • yesenadam 6y ago
    Plase AskHN this question! Probably it's been asked many times before.
• sevagh 6y ago
  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. Does it stem from Usenet?
• wejick 6y ago
  I miss blogs too
• s17n 6y ago
  Blogger... wasn't shut down?
• acidburnNSA 6y ago
  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.
  • passthejoe 6y ago
    > 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. This happened to me a couple days ago. Except it was a 12-year-old post.
• jabroni_salad 6y ago
  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?
• ErikAugust 6y ago
  Being in quarantine has unleashed a lot of nostalgia in me. Just recently I got a new blog up and running after years of inactivity. I wrote a post about a precursor to blogging, which was “Everything / Nothing” websites: https://ease.gg/2020/05/07/everything-nothing/ https://ease.gg/2020/05/07/everything-nothing/ Does anyone here remember those days?
• FailMore 6y ago
  I think there could be more fun and experimental content on the web. I'm working on a side project called https://taaalk.co 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)
  • sturza 6y ago
    Seems clickbaity to me, but i can expand my feedback if you want.
    • FailMore 6y ago
      Yes please. The clickbaityness is not intentional
• arkanciscan 6y ago
  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.
  • passthejoe 6y ago
    > they do it for the likes That's it.
• sturza 6y ago
  Seems like a good idea. But it also seems others have tried and failed: http://www.blogscatalog.com/Automotive/index.html http://www.blogscatalog.com/Automotive/index.html And it’s the first page on google for blog catalogue
• vkaku 6y ago
  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.
• wonder_er 6y ago
  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. Check it out! https://random-hn-blog.herokuapp.com/ https://random-hn-blog.herokuapp.com/
• hombre_fatal 6y ago
  > but when you look there's nothing to read 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.
  • jiofih 6y ago
    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.
    • hombre_fatal 6y ago
      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.
      • jiofih 6y ago
        > 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.
• blueridge 6y ago
  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.
• joelrunyon 6y ago
  This looks like another good time for me to bring up https://startablog.com https://startablog.com - our initiative to get 10,000 people to star their blog. There's really never been a better time to control your site, own your content and start working on your voice. Read David Perell for more the benefits of writing publicly more often.
• Etheryte 6y ago
  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.
• rcarmo 6y ago
  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.
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  They didn't go anywhere. Other ways to publish that information cropped up alongside them.
• russellbeattie 6y ago
  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.
• brentis 6y ago
  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.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• iamsanteri 6y ago
  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.
• monksy 6y ago
  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.
• novok 6y ago
  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.
• smarx007 6y ago
  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 https://wordpress.com/start/user (or https://www.blogger.com/ https://www.blogger.com/, nobody actually shut it down) and create your blog!
• rolandtshen 6y ago
  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.
• notetoweb 6y ago
  I recently released https://notetoweb.com https://notetoweb.com that lets you convert your Evernote notes to a blog. Let me know what you think.
• nickdothutton 6y ago
  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/ 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/ https://blog.eutopian.io/building-a-better-linkedin/
• causality0 6y ago
  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.
• joyj2nd 6y ago
  Blogs are not dead, neither is RSS. 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.
  • redisman 6y ago
    Same with recipes or diets and any information about parenting. Google is losing the battle.
  • addajones 6y ago
    I noticed the same thing! It’s terrible for stock trading. Were you able to find anything useful? I resorted to some Discord groups.
• iflywithbook 6y ago
  Is there a way to search only for blogs on Google? Could be a great way to find 'unpopular' content
• ngcc_hk 6y ago
  The page is very hard to read for some reason. Is it the font or the line spacing? The privacy ok until the content has issue then ... it is a hard question. Not sure about the no focus part. I go to a blog at least the person is the focus and usually even for hobbits they have focus. The one I go to everyday is still a blog https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photogr...
• SenHeng 6y ago
  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. 0: https://blogmura.com https://blogmura.com
  • StavrosK 6y ago
    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.
• _____smurf_____ 6y ago
  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.
• stanislavb 6y ago
  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 :/.
• jboydyhacker 6y ago
  Blogs died because: - It takes a lot of time to write well especially every day. - Most couldn’t make a living on it because Google’s whole model is to underpay for content and Google has a monopoly on ads.
• g-garron 6y ago
  For those who want to read blogs. Here are some of them, a feed with lots of them. https://trivial.observer/100daystooffload/ https://trivial.observer/100daystooffload/
• hypertexthero 6y ago
  To follow blogs, check out the most excellent recently-on-HN Fraidycat. I love it: https://fraidyc.at/ https://fraidyc.at/
• mvkel 6y ago
  Blogs are still there, you just have to look for them. What you’re seeing with platforms like Medium is it centralizes content discovery. That’s powerful. But it doesn’t mean blogs have disappeared.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• pythonbase 6y ago
  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.
• text_exch 6y ago
  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. [1] www.thinking-about-things.com
• imgabe 6y ago
  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.
• adamwathan 6y ago
  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: http://www.petesqbsite.com/ http://www.petesqbsite.com/
  • bachmeier 6y ago
    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.
    • jason0597 6y ago
      Where do academics put their material nowadays?
      • tiborsaas 6y ago
        arXiv.org?
      • bachmeier 6y ago
        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.
• xueyongg 6y ago
  I personally enjoyed my journey of creating my new blog since the start of the year. It has been quite an interesting process as an attempt to share what I've learnt on my job as a Software Engineer. I find public posts to be quite exciting given the exposure to critiques it will have! I guess that's my way of gathering feedback and learning from the community! Here's one of my latest posts to share the learnings I have from some meaningful articles I came across. I do post on sales + engineer & design patterns, hope you find it meaningful (: https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-14-first-half-of-may-articles https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-14-first-half-of-m...
• smsm42 6y ago
  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.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• spiritplumber 6y ago
  I miss the unmonetized internet. When something becomes "too cheap to meter", someone will immediately start working on a better meter.
• njharman 6y ago
  I don't understand. Blogosphere seems vibrant to me. I blog semi irregurally on my blogger.com blog. Read dozens of blogs every week. Just added a couple new blogs. Maybe it depends on subject. All of the above are rpg and warfare blogs.
• holografix 6y ago
  Billion dollar unicorn biz idea for any frothing young entrepreneur: 1) Locally ran blog app with nice UI (think wysiwyg text editor, file “uploads” etc) and single file install. 2) Central server managed by a cloud service to resolve people’s dynamic IP into a stable URL, your blog will live at myblog.blogservice.com 3) locally ran blog engine pings new IP address every time people’s ISP change it. 4) Good instructions on how to forward 443 to your local machine running blog. 5) bonus points if local app runs on raspberry pis that can be always on.
• Brajeshwar 6y ago
  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.
• arkanciscan 6y ago
  If there is one thing that guarantees a link will get tons of comments on HN it's the opportunity to brag about how you still have a blog and use an RSS reader.
• lihaciudaniel 6y ago
  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
• phendrenad2 6y ago
  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.
• sillycube 6y ago
  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
• jsilence 6y ago
  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!
• topherPedersen 6y ago
  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.
• Nition 6y ago
  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.
• necovek 6y ago
  This definitely touches a nerve for me. 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".
• vladoh 6y ago
  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 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 https://www.otherhand.org
• NiceWayToDoIT 6y ago
  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.
• adam0c 6y ago
  TL;DR Blogs still exist! sure maybe not in the vast amounts you feel they once did but thats because people have moved onto podcasts
• mrbenns 6y ago
  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
• shash7 6y ago
  Hey man if you want a unsuccessful blog, here's mine: shash7.com
• lcnmrn 6y ago
  I'm working on Pressdown https://github.com/lucianmarin/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.
• jasonlfunk 6y ago
  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.
• thedonkeycometh 6y ago
  I don't understand their main arguments. Blogger is still around, and Wordpress also. Medium has a lot of content regularly. I'm unsure whether this Halcyon world they mention actually went away, or was just swept into Facebook, which is literally a log of what you're doing but not a meandering self-important prose (like the blogosphere past). I run a blog, but its mainly a place to look up common problems I have faced to inform others (incl. future me) and work problems out to understand them further (again, shout out to future me). There's a lot of us that do this, and occasionally get a popular post into the wider sphere, but popularity is the least of our concern.
• juped 6y ago
  I don't like blogs. People should have websites not ordered by publication date. I want to see the personal website brought back.
• jasoneckert 6y ago
  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 http://jasoneckert.net (which forwards to a longer URL that is secured) in case you are interested.
• seesawtron 6y ago
  This guy seems to be have compe up with a search engine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208846
• dwheeler 6y ago
  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 http://dwheeler.com
• wolco 6y ago
  Back on the[day you felt your blog would be picked up randomly and a variety of people would read it. Today no one will read the blog unless I push them from twitter or youtube or facebook. People post photos/videos/comments with less investment and get better viewship.
• l72 6y ago
  Why isn't anyone creating smaller, specialized search sites? 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 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.
• adiian 6y ago
  ... with rss
• cetico 6y ago
  Newsletters and podcasts are somewhat decent replacements worth considering.
• marmot777 6y ago
  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.
• sunkenvicar 6y ago
  Many of my favourite blogs mutated into (video) podcasts. Unfortunate because a 5 min read turned into a 50 min listen.
• thordenmark 6y ago
  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.
• marmot777 6y ago
  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.
  • rob2312 6y ago
    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.
    • marmot777 6y ago
      Funny you mention Minecraft. My son LOVES Minecraft.
• tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  > 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.
• JSavageOne 6y ago
  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.
  • 1bc29b36f623ba8 6y ago
    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.
• dusted 6y ago
  did someone delete the blogs or make laws perventing people from connecting new webservers to the Internet with the intent to host a blog?
• solidist 6y ago
  A very short post (a graphic, really) about what I learned about blogging over the years. https://medium.com/@solidi/the-one-about-blogging-cd9e65a2055b https://medium.com/@solidi/the-one-about-blogging-cd9e65a205... 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.
• heisnotanalien 6y ago
  There is always Medium for the 200 things I do every morning for a happy and productive life type of stuff.
• josefresco 6y ago
  > 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.
• Gary_W_Longsine 6y ago
  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.)