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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

by 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?
      - DreadY2K 6y ago
        Either that, or have separate webs for different disciplines (maybe one for academia, one for arts, one for jounralism, one for programming, etc.) that are kept separate from each other. I'm not sure how it could be implemented, but a forced partitioning like that could probably serve the same purpose without gatekeeping (if the partitions are small enough).
        lopmotr 6y ago
        No. I get spam for predatory academic journals every day.
        cameronbrown 6y ago
        Sounds like filter bubbles to me.
      - Shared404 6y ago
        Not gatekeeping, I phrased my idea badly before, and I'm sorry about that. I would like to make it clear that I feel very strongly against gatekeeping, and against censorship. More like not pushing for more acceptance. Allow a community to form, but do not try to market your way into a larger community. Obviously this approach is not sustainable, at least on the first try, as the Internet itself shows. However, now that the internet already exists, a parallel internet so to speak would not have as much/any appeal to the average consumer/corporation, which ideally would lead to only those who are interested in the community/content arriving there.
        cameronbrown 6y ago
        How is that different from subreddits - Or communities like HN? Those aren't technical decisions, but social ones, so why do we need a new internet to implement them?
  - noobaccount 6y ago
    Nothing, we’re just all gonna have to learn to deal with each other this way on this scale and move on.
    - api 6y ago
      Overall this is the best big picture answer
  - naravara 6y ago
    >What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet? Ads blocked by default on all browsers. The original sin with a lot of these comes from the fact that incentives drive towards maximizing clicks over building a subscriber base. Ads themselves aren't really the problem either. Magazine style ads, where you just buy space on the strength of a subscriber/distribution reach rather than paying per click, wouldn't be perfect but they'd align incentives between readers and writers much better than the current situation does. The core problem is that the metrics are too granular, so there's too much room to game them at the margins.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I think Urbit is trying to do this: https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f149 https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f14... Mostly by putting some cost to having an ID in the network.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    Not sure you need a whole new internet. Maybe a search engine aggressively excluding commercial results. Even blogs with ads. Anything with ads or selling something would not be listed.
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    > What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet? Ban (yes, legally) collecting & monetizing most information about users. But do that generally, not just for the Internet. Or at least make holding such data incredibly risky (enormous company-ending fines for leaks or misuse). No loading third-party domain content in browsers. At all. No images, no scripts. You can link to it. That’s it. Limit scripting to defining custom sorts for tables, custom regexes for form fields, and... that’s about it. Too easy to spy or do shit without the user’s express permission otherwise. That should take care of the worst of the bad incentives that have made the web so hostile and shitty.
    - api 6y ago
      You are forgetting the other half of the equation. The web must have a first class payment system. Nothing is free; money will be made overtly or covertly. If there is no honest overt method, there will be a dishonest covert method.
      - karatestomp 6y ago
        Maybe. Most of the best parts of the web are totally free, donationware (wikipedia), or illegal to begin with (library genesis). Ads served 1st party and aimed at a reading demographic, not at individuals, like all ads except junk mail before the web, would be possible regardless. But yes some kind of payment flow that is just about entirely controlled by the browser—special UI pages cannot mimic, a “you’ll find a way to accept what this form sends you, or you won’t take payments” attitude from the spec—might be OK. I’d have to think it through some more. It’d be easy to screw up in a way that let the Nu Web become overrun with bad incentives and dangerous garbage again (watch the “non-computer-literate”, which is a lot of people and yes that includes the next generation now entering adulthood, not just old folks, try to use the web to accomplish any task at all if you don’t get what I mean by “dangerous”)
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    web of trust for everything
  - asdff 6y ago
    Ban advertising. Users could pay for the websites they use by proportion of time spent per billing cycle for their internet plan. Popular sites with more demanding server requirements would be paid for by the very users who induce that demand directly, rather than through more dubious advertising.
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      Would this actually remove the incentive for spam and SEO?
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  I don't think it's a coincidence that Google prioritizes content that has people staring at more ads for longer periods of time.
- hagy 6y ago
  I never realized how bad Google spam could be for technical content until I had to start searching for solution to some Windows issues. Almost without fail, the first page would be littered would spam sites posing as informative answers. Many of them were just duplicating content from official Windows documentation with minor modification. The more sophisticated ones would provide enough real content to entice you into thinking the page had the solution only to reveal you had to sign up to access the full content of the page. I've never encountered this before when searching for linux or programming topics. In those cases, Google results always include relevant stack overflow postings and links to the appropriate section of documentation. I'm surprised Google hasn't penalized these spam pages, but I'd imagine there are some perverse incentives to keep them around. Wouldn't surprise me if many of these sites show adds through a Google-owned affiliate program or are in another way tied into Google's ad tech empire.
momokoko 6y ago
Google has an unusual situation where search now only needs to be good enough. They are much more focused on the knowledge engine of providing direct answers and the advertising business. With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality
- londons_explore 6y ago
  > search has certainly lowered in quality I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there. A good chunk of that is that more and more info is locked into walled gardens (in some App, on Facebook/Instagram/TicTok), but also a lot of what people want to find in todays world just isn't on the internet anymore, except places like the web archive, where Google isn't allowed to venture...
  - dewey 6y ago
    > I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there. I think that's not the case: There's a lot more people with more diverse backgrounds, from different locations and cultures online now than it was the case 10 years ago. It's just harder to find the places through a "globalized" search that is mostly aiming at commercial offers. From time to time I stumble upon absolute niche blogs (Example from my feed reader: https://singapore60smusic.blogspot.com https://singapore60smusic.blogspot.com) and it reminds me that there's a lot of good resources out there if you find them somehow).
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      Although a quick search reveals that: https://www.google.com/search?q=1960s+music+blog+from+singapore+where+the+computer+is+down https://www.google.com/search?q=1960s+music+blog+from+singap... I'd guess the issue is simply people aren't looking for it.
  - naravara 6y ago
ljm 6y ago
RSS is truly a blessing, and it's such a shame that the side effect of Google is to essentially corrupt a vast portion of the internet such that most of the stuff you see and read has the sole purpose of pleasing the search engine, not the reader. That relationship is the wrong way round. I'm just re-setting up my own blog (to complement a Youtube channel). Without designing one from scratch (with a static site generator or some such), it's quite difficult to get an off the shelf one that isn't bloated as hell though. I should suck it up but design isn't my strong-suit, and I'd rather just get straight to writing and recording.
- dewey 6y ago
  Whatever you do, just don't use Medium. Ghost or Hugo (With Netlify, https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/ https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/) are both very low effort solutions and most of them come with themes that don't look too bad from the get go. It's very quick to get something up and running even though it's technically a static site generator.
  - novok 6y ago
    Those are nerd only solutions. If anything will have mass market appeal and actually catch on with experts that are not nerds, it can't be nerd only.
    - dewey 6y ago
      There’s a lot of non nerd solutions. Ghost, Wordpress, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr are all very easy to Süd- platforms. There’s a variety of free and paid platforms. The existing solutions are not the problems.
      - passthejoe 6y ago
        I do have a Hugo blog, and I agree that pretty much all static-site generators are too nerdy for most potential users. WordPress is still around, and I recommend it. It's more "social" than ever in some ways, and the built-in comments are looking better and better as the years go by. (I use Disqus to moderate the comments for more than a dozen blogs in one network, but for an individual blog, I prefer the native WP comments.)
NicoJuicy 6y ago
I have an entire setup for crawling rss hourly http://handlr.sapico.me http://handlr.sapico.me
- progre 6y ago
  Is this your site? It's really nice! I have something similar (although without all of the features on this site). I also scrape a bunch of blogs that doesn't have rss. One thing, people really like https, especially when sending form data such as the signup.
  - NicoJuicy 6y ago
    Thanks, I'm dogfooding it mostly. But I added https :) ( https://handlr.sapico.me https://handlr.sapico.me ) I'm currently the only one that can add RSS-feeds though. It has custom actions also, eg. https://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Details?id=ab43c38d-3d96-ea11-9692-b35c56d7b03d https://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Details?id=ab43c38d-3d96-ea11-... where comments by HN are loaded in the post. ( Custom tag that adds a form field to input the HN Id ) Eg. CommentsByHackernews is the tag. I also have a variation for the city were I live in ( Bruges / Belgium ) https://brugge.sapico.me/ https://brugge.sapico.me/
    - progre 6y ago
      Nice! Here is mine: https://hxfd.prog.re/ https://hxfd.prog.re/ It's just a static page that gets rendered on the server after each scraping round (every half hour).
      - NicoJuicy 6y ago
        No bookmarks of your own? Eg. check http://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create http://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create on top right (The bookmarklet). On mobile ( Android), I share websites to Tasker that then open handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create?Title=%1&Url=%2 I then add the tags and then create the item. I think it's the only way to easily bookmark websites. Note: If a url is filled in, but not a title. Then on focus-out the title is fetched from the page and filled in. Although RSS is an "easy" content crawl feature, i wouldn't be able to miss the "bookmarking" functionality that makes the site more usefull.
deleted 6y ago
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zhdc1 6y ago
Blogs and forums stopped being a thing when Google flushed them out sometime between 2009-2012 (with the Panda update? I'm not an SEO guy so I wasn't really following it at the time). Anyway, it felt like a bunch of places went from having active communities to stagnating or dying outright overnight. People forget just how much general innovation was being driven by these sites - Styleforum and AskAndy for men's fashion, BB.com for health and wellness (ignoring misc), Something Awful also comes to mind. Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative, but it just really hasn't happened.
- angstrom 6y ago
  I characterize Reddit as true neutral. It has the potential to be any alignment, but it's mostly the will of the moderator to impose what alignment any subreddit will be. It's the only place on the Internet that still has the feel occaisionally of the 90s/00s.
  - afiori 6y ago
    Surely that is/was reddit's promise, but it does not live up to it.
    - angstrom 6y ago
      I think where it breaks down is when you have to run plugins that identify the kind of person a user is. I find that reduces the crapiness of the interactions if I can see someone is a POS without investing much time in finding that out. It's a step that shouldn't be necessary, but the faster that can be discerned the less I find myself second guessing their intent.
      - afiori 6y ago
        Actually that sound even more toxic... You could say that the current karma system is sort of supposed to be that, but at least it does not affect comments visibility as far as I know. Having a parallel unofficial social credit system looks like one thing that would just create unnecessary conflicts in communities that do not have a strong troll problem.
karlicoss 6y ago
I'm increasingly running into blogs that sadly don't have RSS, but just today I discovered a cool open source project to generate RSS based on visual scraping: https://politepol.com/en/ https://politepol.com/en/
- dewey 6y ago
  I wrote a tool to do something similar a while ago for sites that didn't work with these ready-made tools, it's a bit more effort as you'd have to implemented a custom scraping plugin for the target website: https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge
bckmn 6y ago
In a vein similar to your annoying technology site, you would probably appreciate https://grumpy.website/ https://grumpy.website/ One of my favorite blogs of all time.
- dewey 6y ago
  Grumpy is amazing! We very much enjoy their content and actually got inspired by that site in the first place. Theres a link to them on our About page: https://annoying.technology/colophon/ https://annoying.technology/colophon/
- yesenadam 6y ago
  Thanks, that's awesome, just spent 20 minutes reading on there. But quite frequently as I was trying to read, everything on screen jumped upwards, by a few lines or half a page, apparently because stuff below it was loading. Normally I wouldn't complain, the site has taught me not to put up silently with such things. Don't think I've seen that behaviour before. (Am using latest version of FF)
martinhath 6y ago
I've been collecting blogs I'm interested in via. HN, lobste.rs, reddit, or just random links all around, and am now at around 50 feeds, all of which at least have once had content that I'm genuinely interested in. Then I use `newsboat` for reading and keeping track of what I've seen. Overall I'm very happy with this extremely simple setup, and am almost annoyed that I didn't spend those few seconds it is to set something like this up years ago. --- As to the original link posted, blogs obviously never went anywhere, but they aren't (anymore) in the places that you are. I feel this comes close to the frustration some people have that "nobody is reading books anymore because everyone are streaming movies and series instead". Books never went anywhere, and they're probably more accessible than ever. If you're not reading books now, that's on you. Similarly with blogs: if you're not reading and/or following blogs, it's just because you don't want to.
oefrha 6y ago
I just searched for some relatively focused topics I’ve written about years ago, and Google found my blog posts just fine (mostly among the top results). I don’t know how popular those posts are (I don’t use analytics at all and since the blog has been hosted on GitHub Pages since forever ago I don’t even have server logs to analyze) but I do know quite a few were never discussed elsewhere. I guess it’s hard to find blogs these days when you just type “blog” into the search engine, or search for a keyword that a million people compete on in order to sell you stuff. But if you have actual, say technical questions, you’ll land on interesting blog posts in no time, sometimes not even on the dumpster fire that is Medium, and written by people who aren’t writing merely to bolster their online presence.
jondubois 6y ago
From my (subjective) perspective, I also feel like something strange happened with Google search when it comes to blogs. My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google). I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad. Here is my blog: https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/ https://socketcluster.io/ I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead. Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).
- rubatuga 6y ago
  IMO could be just coincidence. As humans we see patterns that don't exist.
ezconnect 6y ago
Why is the annoying.technology blog uses so much cpu?
- dewey 6y ago
  That's the first time I'm hearing that problem, are you sure it's from the site? It's basically just a generated static html site with no JS except a tiny analytics snippet. For me it's really quick and lightweight.
deleted 6y ago
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hliyan 6y ago
Speaking of discoverability, I found the author's writing interesting and wanted to subscribe to new articles. I usually do this by following the author's twitter account. Sadly, the one that he links to does not exist: twitter.com/TTTThiscom
coding_lobster 6y ago
Your annoying technology blog reminds of this Jonathan Blow talk where he talked about decreasing quality of software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk
AndrewStephens 6y ago
I just want to say that I like your nitmyhostname blog and enjoyed your article on RSS.
- dewey 6y ago
  Thank you, I'm glad to hear that!
_bxg1 6y ago
You inspired me to do a project today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208846
- nialv7 6y ago
  There seem to already be such a list: https://github.com/jkup/awesome-personal-blogs https://github.com/jkup/awesome-personal-blogs But certainly the more the merrier
basicallydan 6y ago
I like your blog! It reminds me of https://littlebigdetails.com/ https://littlebigdetails.com/ except it’s the opposite. Bookmarked!
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
Annoying Technology is one of my favorite recent finds. Just wanted to vouch: Good stuff!
jillesvangurp 6y ago
SEO is the problem. Most authors figure out at some point that nobody goes to their website. So, they move to different channels (linkedin, facebook, medium, etc.) and at best might cross post to their blog and those channels. When it comes to reaching people, the odds are stacked against you on your personal website because of multi billion dollar companies optimizing for ad revenue and vastly preferring directing people to ad equipped channels of their choice rather than your website. This is also the real reason Google killed Google Reader: they wanted to capture the ad revenue and instead force content producers to use those. Which is why all news publishers bend over backwards to ensure their news shows up in Google news. It's that simple. Any click that goes to your website directs the user away from their money making channels. So, they don't. With RSS readers, most of your potential audience will never find you unless they subscribed to your article or it randomly shows up as a link in some channel they follow. Getting lucky on HN helps. But most people don't get that lucky. So-called influencers basically try to manipulate the odds by doing what they think yields the best results. That's why clickbait exists, why your twitter and facebook feeds are filled with crap, and why it is so hard to find channels that contain curated content. That's also why we all love HN.

by dewey 6y ago

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?
    - DreadY2K 6y ago
      Either that, or have separate webs for different disciplines (maybe one for academia, one for arts, one for jounralism, one for programming, etc.) that are kept separate from each other. I'm not sure how it could be implemented, but a forced partitioning like that could probably serve the same purpose without gatekeeping (if the partitions are small enough).
      - lopmotr 6y ago
        No. I get spam for predatory academic journals every day.
      - cameronbrown 6y ago
        Sounds like filter bubbles to me.
    - Shared404 6y ago
      Not gatekeeping, I phrased my idea badly before, and I'm sorry about that. I would like to make it clear that I feel very strongly against gatekeeping, and against censorship. More like not pushing for more acceptance. Allow a community to form, but do not try to market your way into a larger community. Obviously this approach is not sustainable, at least on the first try, as the Internet itself shows. However, now that the internet already exists, a parallel internet so to speak would not have as much/any appeal to the average consumer/corporation, which ideally would lead to only those who are interested in the community/content arriving there.
      - cameronbrown 6y ago
        How is that different from subreddits - Or communities like HN? Those aren't technical decisions, but social ones, so why do we need a new internet to implement them?
- noobaccount 6y ago
  Nothing, we’re just all gonna have to learn to deal with each other this way on this scale and move on.
  - api 6y ago
    Overall this is the best big picture answer
- naravara 6y ago
  >What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet? Ads blocked by default on all browsers. The original sin with a lot of these comes from the fact that incentives drive towards maximizing clicks over building a subscriber base. Ads themselves aren't really the problem either. Magazine style ads, where you just buy space on the strength of a subscriber/distribution reach rather than paying per click, wouldn't be perfect but they'd align incentives between readers and writers much better than the current situation does. The core problem is that the metrics are too granular, so there's too much room to game them at the margins.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I think Urbit is trying to do this: https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f149 https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f14... Mostly by putting some cost to having an ID in the network.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  Not sure you need a whole new internet. Maybe a search engine aggressively excluding commercial results. Even blogs with ads. Anything with ads or selling something would not be listed.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  > What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet? Ban (yes, legally) collecting & monetizing most information about users. But do that generally, not just for the Internet. Or at least make holding such data incredibly risky (enormous company-ending fines for leaks or misuse). No loading third-party domain content in browsers. At all. No images, no scripts. You can link to it. That’s it. Limit scripting to defining custom sorts for tables, custom regexes for form fields, and... that’s about it. Too easy to spy or do shit without the user’s express permission otherwise. That should take care of the worst of the bad incentives that have made the web so hostile and shitty.
  - api 6y ago
    You are forgetting the other half of the equation. The web must have a first class payment system. Nothing is free; money will be made overtly or covertly. If there is no honest overt method, there will be a dishonest covert method.
    - karatestomp 6y ago
      Maybe. Most of the best parts of the web are totally free, donationware (wikipedia), or illegal to begin with (library genesis). Ads served 1st party and aimed at a reading demographic, not at individuals, like all ads except junk mail before the web, would be possible regardless. But yes some kind of payment flow that is just about entirely controlled by the browser—special UI pages cannot mimic, a “you’ll find a way to accept what this form sends you, or you won’t take payments” attitude from the spec—might be OK. I’d have to think it through some more. It’d be easy to screw up in a way that let the Nu Web become overrun with bad incentives and dangerous garbage again (watch the “non-computer-literate”, which is a lot of people and yes that includes the next generation now entering adulthood, not just old folks, try to use the web to accomplish any task at all if you don’t get what I mean by “dangerous”)
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  web of trust for everything
- asdff 6y ago
  Ban advertising. Users could pay for the websites they use by proportion of time spent per billing cycle for their internet plan. Popular sites with more demanding server requirements would be paid for by the very users who induce that demand directly, rather than through more dubious advertising.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    Would this actually remove the incentive for spam and SEO?
heavyset_go 6y ago
I don't think it's a coincidence that Google prioritizes content that has people staring at more ads for longer periods of time.
hagy 6y ago
I never realized how bad Google spam could be for technical content until I had to start searching for solution to some Windows issues. Almost without fail, the first page would be littered would spam sites posing as informative answers. Many of them were just duplicating content from official Windows documentation with minor modification. The more sophisticated ones would provide enough real content to entice you into thinking the page had the solution only to reveal you had to sign up to access the full content of the page. I've never encountered this before when searching for linux or programming topics. In those cases, Google results always include relevant stack overflow postings and links to the appropriate section of documentation. I'm surprised Google hasn't penalized these spam pages, but I'd imagine there are some perverse incentives to keep them around. Wouldn't surprise me if many of these sites show adds through a Google-owned affiliate program or are in another way tied into Google's ad tech empire.

momokoko 6y ago

Google has an unusual situation where search now only needs to be good enough. They are much more focused on the knowledge engine of providing direct answers and the advertising business. With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality

londons_explore 6y ago
> search has certainly lowered in quality I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there. A good chunk of that is that more and more info is locked into walled gardens (in some App, on Facebook/Instagram/TicTok), but also a lot of what people want to find in todays world just isn't on the internet anymore, except places like the web archive, where Google isn't allowed to venture...
- dewey 6y ago
  > I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there. I think that's not the case: There's a lot more people with more diverse backgrounds, from different locations and cultures online now than it was the case 10 years ago. It's just harder to find the places through a "globalized" search that is mostly aiming at commercial offers. From time to time I stumble upon absolute niche blogs (Example from my feed reader: https://singapore60smusic.blogspot.com https://singapore60smusic.blogspot.com) and it reminds me that there's a lot of good resources out there if you find them somehow).
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Although a quick search reveals that: https://www.google.com/search?q=1960s+music+blog+from+singapore+where+the+computer+is+down https://www.google.com/search?q=1960s+music+blog+from+singap... I'd guess the issue is simply people aren't looking for it.
- naravara 6y ago

ljm 6y ago

RSS is truly a blessing, and it's such a shame that the side effect of Google is to essentially corrupt a vast portion of the internet such that most of the stuff you see and read has the sole purpose of pleasing the search engine, not the reader. That relationship is the wrong way round. I'm just re-setting up my own blog (to complement a Youtube channel). Without designing one from scratch (with a static site generator or some such), it's quite difficult to get an off the shelf one that isn't bloated as hell though. I should suck it up but design isn't my strong-suit, and I'd rather just get straight to writing and recording.

dewey 6y ago
Whatever you do, just don't use Medium. Ghost or Hugo (With Netlify, https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/ https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/) are both very low effort solutions and most of them come with themes that don't look too bad from the get go. It's very quick to get something up and running even though it's technically a static site generator.
- novok 6y ago
  Those are nerd only solutions. If anything will have mass market appeal and actually catch on with experts that are not nerds, it can't be nerd only.
  - dewey 6y ago
    There’s a lot of non nerd solutions. Ghost, Wordpress, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr are all very easy to Süd- platforms. There’s a variety of free and paid platforms. The existing solutions are not the problems.
    - passthejoe 6y ago
      I do have a Hugo blog, and I agree that pretty much all static-site generators are too nerdy for most potential users. WordPress is still around, and I recommend it. It's more "social" than ever in some ways, and the built-in comments are looking better and better as the years go by. (I use Disqus to moderate the comments for more than a dozen blogs in one network, but for an individual blog, I prefer the native WP comments.)

NicoJuicy 6y ago

I have an entire setup for crawling rss hourly http://handlr.sapico.me http://handlr.sapico.me

progre 6y ago
Is this your site? It's really nice! I have something similar (although without all of the features on this site). I also scrape a bunch of blogs that doesn't have rss. One thing, people really like https, especially when sending form data such as the signup.
- NicoJuicy 6y ago
  Thanks, I'm dogfooding it mostly. But I added https :) ( https://handlr.sapico.me https://handlr.sapico.me ) I'm currently the only one that can add RSS-feeds though. It has custom actions also, eg. https://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Details?id=ab43c38d-3d96-ea11-9692-b35c56d7b03d https://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Details?id=ab43c38d-3d96-ea11-... where comments by HN are loaded in the post. ( Custom tag that adds a form field to input the HN Id ) Eg. CommentsByHackernews is the tag. I also have a variation for the city were I live in ( Bruges / Belgium ) https://brugge.sapico.me/ https://brugge.sapico.me/
  - progre 6y ago
    Nice! Here is mine: https://hxfd.prog.re/ https://hxfd.prog.re/ It's just a static page that gets rendered on the server after each scraping round (every half hour).
    - NicoJuicy 6y ago
      No bookmarks of your own? Eg. check http://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create http://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create on top right (The bookmarklet). On mobile ( Android), I share websites to Tasker that then open handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create?Title=%1&Url=%2 I then add the tags and then create the item. I think it's the only way to easily bookmark websites. Note: If a url is filled in, but not a title. Then on focus-out the title is fetched from the page and filled in. Although RSS is an "easy" content crawl feature, i wouldn't be able to miss the "bookmarking" functionality that makes the site more usefull.

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zhdc1 6y ago

Blogs and forums stopped being a thing when Google flushed them out sometime between 2009-2012 (with the Panda update? I'm not an SEO guy so I wasn't really following it at the time). Anyway, it felt like a bunch of places went from having active communities to stagnating or dying outright overnight. People forget just how much general innovation was being driven by these sites - Styleforum and AskAndy for men's fashion, BB.com for health and wellness (ignoring misc), Something Awful also comes to mind. Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative, but it just really hasn't happened.

angstrom 6y ago
I characterize Reddit as true neutral. It has the potential to be any alignment, but it's mostly the will of the moderator to impose what alignment any subreddit will be. It's the only place on the Internet that still has the feel occaisionally of the 90s/00s.
- afiori 6y ago
  Surely that is/was reddit's promise, but it does not live up to it.
  - angstrom 6y ago
    I think where it breaks down is when you have to run plugins that identify the kind of person a user is. I find that reduces the crapiness of the interactions if I can see someone is a POS without investing much time in finding that out. It's a step that shouldn't be necessary, but the faster that can be discerned the less I find myself second guessing their intent.
    - afiori 6y ago
      Actually that sound even more toxic... You could say that the current karma system is sort of supposed to be that, but at least it does not affect comments visibility as far as I know. Having a parallel unofficial social credit system looks like one thing that would just create unnecessary conflicts in communities that do not have a strong troll problem.

karlicoss 6y ago

I'm increasingly running into blogs that sadly don't have RSS, but just today I discovered a cool open source project to generate RSS based on visual scraping: https://politepol.com/en/ https://politepol.com/en/

dewey 6y ago
I wrote a tool to do something similar a while ago for sites that didn't work with these ready-made tools, it's a bit more effort as you'd have to implemented a custom scraping plugin for the target website: https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge https://github.com/dewey/feedbridge

bckmn 6y ago

In a vein similar to your annoying technology site, you would probably appreciate https://grumpy.website/ https://grumpy.website/ One of my favorite blogs of all time.

dewey 6y ago
Grumpy is amazing! We very much enjoy their content and actually got inspired by that site in the first place. Theres a link to them on our About page: https://annoying.technology/colophon/ https://annoying.technology/colophon/
yesenadam 6y ago
Thanks, that's awesome, just spent 20 minutes reading on there. But quite frequently as I was trying to read, everything on screen jumped upwards, by a few lines or half a page, apparently because stuff below it was loading. Normally I wouldn't complain, the site has taught me not to put up silently with such things. Don't think I've seen that behaviour before. (Am using latest version of FF)

martinhath 6y ago

I've been collecting blogs I'm interested in via. HN, lobste.rs, reddit, or just random links all around, and am now at around 50 feeds, all of which at least have once had content that I'm genuinely interested in. Then I use `newsboat` for reading and keeping track of what I've seen. Overall I'm very happy with this extremely simple setup, and am almost annoyed that I didn't spend those few seconds it is to set something like this up years ago. --- As to the original link posted, blogs obviously never went anywhere, but they aren't (anymore) in the places that you are. I feel this comes close to the frustration some people have that "nobody is reading books anymore because everyone are streaming movies and series instead". Books never went anywhere, and they're probably more accessible than ever. If you're not reading books now, that's on you. Similarly with blogs: if you're not reading and/or following blogs, it's just because you don't want to.

oefrha 6y ago

I just searched for some relatively focused topics I’ve written about years ago, and Google found my blog posts just fine (mostly among the top results). I don’t know how popular those posts are (I don’t use analytics at all and since the blog has been hosted on GitHub Pages since forever ago I don’t even have server logs to analyze) but I do know quite a few were never discussed elsewhere. I guess it’s hard to find blogs these days when you just type “blog” into the search engine, or search for a keyword that a million people compete on in order to sell you stuff. But if you have actual, say technical questions, you’ll land on interesting blog posts in no time, sometimes not even on the dumpster fire that is Medium, and written by people who aren’t writing merely to bolster their online presence.

jondubois 6y ago

From my (subjective) perspective, I also feel like something strange happened with Google search when it comes to blogs. My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google). I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad. Here is my blog: https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/ https://socketcluster.io/ I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead. Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).

rubatuga 6y ago
IMO could be just coincidence. As humans we see patterns that don't exist.

ezconnect 6y ago

Why is the annoying.technology blog uses so much cpu?

dewey 6y ago
That's the first time I'm hearing that problem, are you sure it's from the site? It's basically just a generated static html site with no JS except a tiny analytics snippet. For me it's really quick and lightweight.

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hliyan 6y ago

Speaking of discoverability, I found the author's writing interesting and wanted to subscribe to new articles. I usually do this by following the author's twitter account. Sadly, the one that he links to does not exist: twitter.com/TTTThiscom

coding_lobster 6y ago

Your annoying technology blog reminds of this Jonathan Blow talk where he talked about decreasing quality of software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

AndrewStephens 6y ago

I just want to say that I like your nitmyhostname blog and enjoyed your article on RSS.

dewey 6y ago
Thank you, I'm glad to hear that!

_bxg1 6y ago

You inspired me to do a project today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208846

nialv7 6y ago
There seem to already be such a list: https://github.com/jkup/awesome-personal-blogs https://github.com/jkup/awesome-personal-blogs But certainly the more the merrier

basicallydan 6y ago

I like your blog! It reminds me of https://littlebigdetails.com/ https://littlebigdetails.com/ except it’s the opposite. Bookmarked!

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

Annoying Technology is one of my favorite recent finds. Just wanted to vouch: Good stuff!

jillesvangurp 6y ago

SEO is the problem. Most authors figure out at some point that nobody goes to their website. So, they move to different channels (linkedin, facebook, medium, etc.) and at best might cross post to their blog and those channels. When it comes to reaching people, the odds are stacked against you on your personal website because of multi billion dollar companies optimizing for ad revenue and vastly preferring directing people to ad equipped channels of their choice rather than your website. This is also the real reason Google killed Google Reader: they wanted to capture the ad revenue and instead force content producers to use those. Which is why all news publishers bend over backwards to ensure their news shows up in Google news. It's that simple. Any click that goes to your website directs the user away from their money making channels. So, they don't. With RSS readers, most of your potential audience will never find you unless they subscribed to your article or it randomly shows up as a link in some channel they follow. Getting lucky on HN helps. But most people don't get that lucky. So-called influencers basically try to manipulate the odds by doing what they think yields the best results. That's why clickbait exists, why your twitter and facebook feeds are filled with crap, and why it is so hard to find channels that contain curated content. That's also why we all love HN.