28 ms·

Blogging Is Not Dead

330 points by g-garron 6y ago

softwaredoug 6y ago
It all changed when marketing firms latched onto "blogging" Now it's sadly the case a lot of blogs don't have a lot of content, are full of SEO boilerplate, with click-bait headlines instead of being interesting or well written. Some blogs are great, well-written lead ins that end with "to get the end of this story, contact our sales person for a demo!". Or there's the form that pops up that really, really wants your email address for a GREAT newsletter! I think when a company has a 'blog' it really needs to fulfill a contract of actually providing useful, interesting content. It's the only way, honestly, your brand will build long term trust. Otherwise don't call it a 'blog' call it 'marketing information' or something...
- crazygringo 6y ago
  I don't think it changed at all. It's not like the old bloggers became marketing bloggers. They didn't change. The marketing blogs just became a new thing, a separate thing. I don't think I've ever been confused between the two, despite them both being called blogs. It's pretty obvious that a personal blog is one thing, and a company blog is another. They're both "weblogs", neither has a greater right to the name.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hn_check 6y ago
    "I don't think it changed at all. It's not like the old bloggers became marketing bloggers" The old bloggers all just moved on. Or at least the vast majority of them did. The number of terrible blogs are legion. Everyone has a motivation for the things they do, and a lot of the time the motivation for a blog is professional credibility/development, and for the self-employed, more directly in "leads" and good business. Neither works out. After your dozen-th time on the front-page of HN you realize it works the same as always -- a lot of passing, casual readers who might find the content exemplary but...eh. There was a time when those people would become regulars because you showed that you make good content, but it's just unnecessary now. Just watch HN and Reddit and if they make something good again, maybe it'll appear there.
    - taejo 6y ago
      > The old bloggers all just moved on. Or at least the vast majority of them did. Did they? Or do they just make up a decreasing fraction of blogs? I've got 95 blogs in my feed reader. My guess is that I've been subscribed to most of them for more than five years, but still about 80% of them posted within the last year (an arbitrary cut-off point, but I don't think it's fair to call something dead if it only ever showed signs of life a couple times a year in its prime).
  - softwaredoug 6y ago
    The change is the lower signal to noise on Google, Twitter, etc. So discoverability of good blog articles becomes ever tougher given how much crap is out there. This discourages new bloggers...
- calvinmorrison 6y ago
  I mean this is like the Rock Auto newsletter. It's unabashedly a bunch of sales spiel about their newest discounts, with one fun anecdotal story, a picture of a contestants car, and a pop quiz on obscure car knowledge. I love it!
- raindropm 6y ago
  Everything ruined when money get involves. It always dilute the value of something into money making machine 'trend' for some get rich quick marketer, they milk it dry(or try to), often in a spammy, tasteless way, then move on to(ruin) something new. What a shallow society we live in.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > Everything ruined when money get involves. Actually, you won't see much content if the creators don't get paid. So the problem is how to get money to them. Patreon is still one of the very few success stories here, depositing over 90% of contributions directly to creators.
    - DJHenk 6y ago
      > Actually, you won't see much content if the creators don't get paid. This is definitely not true. There are plenty of people who like to share their work without any monetary reward (be it either direct or indirect, building their personal 'brand' etc.), but who do it just for the fun of sharing and communicating with each other. The extreme focus on startups, earning money with your special thing, etc. that is common here is not representative for the whole world. There are plenty of people who can do without that. At least, it used to be that way. I'll admit that this 'get rich online' culture that is prevalent here is spreading more and more to the rest of society.
avian 6y ago
> We also have webmentions, so, if bloggers start using it, it will help us find other's blogs. My informal research [1] shows approximately zero adoption of webmention. For 44 blog posts I have written in the past two years, I did not have a single external link to a host that would support it. [1] https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2020/01/checking_webmention_adoption_rate/ https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2020/01/checking...
- rcarmo 6y ago
  Webmentions, pingbacks and the like were often abused for link spam. I disabled all of that on my blog ages ago (and I had to implement it in the first place, so... that was a drag).
  - onli 6y ago
    Webmentions don't exist for that long. It's unlikely you had to disable them ages ago. But they are basically trackbacks and it's easy to conflate them. That's also something I should repeat. As someone involved in an active blog engine project for many years now, webmentions annoyed me. They seemingly ignored that trackbacks existed and had already solved the issues webmentions now solve again. They should have been compatible, an extension ideally, but they are not. The project was not even interested enough to host a trackback/webmention converter, which would have given them an enormous adoption boost. Signals to me a complete disinterest of the "indie web" to integrate with the actually already existing independent and open web. I don't get it, it's a shame.
    - njkleiner 6y ago
      They were never really supposed to be interoperable with pingback from what I can tell, see the reasons here[0]. You're right in the sense that it's a classic case of <insert XKCD standards comic here>, but FYI there is a pingback to Webmention converter now[1]. [0]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention-faq#Why_webmention_instead_of_pingback https://indieweb.org/Webmention-faq#Why_webmention_instead_o... [1]: https://webmention.io/#forwarding https://webmention.io/#forwarding
gazelle21 6y ago
IF you have to argue if something is dead or not, it's not a good sign.
jakevoytko 6y ago
We're overly attached to a specific idea of a "blog". In practice, "web logging" never died, even if the specific blog format has diminished over time. Blogs are websites that host posts in chronological order, but defined in a very specific way that excludes your Facebook and Twitter. The difference isn't self-hosting - Blogger and Wordpress.com host your blog. I reckon the difference is aggregation. Facebook groups your posts with posts from everyone else. They get to curate individual feeds. People with money get to bypass the curation a little. Don't get me wrong, I have my own blog (link in profile) and I deleted my Facebook account years ago. But quite honestly, the format is less usable than having centralized aggregators that float the most popular content to the top. This is why we're all on Hacker News, right? The act of having the aggregator allows extra features to be overlayed, like community discussion. Are aggregators the "best" format by every metric? No, but it allows me to read content I like without doing a lot of work, so here I am.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  Isn't the need for aggregators a failure of search engines? To the credit of Google, as much as I disdain them, combating SEO spam is a hard problem. I think that blogging feels "dead" because of SEO spam and because ads pay for jack shit these days.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Google knows very well that they're padding their search results with e-commerce sites to the detriment of meaningful content.
- emsal 6y ago
  I think there's room for both self-directed aggregation (à la reader sites) as well as the centralized aggregator model. It's quite shackling to never have any control over the content that you're about to consume, and being able to check up on websites that you have personally discerned as being good content is quite empowering.
- tehjoker 6y ago
  This seems right, but I think it's also about authorial control of format and the expectation of readers that they are going to possibly read longer texts. Twitter is very up front about formats and character limits. Facebook is less dramatic but still very self contained. The placement alongside many other items that scream for attention, the possibility that facebook won't present it to your audience, presentation, and interactions mean investing in forms of writing outside the constraints of the medium is just not very worthwhile. There are places in Facebook where longer form writing is possible, but the system still doesn't really encourage it.
xwdv 6y ago
Blogging is not dead, it's just being rapidly made obsolete by commenting. Comments are everywhere. Total volume of comments on the internet compared to blogs is larger by several orders of magnitude. Readership is up, everything has comments. Comments don't care about SEO, or money, or fame, that makes them one of the purest forms of content you can find on the internet. You could argue that some sites have people commenting for fame because of karma systems, but ultimately that karma means nothing. Very few comments have ever "gone viral" the way a blog or youtube or tiktok video tries so hard to. Comments are like graffiti; ephemeral, and meant to be enjoyed in the moment you stumble across them. Very few comments make any kind of money for their author the way a blog does. Marketing firms have not latched onto comments yet the way they latch onto blogs. But when they do, it's over.
- AQuantized 6y ago
  I think this underestimates how much exploitation of this idea of comments as unbiased is currently taking place. There's a reason you can sell a Reddit account with a ton of karma and activity for a decent buck. Tons of PR firms now utilize faux accounts on almost all social media.
  - xwdv 6y ago
    Those however are a small portion of total comments. Pretty much whenever you see a blog you can bet it's being monetized somehow or used for some financial gain. When you see a comment, it's unlikely there is any motive behind it beyond expressing an idea. Now imagine the world where every comment is also some kind of ad or invitation to buy or subscribe to something. Hell.
    - kansface 6y ago
      > Those however are a small portion of total comments. When you see a comment, it's unlikely there is any motive behind it beyond expressing an idea. I haven't read or seen any studies. I'm really curious what percentage of the average reddit thread's comments are from companies, nation states, and paid for power users. > Now imagine the world where every comment is also some kind of ad or invitation to buy or subscribe to something. Hell. That would be product reviews!
TrackerFF 6y ago
Is it a cultural thing that differs from country to country? Here in Norway, the best paid "influencers" are still bloggers - though they are obviously on all channels these days. edit: But what I'm trying to get at is, no, at least here - blogs are not dead and forgotten / some esoteric channel for the very few.
bovermyer 6y ago
I don't think the volume of blogging decreased. It probably increased. The reason some people think blogging is dead is because the blog "signal" is much, much quieter than the social media "noise." It's a question of comparative volume.
foob 6y ago
If you want to see more high quality blog posts, then I highly recommend taking actions to help promote and encourage them. Sign up for a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed when you find a blog that consistently produces quality material. Post new or old content on Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Twitter, and other communities where you think they would be a good fit. Upvote and retweet quality content that you run across, and flag stuff that's blatantly marketing spam. Leave comments on the blog or reach out to the author over email. Even as a single individual, these sort of actions have a much bigger impact than you might expect. I used to blog extensively, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. The content I would write was loosely for marketing purposes, but I put a lot of effort into generating high quality content that I would genuinely enjoy reading myself. An article that I spent 50+ hours on and felt very proud of might have a 30% chance of reaching the front page of Hacker News. A fluffy post with a decent title that I spent only an hour or two on would still have a 10-15% chance of front paging. The way the math works out, it's simply much lower ROI to generate quality content. It's also a bit heartbreaking to invest a lot of time making something for other people to enjoy only for nobody to ever see it. The second chance queue on Hacker News is a major step in the right direction, and I'm grateful for all the times where my posts were given another chance. A lot of great content still slips through the cracks however, and relatively small actions by community members would go a long way towards helping incentives align towards generating quality content.
- thomasahle 6y ago
  Interesting, I didn't know about the second chance queue. This appears to be the best source of information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 Personally I was sad when my tiny python chess engine Sunfish [1] didn't make it past the two-three upvotes stage. However about half a year later somebody else submitted it and it got a lot of traction. I wonder how accepted it is to resubmit the same, or a version of, your project or blog post, to try your luck again. [1] https://github.com/thomasahle/sunfish https://github.com/thomasahle/sunfish
  - alextheparrot 6y ago
    The FAQ guidance seems to be that a few reposts a year iff the story didn’t already get transaction is fine — seems like a good barometer. Personally, I’d prefer if someone reposted a good blog post or project rather than trying to develop new things just to have the ability to post something.
rhacker 6y ago
Get out of the software development blogging bubble. Spend 3 minutes looking at each of the following: Look at woodworking blogs, recipe blogs, gardening blogs. One thing you'll note is that those are all filled with a shit fuck ton of ads and are completely unusable. I know this because my wife wades through that stuff and the only way she can is by using a blocker. I don't use a blocker because very few of the software specific websites I visit have ads (generally). Recipe blogs are the worst - here's a sample from pinch of yum: https://imgur.com/A4e53R5 https://imgur.com/A4e53R5
- Spivak 6y ago
  I would hesitate to call recipe blogs "blogs." They're ad farms with good SEO and the thinnest veneer of content to get clicks. There are actual cooking and baking blogs of the quality you see in software where professionals or hobbyists talk about their craft but they won't show up on Google with terms like "$food_name recipe" and it doesn't really make sense for them to. Cooking blogs are for cooking nerds -- people who have notebooks and scrap books full of recipe clippings from old magazines and cake boxes and a shelf of random dog-eared culinary textbooks and recipe anthologies that could knock a person out if you got hit with them. These blogs are full of crappy unflattering photography, zero web design skills, okay-ish writing, and cult-like followings.
  - watwut 6y ago
    It would actually made sense of them to show up. What google chooses to show does not make sense to show up. When it comes to cooking, google is just horribly bad.
    - Finnucane 6y ago
      Is there a "Hacker News" equivalent for cooking/foodie blogs? If not, there probably could be.
      - qznc 6y ago
        There is a subreddit for everything they say.
Hoasi 6y ago
Blogging is not dead. It is just unevenly discoverable. And that creates an interesting problem that is still waiting for a solution.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  >It is just unevenly discoverable. I suspect this makes me selfish, but I like it like this. It is fun finding out of the way blogs and being part of a tiny audience following an interesting but rarely discussed topic.
- mikro2nd 6y ago
  Every kind of discoverability in the internet is horrible and uneven, and unevenly favoured by present-day discovery engines (the GRAFT). I blogged about this some months ago: https://one.mikro2nd.net/2020/01/discoverability/ https://one.mikro2nd.net/2020/01/discoverability/
skybrian 6y ago
"X is alive / X is dead" is binary thinking and taking sides on this is pointless and divisive. Better to use a float rather than a boolean to model how popular something is.
NN88 6y ago
Google reader killed it. Not to mention, Reddit won't let you post blogs to their largest subreddits.
dnissley 6y ago
The blog discovery story is terrible, which I think is the only thing that would make someone say that blogging is dead. Anyone know of any good solutions for this? I've been kicking around an idea about manually associating blogs to twitter accounts, and then using twitter follows to create a graph for discovery purposes.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  The problem with any automated method is it is subject to hijacking by people who are interested in money. I think the best thing to do is to return to manual link referals. There are plenty of bloggers who will link to other blogs throughout their articles, or post articles with explicit lists of blogs they like. Good, interesting, blogs will rise to the top by being linked a lot.
ManoSinkosika 6y ago
Your content is great. I think blogging will never be dead
vinceguidry 6y ago
A blogger I used to follow, Steve Pavlina, shut down his forums like in 2011 after 5 years of running them stating that they were always completely irrelevant to his biz model. He's still posting to his blog, daily, having started in 2004. Still going strong after 15 years.
- klondike_klive 6y ago
  His name rings a bell - I remember reading his stuff about polyphasic sleep. Interesting guy, one of the first "Quantified Self" types I became aware of.
- coding123 6y ago
  Nice, thanks for pointing this out. I am amazed by the quality of writing! Nice random nugget: https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2020/05/herd-stupidity/ https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2020/05/herd-stupidity/ > This isn’t a situation where you should look to the masses for guidance. When you see idiotic behavior, don’t let the fact that everyone else seems fine with it persuade you that it’s probably okay. Stupid behavior that’s popular is still stupid. A bar full of idiots taking reassuring cues from each other is still a bar full of idiots.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Prophetic ... applies to the corona lockdown perfectly.
    - taejo 6y ago
      It's correct, but since it's from last week it's hardly prophetic.
PerilousD 6y ago
The original article was crap since the author stated "spent an hour trying to find blog and ...nothing" Any reasonable response would have been an hour trying to figure out where the "return" key was is NOT the same thing as an hour spent searching. Blog, by folks that don't give a crap about Googles SEO requirements exist, have existed and will still exist in the future.
djsumdog 6y ago
I still had that previous article the author references in another tab[2]. Yes, use an RSS Reader. RSS is not dead[0]. Hackernews often has blog posts. If you see a post you like, go to the main page and see if you like any of the other posts. If it's a blog you think you want to follow, subscribe to it. If, after a few months, you find none of the articles are interesting and often mark them all read, then just unsubscribe. If you blog, cross-promote it on Reddit, Twitter, your FB page (although if you don't use Twitter/FB often, it'll be just a trickle of clicks[1], but it's better than nothing), etc. Try not to use another platforms just to promote you. If you see blog posts you like, be sure to promote them! Maybe use one of your RSS reader apps just to dump one of those huge github aggregated blog lists with like 500 tech and personal blogs. You can scroll through it when you're bored and see if there's anything interesting and mark the rest as read. Maybe setup your own Solr server to index every blog you come across just for the hell of it? (I've been meaning to do this forever!) The big search engines aren't good at showing us blogs, so maybe it's up to us to find and promote them? [0]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-social-network-protocol/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-so... [1]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-effect/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-e... [2]: 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...
- hopesthoughts 6y ago
  I've never stopped using RSS. I'm now up to over 500 feeds. It took me a really long while to find a service I was happy with after Google Reader shut down, and it's still not perfect. However I've gotten it to where I can use it efficiently.
imprettycool 6y ago
The nice thing about RSS is that it's never gonna die
filmgirlcw 6y ago
Blogging isn't dead but blog discovery basically is. Fifteen years ago (through about 2009, I would say -- about the time Facebook demonstrably took over MySpace), there were tons of services and startups built around blog discovery. And even into the early 2010s, Tumblr was still a thriving community that paid host to many different different subcultures and demographics (whereas today, Tumblr is largely fandom). But now? The spammers helped murder the pingback/trackback -- RSS is still alive but it is often hidden and isn't even always a default for various static site blogging engines -- not to mention the lengths web browsers go to to deny that RSS even exists -- and the art of finding quality like-minded blogs of any size, is incredibly difficult. Google had a blog search part of its search engine but shut that down nearly a decade ago. (Frankly, the fact that Google keeps Blogger running is sort of amazing, although I would be shocked if more than one or two full time employees worked on it -- I have to assume all the maintenance is done by vendors and contractors.) Moreover, we've moved our communications to silos that don't allow for easy syndication (you haven't been able to auto-publish your blog/website to Facebook for years, for instance) or to formats (video), that are reliant on major giants (YouTube, Twitch, and to a lesser but growing extent, TikTok) rather than a user's own platform -- and that require a much higher barrier to entry for creators than blogging ever did. Way more people consumed blog content than ever regularly made their own blog -- but now it's even greater. But beyond the various platform silos and the move away from decentralized to closed social network behemoths, blogging also never properly embraced mobile. The act of blogging on mobile was too difficult for too long (Tumblr being the one exception), while Facebook and Twitter were quick to become mobile-first (and in Twitter's case, was originally designed for mobile). Blogging isn't dead but the curation and discovery tools that made it really take off in the 2000s is. As someone who owes their entire career to blogging, this makes me sad. But it is what it is.
- souterrain 6y ago
  > But now? The spammers helped murder the pingback/trackback -- RSS is still alive but it is often Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation. It seems both decentralised mail and content netizens have little choice but to seek shelter with large service providers as a defence from the trash on the net. I’m not saying the large players have a hand in spam, but they certainly aren’t being harmed by it in the same proportion as the individual hosting their own blog or smtp server.
gtrubetskoy 6y ago
Related - see my Ask HN on how to host your own blog without giving it to the centralized blogging services (I won't name): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206094
masswerk 6y ago
I'd say, there are significantly less high frequency blogs than, say, 10 years ago. One of the reasons for this is the radical decline in means of monetization. In the heyday of blogging, you could do it for living, with just a few non-obtrusive ads. Which has changed a lot. Even, if you would plaster your site with ads, like news outlets, with little room left for actually reading, chances are, you won't see much of a return. As a result, blogging is mostly a hobbyist endeavor (again).
tracker1 6y ago
From a blog without an RSS feed...
- acangiano 6y ago
  https://www.garron.blog/en/feed.xml https://www.garron.blog/en/feed.xml
  - tracker1 6y ago
    how did you find that... when I hit the home page, I looked at the source and not finding either an RSS header or a link to that feed.xml
abbadadda 6y ago
I wonder if a dedicated company could build a non-privacy invasive RSS reader that could: (1) show targeted ads based on a user's curated blog feed; (2) Develop a profit-sharing model for those authors that generate the most traffic. I'm kind of thinking like hackernews but (A) user-curated content; and (B) Advertising; and (C) optional subscriptions to support the bloggers. There could of course be a discovery mode to find new blogs, but the default would be user-curated. To ensure payments were significant enough to overcome the micropayment problem, perhaps a "minimum payout" could be set for authors so they could accumulate proceeds (and see some fruits of their labor without having to set up their own individual payment system) even if they couldn't withdraw them yet. If someone really was motivated they might even be able to set this up as a non-profit. Just kind of a brain dump. Thinking of this as "the front page for blogs" by bloggers for bloggers (instead of a big corporation whose primary objective is to generate profits, which is exceedingly difficult with traditional RSS feeds). Fraud and spoofing views would be an obvious challenge of this framework.
klysm 6y ago
It’s really interesting that HN can be a long term asynchronous channel for discourse through independent blogs
ramkarthikk 6y ago
There are many blogs today but when (many) people say they miss the old days of blogging, it is mostly not about the number of blogs. Back then, there was a huge community around blogs. That community has moved to Twitter and other places. Previously, people would comment on blogs and if you are a frequent reader of a blog, you would recognize a lot of people who comment there and you may even become friends with them. Constructive comments have moved away from the blogs and are now on Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit etc. There used to be services specifically around the blogging space, like Technorati (and even StumbleUpon to an extent). I also feel, and this might just be me, people have started associating purpose with mediums. If you want to post silly or just casual stuff, you post it on Twitter. If you have something really valuable and on brand, you post it on your blog. People used to post everything to their blogs because that's where they could previously share their thoughts.
alexmingoia 6y ago
What makes content discoverable on Twitter? Reposting and linking to other posts. Bloggers should do more of that.
cageface 6y ago
Content on open platforms like blogs and podcasts has two serious handicaps. First, it doesn't have any built in system for liking, commenting on and sharing content. Second, there is no low-friction way to monetize it except for advertising. I don't see any easy, scalable solutions to these problems but until they're solved open platforms will cater to niche audiences.
milap 6y ago
We need youtube for bloggers.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Youtube is already dominated by bloggers, it's all game reviews, food / cooking, makeup, etc. Just open it up in an anonymous browser window and you'll see what I mean. However, and I'm making an assumption here, it's not the blogs you're personally interested in. I bought a synthesizer the other day (UNO Synth, relatively cheap (most electronic instruments are expensive I'm afraid :( )) and you quickly run into the music youtubers, just people at their own home or home studio that show you a product and fiddle with it. There is a LOT of content like that on youtube, in all genres. It's just that they're not for everyone. I prefer reading a blog over watching a video about programming. I don't like having to listen to people (except if it's my adopted dad AvE), and I don't have the patience to sit through a half hour video. But it's there. One channel that frequently features something that would be on HN is Tom Scott, who makes a wide range of relatively short / punchy videos about a subject, ranging from weird art installations in the middle of nowhere to the basics of computers and text compression. That is blog content, it's just that the presentation is different.
- robjan 6y ago
  That's Wordpress.com or Tumblr
ipiz0618 6y ago
Didn't think blogging even dying given the number of high quality blog posts from personal blogs / Medium on HN. Some dev.to posts really resemble blog posts as well. Maybe it's a developer specific culture?
shruubi 6y ago
I've tried blogging in the past, but have since given up on it. I found that I was putting in a lot of time and effort to have my work read by maybe 3-5 people and came to the conclusion that I had nothing interesting or worthwhile to contribute or say, nor am I a person who can compete with the usual horde of twitter-tech-celebrities who seemingly control a majority of the audience. These days, whether it be blogs or social media, the end goal is becoming less about saying something worthwhile and more about building and maintaining some kind of personal brand. So while I'll continue being another worthless face in the crowd, consuming content, I also won't mourn the death of blogging or any other similar forms.
- blueridge 6y ago
  Agreed. Pulling over a comment I left the other day in a similar thread about blogging, seems relevant here: 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.
type0 6y ago
It is kinda dead, not in a way BBS is dead, or even IRC. Anecdotally less and less blogs enable comments or curate the comment spam. I even see some HN users advice their readers to use this site for comments where there previously had a comments section. Certain Disqus'ting services did not help this blogging demise.
lazarous 6y ago
I'd welcome some feedback. I'm hoping to start a blog based around my hobby and findings. It won't be anything ground breaking but I'd like somewhere to put my thoughts and feelings. I feel people may enjoy the content and pictures. Do you think its worth me creating a blog like this, hoping that one day I could build up an organic following and potentially monetise it?
juliend2 6y ago
I think psychology needs to be taken into account here: The currency we have right now on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is reputation. There, it's in the form of Followers. That's the very currency that Stack Overflow uses to grow and sustain. It's "gamified". And the blogosphere needs that, too. And in a way, blogs have that, but it's in the form of Reddit and HN and some other sites, where people get their karma fix by taking the time to read the blog post (upfront time investment), comment on it (risk losing karma), then get their comment being liked (return on investment), which augment their karma. (Facebook does not have a Karma system like Reddit or HN has. But if it would, it would make the world a bit more like a certain black mirror episode of season 2.) Why do you see coders put their reddit+HN profile links on their site? Because they want their reputation/karma/notoriety to follow them in real-life context, so it can be converted as real "notoriety currency". (people looking at their profile will say Gosh, this guy has 2000 points on SO and 4000 points on HN, he must be very smart or influent!). So my guess is that the reason blogs still exist is because of sites like Reddit, HN, where people can get reputation (and not only knowledge) out of their reading. There's also something satisfying in the act of praising a good post with your friends. It's like watching a good movie and talking about how good it is with your friends. And blogs also survived because that still being viewed as THE most professional was of expressing one's opinions. It gives you gravitas by default when you have your own blog, compared to having a Twitter / Facebook account like the plebs. And you get the best of both worlds when you promote your blog posts on social networks.
harvey1111 6y ago
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330 points by g-garron 6y ago

It all changed when marketing firms latched onto "blogging" Now it's sadly the case a lot of blogs don't have a lot of content, are full of SEO boilerplate, with click-bait headlines instead of being interesting or well written. Some blogs are great, well-written lead ins that end with "to get the end of this story, contact our sales person for a demo!". Or there's the form that pops up that really, really wants your email address for a GREAT newsletter! I think when a company has a 'blog' it really needs to fulfill a contract of actually providing useful, interesting content. It's the only way, honestly, your brand will build long term trust. Otherwise don't call it a 'blog' call it 'marketing information' or something...

crazygringo 6y ago
I don't think it changed at all. It's not like the old bloggers became marketing bloggers. They didn't change. The marketing blogs just became a new thing, a separate thing. I don't think I've ever been confused between the two, despite them both being called blogs. It's pretty obvious that a personal blog is one thing, and a company blog is another. They're both "weblogs", neither has a greater right to the name.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hn_check 6y ago
  "I don't think it changed at all. It's not like the old bloggers became marketing bloggers" The old bloggers all just moved on. Or at least the vast majority of them did. The number of terrible blogs are legion. Everyone has a motivation for the things they do, and a lot of the time the motivation for a blog is professional credibility/development, and for the self-employed, more directly in "leads" and good business. Neither works out. After your dozen-th time on the front-page of HN you realize it works the same as always -- a lot of passing, casual readers who might find the content exemplary but...eh. There was a time when those people would become regulars because you showed that you make good content, but it's just unnecessary now. Just watch HN and Reddit and if they make something good again, maybe it'll appear there.
  - taejo 6y ago
    > The old bloggers all just moved on. Or at least the vast majority of them did. Did they? Or do they just make up a decreasing fraction of blogs? I've got 95 blogs in my feed reader. My guess is that I've been subscribed to most of them for more than five years, but still about 80% of them posted within the last year (an arbitrary cut-off point, but I don't think it's fair to call something dead if it only ever showed signs of life a couple times a year in its prime).
- softwaredoug 6y ago
  The change is the lower signal to noise on Google, Twitter, etc. So discoverability of good blog articles becomes ever tougher given how much crap is out there. This discourages new bloggers...
calvinmorrison 6y ago
I mean this is like the Rock Auto newsletter. It's unabashedly a bunch of sales spiel about their newest discounts, with one fun anecdotal story, a picture of a contestants car, and a pop quiz on obscure car knowledge. I love it!
raindropm 6y ago
Everything ruined when money get involves. It always dilute the value of something into money making machine 'trend' for some get rich quick marketer, they milk it dry(or try to), often in a spammy, tasteless way, then move on to(ruin) something new. What a shallow society we live in.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > Everything ruined when money get involves. Actually, you won't see much content if the creators don't get paid. So the problem is how to get money to them. Patreon is still one of the very few success stories here, depositing over 90% of contributions directly to creators.
  - DJHenk 6y ago
    > Actually, you won't see much content if the creators don't get paid. This is definitely not true. There are plenty of people who like to share their work without any monetary reward (be it either direct or indirect, building their personal 'brand' etc.), but who do it just for the fun of sharing and communicating with each other. The extreme focus on startups, earning money with your special thing, etc. that is common here is not representative for the whole world. There are plenty of people who can do without that. At least, it used to be that way. I'll admit that this 'get rich online' culture that is prevalent here is spreading more and more to the rest of society.

avian 6y ago

> We also have webmentions, so, if bloggers start using it, it will help us find other's blogs. My informal research [1] shows approximately zero adoption of webmention. For 44 blog posts I have written in the past two years, I did not have a single external link to a host that would support it. [1] https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2020/01/checking_webmention_adoption_rate/ https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2020/01/checking...

rcarmo 6y ago
Webmentions, pingbacks and the like were often abused for link spam. I disabled all of that on my blog ages ago (and I had to implement it in the first place, so... that was a drag).
- onli 6y ago
  Webmentions don't exist for that long. It's unlikely you had to disable them ages ago. But they are basically trackbacks and it's easy to conflate them. That's also something I should repeat. As someone involved in an active blog engine project for many years now, webmentions annoyed me. They seemingly ignored that trackbacks existed and had already solved the issues webmentions now solve again. They should have been compatible, an extension ideally, but they are not. The project was not even interested enough to host a trackback/webmention converter, which would have given them an enormous adoption boost. Signals to me a complete disinterest of the "indie web" to integrate with the actually already existing independent and open web. I don't get it, it's a shame.
  - njkleiner 6y ago
    They were never really supposed to be interoperable with pingback from what I can tell, see the reasons here[0]. You're right in the sense that it's a classic case of <insert XKCD standards comic here>, but FYI there is a pingback to Webmention converter now[1]. [0]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention-faq#Why_webmention_instead_of_pingback https://indieweb.org/Webmention-faq#Why_webmention_instead_o... [1]: https://webmention.io/#forwarding https://webmention.io/#forwarding

gazelle21 6y ago

IF you have to argue if something is dead or not, it's not a good sign.

jakevoytko 6y ago

We're overly attached to a specific idea of a "blog". In practice, "web logging" never died, even if the specific blog format has diminished over time. Blogs are websites that host posts in chronological order, but defined in a very specific way that excludes your Facebook and Twitter. The difference isn't self-hosting - Blogger and Wordpress.com host your blog. I reckon the difference is aggregation. Facebook groups your posts with posts from everyone else. They get to curate individual feeds. People with money get to bypass the curation a little. Don't get me wrong, I have my own blog (link in profile) and I deleted my Facebook account years ago. But quite honestly, the format is less usable than having centralized aggregators that float the most popular content to the top. This is why we're all on Hacker News, right? The act of having the aggregator allows extra features to be overlayed, like community discussion. Are aggregators the "best" format by every metric? No, but it allows me to read content I like without doing a lot of work, so here I am.

ravenstine 6y ago
Isn't the need for aggregators a failure of search engines? To the credit of Google, as much as I disdain them, combating SEO spam is a hard problem. I think that blogging feels "dead" because of SEO spam and because ads pay for jack shit these days.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Google knows very well that they're padding their search results with e-commerce sites to the detriment of meaningful content.
emsal 6y ago
I think there's room for both self-directed aggregation (à la reader sites) as well as the centralized aggregator model. It's quite shackling to never have any control over the content that you're about to consume, and being able to check up on websites that you have personally discerned as being good content is quite empowering.
tehjoker 6y ago
This seems right, but I think it's also about authorial control of format and the expectation of readers that they are going to possibly read longer texts. Twitter is very up front about formats and character limits. Facebook is less dramatic but still very self contained. The placement alongside many other items that scream for attention, the possibility that facebook won't present it to your audience, presentation, and interactions mean investing in forms of writing outside the constraints of the medium is just not very worthwhile. There are places in Facebook where longer form writing is possible, but the system still doesn't really encourage it.

xwdv 6y ago

Blogging is not dead, it's just being rapidly made obsolete by commenting. Comments are everywhere. Total volume of comments on the internet compared to blogs is larger by several orders of magnitude. Readership is up, everything has comments. Comments don't care about SEO, or money, or fame, that makes them one of the purest forms of content you can find on the internet. You could argue that some sites have people commenting for fame because of karma systems, but ultimately that karma means nothing. Very few comments have ever "gone viral" the way a blog or youtube or tiktok video tries so hard to. Comments are like graffiti; ephemeral, and meant to be enjoyed in the moment you stumble across them. Very few comments make any kind of money for their author the way a blog does. Marketing firms have not latched onto comments yet the way they latch onto blogs. But when they do, it's over.

AQuantized 6y ago
I think this underestimates how much exploitation of this idea of comments as unbiased is currently taking place. There's a reason you can sell a Reddit account with a ton of karma and activity for a decent buck. Tons of PR firms now utilize faux accounts on almost all social media.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Those however are a small portion of total comments. Pretty much whenever you see a blog you can bet it's being monetized somehow or used for some financial gain. When you see a comment, it's unlikely there is any motive behind it beyond expressing an idea. Now imagine the world where every comment is also some kind of ad or invitation to buy or subscribe to something. Hell.
  - kansface 6y ago
    > Those however are a small portion of total comments. When you see a comment, it's unlikely there is any motive behind it beyond expressing an idea. I haven't read or seen any studies. I'm really curious what percentage of the average reddit thread's comments are from companies, nation states, and paid for power users. > Now imagine the world where every comment is also some kind of ad or invitation to buy or subscribe to something. Hell. That would be product reviews!

TrackerFF 6y ago

Is it a cultural thing that differs from country to country? Here in Norway, the best paid "influencers" are still bloggers - though they are obviously on all channels these days. edit: But what I'm trying to get at is, no, at least here - blogs are not dead and forgotten / some esoteric channel for the very few.

bovermyer 6y ago

I don't think the volume of blogging decreased. It probably increased. The reason some people think blogging is dead is because the blog "signal" is much, much quieter than the social media "noise." It's a question of comparative volume.

foob 6y ago

If you want to see more high quality blog posts, then I highly recommend taking actions to help promote and encourage them. Sign up for a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed when you find a blog that consistently produces quality material. Post new or old content on Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, Twitter, and other communities where you think they would be a good fit. Upvote and retweet quality content that you run across, and flag stuff that's blatantly marketing spam. Leave comments on the blog or reach out to the author over email. Even as a single individual, these sort of actions have a much bigger impact than you might expect. I used to blog extensively, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. The content I would write was loosely for marketing purposes, but I put a lot of effort into generating high quality content that I would genuinely enjoy reading myself. An article that I spent 50+ hours on and felt very proud of might have a 30% chance of reaching the front page of Hacker News. A fluffy post with a decent title that I spent only an hour or two on would still have a 10-15% chance of front paging. The way the math works out, it's simply much lower ROI to generate quality content. It's also a bit heartbreaking to invest a lot of time making something for other people to enjoy only for nobody to ever see it. The second chance queue on Hacker News is a major step in the right direction, and I'm grateful for all the times where my posts were given another chance. A lot of great content still slips through the cracks however, and relatively small actions by community members would go a long way towards helping incentives align towards generating quality content.

thomasahle 6y ago
Interesting, I didn't know about the second chance queue. This appears to be the best source of information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 Personally I was sad when my tiny python chess engine Sunfish [1] didn't make it past the two-three upvotes stage. However about half a year later somebody else submitted it and it got a lot of traction. I wonder how accepted it is to resubmit the same, or a version of, your project or blog post, to try your luck again. [1] https://github.com/thomasahle/sunfish https://github.com/thomasahle/sunfish
- alextheparrot 6y ago
  The FAQ guidance seems to be that a few reposts a year iff the story didn’t already get transaction is fine — seems like a good barometer. Personally, I’d prefer if someone reposted a good blog post or project rather than trying to develop new things just to have the ability to post something.

rhacker 6y ago

Get out of the software development blogging bubble. Spend 3 minutes looking at each of the following: Look at woodworking blogs, recipe blogs, gardening blogs. One thing you'll note is that those are all filled with a shit fuck ton of ads and are completely unusable. I know this because my wife wades through that stuff and the only way she can is by using a blocker. I don't use a blocker because very few of the software specific websites I visit have ads (generally). Recipe blogs are the worst - here's a sample from pinch of yum: https://imgur.com/A4e53R5 https://imgur.com/A4e53R5

Spivak 6y ago
I would hesitate to call recipe blogs "blogs." They're ad farms with good SEO and the thinnest veneer of content to get clicks. There are actual cooking and baking blogs of the quality you see in software where professionals or hobbyists talk about their craft but they won't show up on Google with terms like "$food_name recipe" and it doesn't really make sense for them to. Cooking blogs are for cooking nerds -- people who have notebooks and scrap books full of recipe clippings from old magazines and cake boxes and a shelf of random dog-eared culinary textbooks and recipe anthologies that could knock a person out if you got hit with them. These blogs are full of crappy unflattering photography, zero web design skills, okay-ish writing, and cult-like followings.
- watwut 6y ago
  It would actually made sense of them to show up. What google chooses to show does not make sense to show up. When it comes to cooking, google is just horribly bad.
  - Finnucane 6y ago
    Is there a "Hacker News" equivalent for cooking/foodie blogs? If not, there probably could be.
    - qznc 6y ago
      There is a subreddit for everything they say.

Hoasi 6y ago

Blogging is not dead. It is just unevenly discoverable. And that creates an interesting problem that is still waiting for a solution.

ImaCake 6y ago
>It is just unevenly discoverable. I suspect this makes me selfish, but I like it like this. It is fun finding out of the way blogs and being part of a tiny audience following an interesting but rarely discussed topic.
mikro2nd 6y ago
Every kind of discoverability in the internet is horrible and uneven, and unevenly favoured by present-day discovery engines (the GRAFT). I blogged about this some months ago: https://one.mikro2nd.net/2020/01/discoverability/ https://one.mikro2nd.net/2020/01/discoverability/

skybrian 6y ago

"X is alive / X is dead" is binary thinking and taking sides on this is pointless and divisive. Better to use a float rather than a boolean to model how popular something is.

NN88 6y ago

Google reader killed it. Not to mention, Reddit won't let you post blogs to their largest subreddits.

dnissley 6y ago

The blog discovery story is terrible, which I think is the only thing that would make someone say that blogging is dead. Anyone know of any good solutions for this? I've been kicking around an idea about manually associating blogs to twitter accounts, and then using twitter follows to create a graph for discovery purposes.

ImaCake 6y ago
The problem with any automated method is it is subject to hijacking by people who are interested in money. I think the best thing to do is to return to manual link referals. There are plenty of bloggers who will link to other blogs throughout their articles, or post articles with explicit lists of blogs they like. Good, interesting, blogs will rise to the top by being linked a lot.

ManoSinkosika 6y ago

Your content is great. I think blogging will never be dead

vinceguidry 6y ago

A blogger I used to follow, Steve Pavlina, shut down his forums like in 2011 after 5 years of running them stating that they were always completely irrelevant to his biz model. He's still posting to his blog, daily, having started in 2004. Still going strong after 15 years.

klondike_klive 6y ago
His name rings a bell - I remember reading his stuff about polyphasic sleep. Interesting guy, one of the first "Quantified Self" types I became aware of.
coding123 6y ago
Nice, thanks for pointing this out. I am amazed by the quality of writing! Nice random nugget: https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2020/05/herd-stupidity/ https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2020/05/herd-stupidity/ > This isn’t a situation where you should look to the masses for guidance. When you see idiotic behavior, don’t let the fact that everyone else seems fine with it persuade you that it’s probably okay. Stupid behavior that’s popular is still stupid. A bar full of idiots taking reassuring cues from each other is still a bar full of idiots.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Prophetic ... applies to the corona lockdown perfectly.
  - taejo 6y ago
    It's correct, but since it's from last week it's hardly prophetic.

PerilousD 6y ago

The original article was crap since the author stated "spent an hour trying to find blog and ...nothing" Any reasonable response would have been an hour trying to figure out where the "return" key was is NOT the same thing as an hour spent searching. Blog, by folks that don't give a crap about Googles SEO requirements exist, have existed and will still exist in the future.

djsumdog 6y ago

I still had that previous article the author references in another tab[2]. Yes, use an RSS Reader. RSS is not dead[0]. Hackernews often has blog posts. If you see a post you like, go to the main page and see if you like any of the other posts. If it's a blog you think you want to follow, subscribe to it. If, after a few months, you find none of the articles are interesting and often mark them all read, then just unsubscribe. If you blog, cross-promote it on Reddit, Twitter, your FB page (although if you don't use Twitter/FB often, it'll be just a trickle of clicks[1], but it's better than nothing), etc. Try not to use another platforms just to promote you. If you see blog posts you like, be sure to promote them! Maybe use one of your RSS reader apps just to dump one of those huge github aggregated blog lists with like 500 tech and personal blogs. You can scroll through it when you're bored and see if there's anything interesting and mark the rest as read. Maybe setup your own Solr server to index every blog you come across just for the hell of it? (I've been meaning to do this forever!) The big search engines aren't good at showing us blogs, so maybe it's up to us to find and promote them? [0]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-social-network-protocol/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-so... [1]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-effect/ https://battlepenguin.com/tech/facebook-and-the-silent-bob-e... [2]: 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...

hopesthoughts 6y ago
I've never stopped using RSS. I'm now up to over 500 feeds. It took me a really long while to find a service I was happy with after Google Reader shut down, and it's still not perfect. However I've gotten it to where I can use it efficiently.

imprettycool 6y ago

The nice thing about RSS is that it's never gonna die

filmgirlcw 6y ago

Blogging isn't dead but blog discovery basically is. Fifteen years ago (through about 2009, I would say -- about the time Facebook demonstrably took over MySpace), there were tons of services and startups built around blog discovery. And even into the early 2010s, Tumblr was still a thriving community that paid host to many different different subcultures and demographics (whereas today, Tumblr is largely fandom). But now? The spammers helped murder the pingback/trackback -- RSS is still alive but it is often hidden and isn't even always a default for various static site blogging engines -- not to mention the lengths web browsers go to to deny that RSS even exists -- and the art of finding quality like-minded blogs of any size, is incredibly difficult. Google had a blog search part of its search engine but shut that down nearly a decade ago. (Frankly, the fact that Google keeps Blogger running is sort of amazing, although I would be shocked if more than one or two full time employees worked on it -- I have to assume all the maintenance is done by vendors and contractors.) Moreover, we've moved our communications to silos that don't allow for easy syndication (you haven't been able to auto-publish your blog/website to Facebook for years, for instance) or to formats (video), that are reliant on major giants (YouTube, Twitch, and to a lesser but growing extent, TikTok) rather than a user's own platform -- and that require a much higher barrier to entry for creators than blogging ever did. Way more people consumed blog content than ever regularly made their own blog -- but now it's even greater. But beyond the various platform silos and the move away from decentralized to closed social network behemoths, blogging also never properly embraced mobile. The act of blogging on mobile was too difficult for too long (Tumblr being the one exception), while Facebook and Twitter were quick to become mobile-first (and in Twitter's case, was originally designed for mobile). Blogging isn't dead but the curation and discovery tools that made it really take off in the 2000s is. As someone who owes their entire career to blogging, this makes me sad. But it is what it is.

souterrain 6y ago
> But now? The spammers helped murder the pingback/trackback -- RSS is still alive but it is often Spammers are such superb agents of Internet centralisation. It seems both decentralised mail and content netizens have little choice but to seek shelter with large service providers as a defence from the trash on the net. I’m not saying the large players have a hand in spam, but they certainly aren’t being harmed by it in the same proportion as the individual hosting their own blog or smtp server.

gtrubetskoy 6y ago

Related - see my Ask HN on how to host your own blog without giving it to the centralized blogging services (I won't name): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23206094

masswerk 6y ago

I'd say, there are significantly less high frequency blogs than, say, 10 years ago. One of the reasons for this is the radical decline in means of monetization. In the heyday of blogging, you could do it for living, with just a few non-obtrusive ads. Which has changed a lot. Even, if you would plaster your site with ads, like news outlets, with little room left for actually reading, chances are, you won't see much of a return. As a result, blogging is mostly a hobbyist endeavor (again).

tracker1 6y ago

From a blog without an RSS feed...

acangiano 6y ago
https://www.garron.blog/en/feed.xml https://www.garron.blog/en/feed.xml
- tracker1 6y ago
  how did you find that... when I hit the home page, I looked at the source and not finding either an RSS header or a link to that feed.xml

abbadadda 6y ago

I wonder if a dedicated company could build a non-privacy invasive RSS reader that could: (1) show targeted ads based on a user's curated blog feed; (2) Develop a profit-sharing model for those authors that generate the most traffic. I'm kind of thinking like hackernews but (A) user-curated content; and (B) Advertising; and (C) optional subscriptions to support the bloggers. There could of course be a discovery mode to find new blogs, but the default would be user-curated. To ensure payments were significant enough to overcome the micropayment problem, perhaps a "minimum payout" could be set for authors so they could accumulate proceeds (and see some fruits of their labor without having to set up their own individual payment system) even if they couldn't withdraw them yet. If someone really was motivated they might even be able to set this up as a non-profit. Just kind of a brain dump. Thinking of this as "the front page for blogs" by bloggers for bloggers (instead of a big corporation whose primary objective is to generate profits, which is exceedingly difficult with traditional RSS feeds). Fraud and spoofing views would be an obvious challenge of this framework.

klysm 6y ago

It’s really interesting that HN can be a long term asynchronous channel for discourse through independent blogs

ramkarthikk 6y ago

There are many blogs today but when (many) people say they miss the old days of blogging, it is mostly not about the number of blogs. Back then, there was a huge community around blogs. That community has moved to Twitter and other places. Previously, people would comment on blogs and if you are a frequent reader of a blog, you would recognize a lot of people who comment there and you may even become friends with them. Constructive comments have moved away from the blogs and are now on Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit etc. There used to be services specifically around the blogging space, like Technorati (and even StumbleUpon to an extent). I also feel, and this might just be me, people have started associating purpose with mediums. If you want to post silly or just casual stuff, you post it on Twitter. If you have something really valuable and on brand, you post it on your blog. People used to post everything to their blogs because that's where they could previously share their thoughts.

alexmingoia 6y ago

What makes content discoverable on Twitter? Reposting and linking to other posts. Bloggers should do more of that.

cageface 6y ago

Content on open platforms like blogs and podcasts has two serious handicaps. First, it doesn't have any built in system for liking, commenting on and sharing content. Second, there is no low-friction way to monetize it except for advertising. I don't see any easy, scalable solutions to these problems but until they're solved open platforms will cater to niche audiences.

milap 6y ago

We need youtube for bloggers.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Youtube is already dominated by bloggers, it's all game reviews, food / cooking, makeup, etc. Just open it up in an anonymous browser window and you'll see what I mean. However, and I'm making an assumption here, it's not the blogs you're personally interested in. I bought a synthesizer the other day (UNO Synth, relatively cheap (most electronic instruments are expensive I'm afraid :( )) and you quickly run into the music youtubers, just people at their own home or home studio that show you a product and fiddle with it. There is a LOT of content like that on youtube, in all genres. It's just that they're not for everyone. I prefer reading a blog over watching a video about programming. I don't like having to listen to people (except if it's my adopted dad AvE), and I don't have the patience to sit through a half hour video. But it's there. One channel that frequently features something that would be on HN is Tom Scott, who makes a wide range of relatively short / punchy videos about a subject, ranging from weird art installations in the middle of nowhere to the basics of computers and text compression. That is blog content, it's just that the presentation is different.
robjan 6y ago
That's Wordpress.com or Tumblr

ipiz0618 6y ago

Didn't think blogging even dying given the number of high quality blog posts from personal blogs / Medium on HN. Some dev.to posts really resemble blog posts as well. Maybe it's a developer specific culture?

shruubi 6y ago

I've tried blogging in the past, but have since given up on it. I found that I was putting in a lot of time and effort to have my work read by maybe 3-5 people and came to the conclusion that I had nothing interesting or worthwhile to contribute or say, nor am I a person who can compete with the usual horde of twitter-tech-celebrities who seemingly control a majority of the audience. These days, whether it be blogs or social media, the end goal is becoming less about saying something worthwhile and more about building and maintaining some kind of personal brand. So while I'll continue being another worthless face in the crowd, consuming content, I also won't mourn the death of blogging or any other similar forms.

blueridge 6y ago
Agreed. Pulling over a comment I left the other day in a similar thread about blogging, seems relevant here: 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.

type0 6y ago

It is kinda dead, not in a way BBS is dead, or even IRC. Anecdotally less and less blogs enable comments or curate the comment spam. I even see some HN users advice their readers to use this site for comments where there previously had a comments section. Certain Disqus'ting services did not help this blogging demise.

lazarous 6y ago

I'd welcome some feedback. I'm hoping to start a blog based around my hobby and findings. It won't be anything ground breaking but I'd like somewhere to put my thoughts and feelings. I feel people may enjoy the content and pictures. Do you think its worth me creating a blog like this, hoping that one day I could build up an organic following and potentially monetise it?

juliend2 6y ago

I think psychology needs to be taken into account here: The currency we have right now on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is reputation. There, it's in the form of Followers. That's the very currency that Stack Overflow uses to grow and sustain. It's "gamified". And the blogosphere needs that, too. And in a way, blogs have that, but it's in the form of Reddit and HN and some other sites, where people get their karma fix by taking the time to read the blog post (upfront time investment), comment on it (risk losing karma), then get their comment being liked (return on investment), which augment their karma. (Facebook does not have a Karma system like Reddit or HN has. But if it would, it would make the world a bit more like a certain black mirror episode of season 2.) Why do you see coders put their reddit+HN profile links on their site? Because they want their reputation/karma/notoriety to follow them in real-life context, so it can be converted as real "notoriety currency". (people looking at their profile will say Gosh, this guy has 2000 points on SO and 4000 points on HN, he must be very smart or influent!). So my guess is that the reason blogs still exist is because of sites like Reddit, HN, where people can get reputation (and not only knowledge) out of their reading. There's also something satisfying in the act of praising a good post with your friends. It's like watching a good movie and talking about how good it is with your friends. And blogs also survived because that still being viewed as THE most professional was of expressing one's opinions. It gives you gravitas by default when you have your own blog, compared to having a Twitter / Facebook account like the plebs. And you get the best of both worlds when you promote your blog posts on social networks.

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