3 ms·

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

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
naravara 6y ago
I think most wordpress blogs with commentariats just use Disqus now. It's buggy and unreliable, but the commenting capability is still there generally.
rubatuga 6y ago
I use commento.io, which allows anonymous commenting. More than half of the comments on my blog are anonymous commenters. I think it's about reducing the initial friction as much as possible.

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

naravara 6y ago

I think most wordpress blogs with commentariats just use Disqus now. It's buggy and unreliable, but the commenting capability is still there generally.

rubatuga 6y ago

I use commento.io, which allows anonymous commenting. More than half of the comments on my blog are anonymous commenters. I think it's about reducing the initial friction as much as possible.