9 ms·

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

by 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
> The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. This is what I've been pointing out for years as the lost core of the internet.
- freehunter 6y ago
  It seems like this is a cultural shift in society as well. There are no more hobbies, everything is a side hustle and if you can’t turn a profit from it, it’s not worth doing. I’m not an economist or sociologist so I can’t Even pretend to understand why this is, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed over the past few years.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Not my experience at all. The mods plus fanmade expansions community is bigger than ever. And so is open source. Way more stuff is free now than ever before.
    - neutronicus 6y ago
      Open source has a huge "personal brand-building" aspect to it
    - freehunter 6y ago
      It's not about giving things away for free, it's about doing things you like to do just for your own satisfaction. While there is a lot of that in the mods and open source space, there's also a lot of resume building, portfolio projects, etc. There's an insane amount of pressure to always be "shipping to production" no matter if your hobby is crocheting, gardening, writing code, blogging, building robots, playing music, painting, etc. Patreon, Etsy, OnlyFans, Kickstarter, and even Github (just to scratch the surface) all serve to put pressure on creators to turn their hobbies into second jobs.
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        I'm sorry you feel this way, but I do not think this is true for most creators. Too many of my friends have made wonderful things for the sake of it. And they're so self-effacing, they won't even mention these things.
        danjac 6y ago
        Not judging you or your friends, but perhaps those who can do hobbies just for fun are in a position of privilege (enough time, money, financial and professional security) to be able to do so? The "hustle culture" is very real and is I think a side effect of the gig economy and the end of the 9-5 secure job with its strict boundaries of work and leisure time. If you still have that kind of job it's easier to have hobbies with no outcome than personal satisfaction (assuming no other "distractions" like small children). Most creators I happen to know are hustling, whether on Github or Wordpress or Etsy or IRL, either trying to make some money on the side or building a portfolio for their career or to help them score their next gig. Those that aren't are retired or have some secure, traditional 9-5.
        renewiltord 6y ago
        Interesting. It's exactly the opposite. The guys I'm talking about are all running their own startups or at startups. So definitely not 9-5s.
  - donaldcuckman 6y ago
    100% agree
  - Kaze404 6y ago
    I've been saying for years that people need to stop pressuring themselves into being good at their hobbies. Have fun first, who cares if you can't sing/draw/paint?
  - r_c_a_d 6y ago
    Is that true? Or is it just the case that people trying to make a profit have learned how to promote themselves to an extent that drowns out the hobbyists? I had some hobby pages in the 1990s that got a lot of views and came high up in search results. None of them were ever deliberately publicised. I doubt that any of my material would show in the top 1000 of any web search today.
  - anthonypasq 6y ago
    This seems to be a function of the people you hang around with. Hobbies for most people are a way to spend money, not make it. No one I know has "side hustles"
- blobbers 6y ago
  The internet has stopped being an internet but rather being a few large intranets.
  - state_less 6y ago
    It’s the corporate internet, upload/download ratio, it’s the lack of IP address space. It’s social media, it’s private blogging platforms and it’s the plight for power. It's the way you're given knowledge, slow with thought control and subtle hints It's the fast talk they use to abuse and feed my brain It stretches for as far as the eye can see It's reality, fuck it, it's everything but me Atmosphere - Scapegoat, with some blogging additions
    - pcdoodle 6y ago
      Hell yeah! Never thought to find an Atmosphere reference in the comments @ HN.
- chrisandchips 6y ago
  I think it lives on in big platforms like Reddit, but I agree that it used to be far more prevalent on the net than it is. Youtube is a good example. It used to be so fun to just throw up videos on the internet, without caring how far they would really go. I definitely think there are great content creators on it nowadays and I'm glad that they're being paid for their hard work, but it still feels like we've lost something.
- passthejoe 6y ago
  It's VERY hard to make money with Google AdSense types of programs. The volume of traffic you need is so high that if you're there, it probably "pays" to sell the ads yourself and keep all the $$$. But that's hella difficult. Almost all news organizations -- they're not bloggers but chances are they're using blogging software (mostly WordPress) -- have figured this out. And they're still not making enough money from advertising. Hence subscriptions. Bloggers can go this route directly with https://substack.com https://substack.com. Google-owned YouTube's willingness to compensate those who make popular videos has fueled that service's growth and helped it draw a young audience. The fact that Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have no way of "paying" its top performers, as it were, is interesting. You get paid in eyeballs. In exposure. Since the pay for blogs is usually non-existent, there's some value in the "likes," and most people who envision making money off of their social-media/internet presence need to get a side hustle to their side hustle -- a product they can make and sell.
derefr 6y ago
> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. Or, to put that another way: blogs are/were effectively people publicizing their diaries. (Or, in the case of a work blog, publicizing the contents of their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook). > Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/ Not really? Facebook/Twitter/etc. are for "what you're thinking right now." Incomplete, out-of-context thoughts. Maybe conversations, where the thought plus access to the author for further questioning can "add up to" a complete, legible text. I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for "a breakthrough in understanding you've had, and want to preserve for posterity and your own future reference; where enough context is given that you (or someone else) can recapture the whole of the idea just from the words on the page, 10+ years down the line." That's the sole province of blogging. (Or of books, journal papers, and open letters. But blogs are a lot lower-overhead than any of those.)
- neutronicus 6y ago
  > I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for ... Sports journalists (including the mathy ones) use Twitter this way. And, boy howdy, do I hate it. But they do.
- antigirl 6y ago
  Twitter is not just incomplete/out of context thoughts. It can be. But not always. Follow the right people. I find it’s great for Javascript patterns and new findings. Of course the content is not discussed in great detail but you can get a quick jist from various sources. The same with instagram for photos. I much prefer to see photos in series but quick snapshot from various sources in one platform. This is what’s destroyed blogging mostly in my opinion, you can micro blog quickly. People used to blog because they wanted a presence on the internet, now you can have that with social media platforms
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    I am curious about the story behind your username. I don't understand it.
blobbers 6y ago
Yes - when I was overseas I kept a "blog" in the form of a website hosted at my university. I'd update it with a few pictures and some text about new things I was experiencing. It was more of a journal and something maybe if my friends and family wanted to read, they could. A slightly extroverted way of showing your inner thoughts and life.
rland 6y ago
Well, this is why I don’t have a blog. I have a lot of strong opinions that might be interesting to some people, but I don’t want to miss opportunities because some HR person googled my name and found a post they disagreed with. Or, in the future, not a real person but an algorithm.
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  Start an anonymous blog. I have one. Also an anonymous hacker news account. :)
  - Reelin 6y ago
    The trouble with that is that once you post something to it you can never associate it with yourself (even accidentally!) or deanonymization of everything else posted by that identity will also occur. Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just end up getting abused, but who knows?)
    - derrick_jensen 6y ago
      I'm about to release something very similar to this. You might see it here in a week or two
      - jborichevskiy 6y ago
        This sounds cool - I'll be keeping an eye out!
    - hk__2 6y ago
      > Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just end up getting abused, but who knows?) The downside is that as a reader you wouldn’t be able to follow your favorite authors anymore.
ian0 6y ago
>> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog. I also recall a distinction between homepages (IE where useful static information collected in one place) and blogs (personal stories not with the goal of teaching). Homepages could have lots of traffic but little real interaction (like FB today). Blogs would have lots of detailed interaction but but very little viewership.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Definitely true for me in the 2000s. My social network formed a bunch of circles with very little overlap. A blog, like the ones I and some of my friends used to have, would serve as a bridge, thanks to the sidebar linking to other people the blog author reads/recommends. Back in the day, I used to be active in a local gamedev scene, so my sidebar was mostly full of links to blogs of other hobbyist/aspiring game developers, who would in turn link back to me. If you were interested in gamedev, you could easily go from blog to blog and enumerate almost everyone in the group, but at each step you also had an opportunity to branch out to a given author's other interests. It was a nice way of discovering new things, and a more personal one. You jumped around topics and social networks simultaneously; at every step it wasn't just a new theme, but a new person, an acqauintance of an acquaintance, someone with a name (or more likely then, a nickname) you would remember and refer back to in conversations. Even though we mostly didn't know one another except from blogs and IRC, the Internet felt much more like a village back then. Now, it feels like a strip mall.
2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
>Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. This right here. You all need to calm down like you're all so unique you are all owed 1000s of views a day. Write for the sake of writing- it's rewarding in and of itself.
unityByFreedom 6y ago
> I wish there were more platforms to make this easy to do. Don't they all work like this by default? You don't have to share what you write everywhere. You also don't need to use FB or Twitter to blog.
aytekin 6y ago
Facebook/Twitter is terrible for putting down ideas. You don’t control what happens to your content. Posts get lost in the sea of millions of other posts. These companies constantly change policies. Writing is a public act. You might still be expecting some readership without the expectation of ad money or promotion of something. What I miss most about the blogs in 90s and early 00s is the conversation between blogs by linking, quoting and commenting each other. Reading blogs involved going from one blog to another, and reading blogs of 10 people about a single issue. It was a conversation. And you would constantly discover new blogs this way.
marban 6y ago
I've recently built https://flipso.com https://flipso.com — It's a mix of Posterous and Tumblr with optional private channels you mentioned.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
This is so true... Youtube is kind of the new blog because so many people don't like writing but they love seeing themselves on screen. This made it too commercial. All the top youtubers do it just for the sponsorship. People like Linus Tech Tips etc, all this "check this out from our sponsors" crap. It really put me off Youtube. The only ones I still watch are zero punctuation and EEVBlog. Dave is also doing it as a job but at least he didn't become annoying. Besides, I really prefer to read over watching videos as I can do it at my own pace. Except in cases where a lot is shown like EEVBlog, it makes sense there. But easy platforms exist. Wordpress is still there :) You just have to keep it up to date like a hawk.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  You might be interested by this: https://sponsor.ajay.app/ https://sponsor.ajay.app/
mesaframe 6y ago
> used against you in job interviews I used to think blogging come as complementary to your skills. How will anyone use them against you?
- mirimir 6y ago
  Well, it depends on what you blog about. If, say, you blog about some social/economic/political position that is (or becomes) unpopular/unacceptable, your career may be toast. Such as, for example, happened for James Damore. So if you're going to blog as your meatspace identity, you gotta protect your brand. If you want to blog carelessly, you'd better do that using a persona that can't readily be linked to your meatspace identity. That's why I'm here as Mirimir. But even then, Mirimir has a reputation to protect. And that's why I use other personas, which can't readily be linked to this one.
  - loquor 6y ago
    Can you leverage Mirimir ever in your real life? If Mirimir writes some stupendous essays but 5% of his posts are critical of say, some aspect of the LGBT community, then wouldn't it be a huge risk to your IRL reputation? Then you couldn't admit that you're Mirimir to others IRL. But I like the idea of blogging under a fake name! This will sound ridiculous, but I'm a young individual with big ambitions. I don't want to blog, lest my future enemies figure out my psyche to use it against me.
    - tome 6y ago
      > I don't want to blog, lest my future enemies figure out my psyche to use it against me. I think you overestimate the sophistication of your future enemies. The bigger risk may be that by not blogging you don't figure out your psyche, to use it for you.
    - mirimir 6y ago
      Yes, that is indeed a limitation. Nobody IRL will ever know that I'm Mirimir. Also, I can't attend physical events as Mirimir, or do anything with audio/video. I suppose that you could use other personas for totally non-controversial stuff. Indeed, you could have a range of them, and disclose some if you like. There is the issue of writing style. At this point, Mirimir is my only persona that writes extensively in English. There are a few others that are basically Mirimir's pseudonyms. But my IRL identity doesn't post much in English. For some others, I've translated into other languages, using offline software.
codebje 6y ago
I blog about my electronics project. It's public in that it's online and accessible but it is for me, both to ensure I think things through well enough to write them down coherently and to have a reference for decisions. I blog my work activities on an internal wiki for similar reasons. Major decisions need to be gathered in project documentation but small decisions and daily challenges are good to have written down.
kebman 6y ago
I wouldn't put an idea on Twitter or Facebook. That's where I put a short joke, or a pun, or some political troll meme. Then I watch the mentions and likes roll in. That's not to say that it never happens, but they aren't really well made platforms for it, outside posting a link to an actual blog. Personally, I think the blogosphere is covered pretty well for me by the likes of Medium. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but they've made a damn good job at cornering that part of the market for those more serious posts that were previously relegated to the blogosphere. That's a place I'd put a more well-formed idea. A great example is the article, "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" by Thomas Pueyo.[1] Outside that, blogs still exists! I still even have my own. I think the complaint is rather that they're hard to index or search. And to that end, there are many solutions and ways around it that still exist, such as syndication or even RSS. [1]: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...
freddie_mercury 6y ago
> written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership I've never really bought this line of argument. People who "write just for writing" don't publish. They write it in One Note or Evernote or Tiddlywiki or plain old text files on their laptop. They don't sign up for Wordpress accounts (or even worse, spend hours configuring some static site generator) and publish it. People publish things because they want them to be read. Having no indication that they are being read is, understandably, discouraging for people who are publishing things.
- needs 6y ago
  There is of course a middle ground between 'writing for writing' and 'writing for payback'. For instance people might want to post how they did some stuff, with the hope that it helps at least one guy. That's how most blog were written. Then internet slowly became a place where everything is a business opportunity, and blogs were relayed into the second zone. Google also somehow became much less useful when it comes to find good blogs, probably because of aggressive SEO.
laurex 6y ago
The thing I miss most is LiveJournal. Sure, over time it kind of failed, and later having data owned by possibly nefarious new owners didn't help reputationally, but what I loved was having a small, approved set of people who could read, and getting to know other people in long form, where writing was the primary draw, rather than links, brags, and ads, like social media has become. I miss the very internal nature that the platform allowed, but it was a more naive time, where the idea that whatever was there would inevitably become public wasn't a barrier to intimacy.

by mawise 6y ago

pmlnr 6y ago

> The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. This is what I've been pointing out for years as the lost core of the internet.

freehunter 6y ago
It seems like this is a cultural shift in society as well. There are no more hobbies, everything is a side hustle and if you can’t turn a profit from it, it’s not worth doing. I’m not an economist or sociologist so I can’t Even pretend to understand why this is, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed over the past few years.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Not my experience at all. The mods plus fanmade expansions community is bigger than ever. And so is open source. Way more stuff is free now than ever before.
  - neutronicus 6y ago
    Open source has a huge "personal brand-building" aspect to it
  - freehunter 6y ago
    It's not about giving things away for free, it's about doing things you like to do just for your own satisfaction. While there is a lot of that in the mods and open source space, there's also a lot of resume building, portfolio projects, etc. There's an insane amount of pressure to always be "shipping to production" no matter if your hobby is crocheting, gardening, writing code, blogging, building robots, playing music, painting, etc. Patreon, Etsy, OnlyFans, Kickstarter, and even Github (just to scratch the surface) all serve to put pressure on creators to turn their hobbies into second jobs.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      I'm sorry you feel this way, but I do not think this is true for most creators. Too many of my friends have made wonderful things for the sake of it. And they're so self-effacing, they won't even mention these things.
      - danjac 6y ago
        Not judging you or your friends, but perhaps those who can do hobbies just for fun are in a position of privilege (enough time, money, financial and professional security) to be able to do so? The "hustle culture" is very real and is I think a side effect of the gig economy and the end of the 9-5 secure job with its strict boundaries of work and leisure time. If you still have that kind of job it's easier to have hobbies with no outcome than personal satisfaction (assuming no other "distractions" like small children). Most creators I happen to know are hustling, whether on Github or Wordpress or Etsy or IRL, either trying to make some money on the side or building a portfolio for their career or to help them score their next gig. Those that aren't are retired or have some secure, traditional 9-5.
        renewiltord 6y ago
        Interesting. It's exactly the opposite. The guys I'm talking about are all running their own startups or at startups. So definitely not 9-5s.
- donaldcuckman 6y ago
  100% agree
- Kaze404 6y ago
  I've been saying for years that people need to stop pressuring themselves into being good at their hobbies. Have fun first, who cares if you can't sing/draw/paint?
- r_c_a_d 6y ago
  Is that true? Or is it just the case that people trying to make a profit have learned how to promote themselves to an extent that drowns out the hobbyists? I had some hobby pages in the 1990s that got a lot of views and came high up in search results. None of them were ever deliberately publicised. I doubt that any of my material would show in the top 1000 of any web search today.
- anthonypasq 6y ago
  This seems to be a function of the people you hang around with. Hobbies for most people are a way to spend money, not make it. No one I know has "side hustles"
blobbers 6y ago
The internet has stopped being an internet but rather being a few large intranets.
- state_less 6y ago
  It’s the corporate internet, upload/download ratio, it’s the lack of IP address space. It’s social media, it’s private blogging platforms and it’s the plight for power. It's the way you're given knowledge, slow with thought control and subtle hints It's the fast talk they use to abuse and feed my brain It stretches for as far as the eye can see It's reality, fuck it, it's everything but me Atmosphere - Scapegoat, with some blogging additions
  - pcdoodle 6y ago
    Hell yeah! Never thought to find an Atmosphere reference in the comments @ HN.
chrisandchips 6y ago
I think it lives on in big platforms like Reddit, but I agree that it used to be far more prevalent on the net than it is. Youtube is a good example. It used to be so fun to just throw up videos on the internet, without caring how far they would really go. I definitely think there are great content creators on it nowadays and I'm glad that they're being paid for their hard work, but it still feels like we've lost something.
passthejoe 6y ago
It's VERY hard to make money with Google AdSense types of programs. The volume of traffic you need is so high that if you're there, it probably "pays" to sell the ads yourself and keep all the $$$. But that's hella difficult. Almost all news organizations -- they're not bloggers but chances are they're using blogging software (mostly WordPress) -- have figured this out. And they're still not making enough money from advertising. Hence subscriptions. Bloggers can go this route directly with https://substack.com https://substack.com. Google-owned YouTube's willingness to compensate those who make popular videos has fueled that service's growth and helped it draw a young audience. The fact that Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have no way of "paying" its top performers, as it were, is interesting. You get paid in eyeballs. In exposure. Since the pay for blogs is usually non-existent, there's some value in the "likes," and most people who envision making money off of their social-media/internet presence need to get a side hustle to their side hustle -- a product they can make and sell.

derefr 6y ago

> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. Or, to put that another way: blogs are/were effectively people publicizing their diaries. (Or, in the case of a work blog, publicizing the contents of their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook). > Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/ Not really? Facebook/Twitter/etc. are for "what you're thinking right now." Incomplete, out-of-context thoughts. Maybe conversations, where the thought plus access to the author for further questioning can "add up to" a complete, legible text. I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for "a breakthrough in understanding you've had, and want to preserve for posterity and your own future reference; where enough context is given that you (or someone else) can recapture the whole of the idea just from the words on the page, 10+ years down the line." That's the sole province of blogging. (Or of books, journal papers, and open letters. But blogs are a lot lower-overhead than any of those.)

neutronicus 6y ago
> I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for ... Sports journalists (including the mathy ones) use Twitter this way. And, boy howdy, do I hate it. But they do.
antigirl 6y ago
Twitter is not just incomplete/out of context thoughts. It can be. But not always. Follow the right people. I find it’s great for Javascript patterns and new findings. Of course the content is not discussed in great detail but you can get a quick jist from various sources. The same with instagram for photos. I much prefer to see photos in series but quick snapshot from various sources in one platform. This is what’s destroyed blogging mostly in my opinion, you can micro blog quickly. People used to blog because they wanted a presence on the internet, now you can have that with social media platforms
- searchableguy 6y ago
  I am curious about the story behind your username. I don't understand it.

blobbers 6y ago

Yes - when I was overseas I kept a "blog" in the form of a website hosted at my university. I'd update it with a few pictures and some text about new things I was experiencing. It was more of a journal and something maybe if my friends and family wanted to read, they could. A slightly extroverted way of showing your inner thoughts and life.

rland 6y ago

Well, this is why I don’t have a blog. I have a lot of strong opinions that might be interesting to some people, but I don’t want to miss opportunities because some HR person googled my name and found a post they disagreed with. Or, in the future, not a real person but an algorithm.

throwaway1777 6y ago
Start an anonymous blog. I have one. Also an anonymous hacker news account. :)
- Reelin 6y ago
  The trouble with that is that once you post something to it you can never associate it with yourself (even accidentally!) or deanonymization of everything else posted by that identity will also occur. Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just end up getting abused, but who knows?)
  - derrick_jensen 6y ago
    I'm about to release something very similar to this. You might see it here in a week or two
    - jborichevskiy 6y ago
      This sounds cool - I'll be keeping an eye out!
  - hk__2 6y ago
    > Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just end up getting abused, but who knows?) The downside is that as a reader you wouldn’t be able to follow your favorite authors anymore.

ian0 6y ago

>> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. Exactly this. Im not sure if my experience was typical, but i recall lots of small mini communities of bloggers, where each blog would have less than a dozen real followers, but everyone would read the other peoples content. Thats why you had the "follows" tab on the sidebar of the blog. I also recall a distinction between homepages (IE where useful static information collected in one place) and blogs (personal stories not with the goal of teaching). Homepages could have lots of traffic but little real interaction (like FB today). Blogs would have lots of detailed interaction but but very little viewership.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Definitely true for me in the 2000s. My social network formed a bunch of circles with very little overlap. A blog, like the ones I and some of my friends used to have, would serve as a bridge, thanks to the sidebar linking to other people the blog author reads/recommends. Back in the day, I used to be active in a local gamedev scene, so my sidebar was mostly full of links to blogs of other hobbyist/aspiring game developers, who would in turn link back to me. If you were interested in gamedev, you could easily go from blog to blog and enumerate almost everyone in the group, but at each step you also had an opportunity to branch out to a given author's other interests. It was a nice way of discovering new things, and a more personal one. You jumped around topics and social networks simultaneously; at every step it wasn't just a new theme, but a new person, an acqauintance of an acquaintance, someone with a name (or more likely then, a nickname) you would remember and refer back to in conversations. Even though we mostly didn't know one another except from blogs and IRC, the Internet felt much more like a village back then. Now, it feels like a strip mall.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago

>Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. This right here. You all need to calm down like you're all so unique you are all owed 1000s of views a day. Write for the sake of writing- it's rewarding in and of itself.

unityByFreedom 6y ago

> I wish there were more platforms to make this easy to do. Don't they all work like this by default? You don't have to share what you write everywhere. You also don't need to use FB or Twitter to blog.

aytekin 6y ago

Facebook/Twitter is terrible for putting down ideas. You don’t control what happens to your content. Posts get lost in the sea of millions of other posts. These companies constantly change policies. Writing is a public act. You might still be expecting some readership without the expectation of ad money or promotion of something. What I miss most about the blogs in 90s and early 00s is the conversation between blogs by linking, quoting and commenting each other. Reading blogs involved going from one blog to another, and reading blogs of 10 people about a single issue. It was a conversation. And you would constantly discover new blogs this way.

marban 6y ago

I've recently built https://flipso.com https://flipso.com — It's a mix of Posterous and Tumblr with optional private channels you mentioned.

GekkePrutser 6y ago

This is so true... Youtube is kind of the new blog because so many people don't like writing but they love seeing themselves on screen. This made it too commercial. All the top youtubers do it just for the sponsorship. People like Linus Tech Tips etc, all this "check this out from our sponsors" crap. It really put me off Youtube. The only ones I still watch are zero punctuation and EEVBlog. Dave is also doing it as a job but at least he didn't become annoying. Besides, I really prefer to read over watching videos as I can do it at my own pace. Except in cases where a lot is shown like EEVBlog, it makes sense there. But easy platforms exist. Wordpress is still there :) You just have to keep it up to date like a hawk.

benhurmarcel 6y ago
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mesaframe 6y ago

> used against you in job interviews I used to think blogging come as complementary to your skills. How will anyone use them against you?

mirimir 6y ago
Well, it depends on what you blog about. If, say, you blog about some social/economic/political position that is (or becomes) unpopular/unacceptable, your career may be toast. Such as, for example, happened for James Damore. So if you're going to blog as your meatspace identity, you gotta protect your brand. If you want to blog carelessly, you'd better do that using a persona that can't readily be linked to your meatspace identity. That's why I'm here as Mirimir. But even then, Mirimir has a reputation to protect. And that's why I use other personas, which can't readily be linked to this one.
- loquor 6y ago
  Can you leverage Mirimir ever in your real life? If Mirimir writes some stupendous essays but 5% of his posts are critical of say, some aspect of the LGBT community, then wouldn't it be a huge risk to your IRL reputation? Then you couldn't admit that you're Mirimir to others IRL. But I like the idea of blogging under a fake name! This will sound ridiculous, but I'm a young individual with big ambitions. I don't want to blog, lest my future enemies figure out my psyche to use it against me.
  - tome 6y ago
    > I don't want to blog, lest my future enemies figure out my psyche to use it against me. I think you overestimate the sophistication of your future enemies. The bigger risk may be that by not blogging you don't figure out your psyche, to use it for you.
  - mirimir 6y ago
    Yes, that is indeed a limitation. Nobody IRL will ever know that I'm Mirimir. Also, I can't attend physical events as Mirimir, or do anything with audio/video. I suppose that you could use other personas for totally non-controversial stuff. Indeed, you could have a range of them, and disclose some if you like. There is the issue of writing style. At this point, Mirimir is my only persona that writes extensively in English. There are a few others that are basically Mirimir's pseudonyms. But my IRL identity doesn't post much in English. For some others, I've translated into other languages, using offline software.

codebje 6y ago

I blog about my electronics project. It's public in that it's online and accessible but it is for me, both to ensure I think things through well enough to write them down coherently and to have a reference for decisions. I blog my work activities on an internal wiki for similar reasons. Major decisions need to be gathered in project documentation but small decisions and daily challenges are good to have written down.

kebman 6y ago

I wouldn't put an idea on Twitter or Facebook. That's where I put a short joke, or a pun, or some political troll meme. Then I watch the mentions and likes roll in. That's not to say that it never happens, but they aren't really well made platforms for it, outside posting a link to an actual blog. Personally, I think the blogosphere is covered pretty well for me by the likes of Medium. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but they've made a damn good job at cornering that part of the market for those more serious posts that were previously relegated to the blogosphere. That's a place I'd put a more well-formed idea. A great example is the article, "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" by Thomas Pueyo.[1] Outside that, blogs still exists! I still even have my own. I think the complaint is rather that they're hard to index or search. And to that end, there are many solutions and ways around it that still exist, such as syndication or even RSS. [1]: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

freddie_mercury 6y ago

> written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership I've never really bought this line of argument. People who "write just for writing" don't publish. They write it in One Note or Evernote or Tiddlywiki or plain old text files on their laptop. They don't sign up for Wordpress accounts (or even worse, spend hours configuring some static site generator) and publish it. People publish things because they want them to be read. Having no indication that they are being read is, understandably, discouraging for people who are publishing things.

needs 6y ago
There is of course a middle ground between 'writing for writing' and 'writing for payback'. For instance people might want to post how they did some stuff, with the hope that it helps at least one guy. That's how most blog were written. Then internet slowly became a place where everything is a business opportunity, and blogs were relayed into the second zone. Google also somehow became much less useful when it comes to find good blogs, probably because of aggressive SEO.

laurex 6y ago

The thing I miss most is LiveJournal. Sure, over time it kind of failed, and later having data owned by possibly nefarious new owners didn't help reputationally, but what I loved was having a small, approved set of people who could read, and getting to know other people in long form, where writing was the primary draw, rather than links, brags, and ads, like social media has become. I miss the very internal nature that the platform allowed, but it was a more naive time, where the idea that whatever was there would inevitably become public wasn't a barrier to intimacy.