9 ms·

Show HN: r/hnblogs, Blogging is not Dead

306 points by fossuser 6y ago

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ Old Reddit Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/ Hi HN, Inspired by this post earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23237559, I thought we could make blog discovery easier by having a place to find interesting, unusual, niche, or really any kind of non-marketing blogs that are posted by the people that write them. There are a ton of interesting blogs on the web, probably more than there were when the web was new, but even though there's more they're a smaller percentage of the total internet and hard to find. Search engines fail to help with this for a lot of reasons. They're both not incentivized to find this kind of non-ad, non-sales content, and there are lots of sophisticated actors trying to game search engines to show their own content. Regular people just writing interesting blogs who don't have an interest in SEO will be lost in that shuffle. HN and Reddit are great for link aggregations, but rely on submissions and upvotes which skew things to more generally popular content. The volume of posts also make it hard to compete (even though I really like HN and find the content interesting). The restriction to only allow posts from the authors of the blogs should help and the writer can interact with the community. The end goal is to generate a wiki on Reddit reminiscent of old 90s 'portal' pages with curated links to interesting content. We have a small initial community from my HN comment on that other post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23239999), but if you write a blog and want to join please do!

bredren 6y ago
Thank you for trying this. It is adding to my own recent interest in resuming blogging for blogging's sake.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Thanks - I look forward to seeing your post!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
brianzelip 6y ago
Glad to see you followed through with the idea!
aklemm 6y ago
If you’re running a blog or personal website, be sure to IndieWeb-ify it for maximum site-to-site engagement. Use micro.blog or the various IndieWeb plugins (or find lots of other options on http://indieweb.org http://indieweb.org).
- O_H_E 6y ago
  See also webrings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
- tduberne 6y ago
  You got me thinking... Would a webmention-based aggregator make sense? In the sense that you link to it from your post and send a mention to it, and your post appears on it? I see a potential for spam, but on the other side I always found that given the low number of webmention-using blogs, they do not seem to bring a lot. Most posts where Ibsaw them used were posts about webmentions themselves, where people basically were playing around. Such an aggregator would at least create some kind of hub where such posts appear.
  - aklemm 6y ago
    I can see something in that idea for sure. Maybe read through some of this to help conceptualize what might work. https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention
bpodgursky 6y ago
To close the loop, remember that you can get an RSS feed to a subreddit by tagging .rss on the URL. So if you want, you can get an aggregate RSS feed of hnblogs here: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs.rss
- fossuser 6y ago
  I didn’t know this - very cool. It helps since a lot of people don’t have rss on their blogs anymore (myself included). I’ll add a note to the sidebar on the subreddit.
- notadog 6y ago
  Thanks for mentioning that, I had no idea that was a feature.
ve55 6y ago
The difficulty with the blogging ecosystem is the same challenge that many others face, which is that some very large companies don't want you to have your own blog when you could instead be producing content to make (Twitter, Medium, Youtube, Facebook, etc) more valuable. Still, the level of control and decentralization with blogs remains appealing to many, luckily. While blogging isn't dead, being able to better discover individual places on the Internet is a great step. My vision of the Internet was always that everyone gets their own website, which could be a blog, or of course anything else, perhaps they want to host videos or music instead of text posts. Then there would be centralized directories as well as decentralized+federated networks and interlinking to help people navigate through all of this. Then you could have open protocols on how all of these things connect, but the huge benefit would be the level of control that users have, resilience to censorship, significantly more creative freedoms and so on. It would be nice if people were not obligated to use certain social networks to be able to have certain kinds of content viewed by others, since we all know if you want your video watched, you have to use Youtube, as an example.
- aklemm 6y ago
  Yes! The technology really seems basically complete now with the IndieWeb and Fediverse efforts. It’s down to a UX and service provider problem now.
  - ve55 6y ago
    I see the largest problem as that you're basically competing with the social networking giants, and without a profit model or some other significant source of funds, how can you expect to take enough of their users to garner your own network effects? I'm reminded of that one xkcd about competing standards (https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png), where every platform wants to maximize their long-term user retention, so ends up being proprietary, and now we have thousands of different systems, apps, and websites, just for something as basic as chat. Not only is this inefficient and wasteful, I think it really hampers the Internet and developer creativity as a whole. It would be great if when you make a new app, you could just drag and drop 'chat' into it, and it would be the same chat protocols and systems that all the other apps use. If we can have donation-funded services as good as Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, maybe there is some way to do this eventually? One can only hope. Services like Mastodon and many others do at least seem impressive technically, even if they're lacking the userbase of their centralized alternatives.
pokemod97 6y ago
All this talk about blogs and this subreddit led me to restart my github pages blog.
glenstein 6y ago
I love this idea. I guess my main concern will be figuring out how to do it without mission creep. It's unproductive to debate what it does or doesn't mean for blogs to be dead. But it is productive, I think, to do something like Awesome Lists[1] but for this. There are some great blogs that I never, ever would have found, unless some random person on Mastodon pointed me to them, and I want there to be a way to find them. I don't even want to say findable blogs are bad necessarily. Discoverability isn't what it used to be. 1. https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  StumbleUpon was pretty good for this.
polote 6y ago
Just liking a post in which I discribed a tool I created to help finding 'original posts' and therefore blog from HN publications https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093990 I'm going through all post published on hn everyday to discover those contents, maybe I could publish my daily findings
bachmeier 6y ago
I really like this, and I think the key is that you have to submit your own posts, so that there is engagement. I suggest having some kind of requirement that authors engage with comments. Otherwise it could turn into Twitter: someone posts material in an attempt to promote themselves (even if there's no attempt to sell anything) but they refuse to engage with most people. That's super boring, and there are other places to do that.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Yeah the summaries and text only posts are meant to help with that. It could be worth asking authors explicitly to engage with comments too. I’ll add that if it looks like people are only dropping links to promote.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- m01 6y ago
  I feel that if in general you want the authors to engage, I would ask the audience to post the comments on the author's blog (for those blogs that support comments). In this specific case it's a bit trickier because you want authors to post their content, and this may or may not be in line with your goal, depending on whether you e.g. prioritise build another community (social network?) of people interested in blogging or reducing reliance on <big centralised websites>. I would prefer reducing the comment fragmentation in this kind of a context.
mraza007 6y ago
Thanks for making this
radoncnotes 6y ago
This is a great idea for aggregating blogs. I am very happy with the initiative. Blogging isn't dead but it has become more niche.
dasqxi 6y ago
The subreddit appears to entirely miss the difference between a "blog" and a "post." The former is a collection of posts, and the subreddit seems to consist exclusively of posts, not blogs. What the the HN post was lamenting was that there aren't blogs as a whole that you can follow anymore. The subreddit doesn't quite seem to be filling the void that had been identified.
- fossuser 6y ago
  This seems pedantic to me? The reason for people to submit a post they like is to interest people in their blog and focus discussion about a specific post in the comments. Submitting the homepage is less interesting. People that like the post can follow the blog (the homepage of which is easy to find from a post). Also, the wiki is a place for the collection of blog links generally.
redis_mlc 6y ago
> No ads on your blogs (no ad-farms), some light ads may be allowed on a per-blog exception basis. So no way to montize blogs for the creators. Are you serious? > Add your post. This is not a list of blogs, you have to repost each article. Perfect for full-time SEO spammers, but a burden on normal bloggers.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I’m not against creators making money, but the default stance should be no-ad with exceptions for light ads on quality blogs when necessary. This whitelists the spam problem which is more effective and reduces the incentive to push large volumes of low quality content that only exists to serve ads. Creators can also make money via paid subscriptions and Patreon, both of which are better models than ads. You’re not supposed to spam every post you’ve written, you’re supposed to post an interesting one that introduces people to your blog so they can then follow if they like it. The wiki is a ‘portal’ of links to the blogs themselves. The post requirement is better for engagement and more likely to get people interested in your blog if they like the post.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
some_furry 6y ago
I'll believe blogging isn't dead when more small blogs make the HN front page.
qznc 6y ago
For a lean mobile view add ".compact" to the end: https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/.compact https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/.compact
im3w1l 6y ago
May I recommend a webring?

306 points by fossuser 6y ago

bredren 6y ago

Thank you for trying this. It is adding to my own recent interest in resuming blogging for blogging's sake.

fossuser 6y ago
Thanks - I look forward to seeing your post!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

brianzelip 6y ago

Glad to see you followed through with the idea!

aklemm 6y ago

If you’re running a blog or personal website, be sure to IndieWeb-ify it for maximum site-to-site engagement. Use micro.blog or the various IndieWeb plugins (or find lots of other options on http://indieweb.org http://indieweb.org).

O_H_E 6y ago
See also webrings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring
tduberne 6y ago
You got me thinking... Would a webmention-based aggregator make sense? In the sense that you link to it from your post and send a mention to it, and your post appears on it? I see a potential for spam, but on the other side I always found that given the low number of webmention-using blogs, they do not seem to bring a lot. Most posts where Ibsaw them used were posts about webmentions themselves, where people basically were playing around. Such an aggregator would at least create some kind of hub where such posts appear.
- aklemm 6y ago
  I can see something in that idea for sure. Maybe read through some of this to help conceptualize what might work. https://indieweb.org/Webmention https://indieweb.org/Webmention

bpodgursky 6y ago

To close the loop, remember that you can get an RSS feed to a subreddit by tagging .rss on the URL. So if you want, you can get an aggregate RSS feed of hnblogs here: https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs.rss https://www.reddit.com/r/hnblogs.rss

fossuser 6y ago
I didn’t know this - very cool. It helps since a lot of people don’t have rss on their blogs anymore (myself included). I’ll add a note to the sidebar on the subreddit.
notadog 6y ago
Thanks for mentioning that, I had no idea that was a feature.

ve55 6y ago

The difficulty with the blogging ecosystem is the same challenge that many others face, which is that some very large companies don't want you to have your own blog when you could instead be producing content to make (Twitter, Medium, Youtube, Facebook, etc) more valuable. Still, the level of control and decentralization with blogs remains appealing to many, luckily. While blogging isn't dead, being able to better discover individual places on the Internet is a great step. My vision of the Internet was always that everyone gets their own website, which could be a blog, or of course anything else, perhaps they want to host videos or music instead of text posts. Then there would be centralized directories as well as decentralized+federated networks and interlinking to help people navigate through all of this. Then you could have open protocols on how all of these things connect, but the huge benefit would be the level of control that users have, resilience to censorship, significantly more creative freedoms and so on. It would be nice if people were not obligated to use certain social networks to be able to have certain kinds of content viewed by others, since we all know if you want your video watched, you have to use Youtube, as an example.

aklemm 6y ago
Yes! The technology really seems basically complete now with the IndieWeb and Fediverse efforts. It’s down to a UX and service provider problem now.
- ve55 6y ago
  I see the largest problem as that you're basically competing with the social networking giants, and without a profit model or some other significant source of funds, how can you expect to take enough of their users to garner your own network effects? I'm reminded of that one xkcd about competing standards (https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png), where every platform wants to maximize their long-term user retention, so ends up being proprietary, and now we have thousands of different systems, apps, and websites, just for something as basic as chat. Not only is this inefficient and wasteful, I think it really hampers the Internet and developer creativity as a whole. It would be great if when you make a new app, you could just drag and drop 'chat' into it, and it would be the same chat protocols and systems that all the other apps use. If we can have donation-funded services as good as Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, maybe there is some way to do this eventually? One can only hope. Services like Mastodon and many others do at least seem impressive technically, even if they're lacking the userbase of their centralized alternatives.

pokemod97 6y ago

All this talk about blogs and this subreddit led me to restart my github pages blog.

glenstein 6y ago

I love this idea. I guess my main concern will be figuring out how to do it without mission creep. It's unproductive to debate what it does or doesn't mean for blogs to be dead. But it is productive, I think, to do something like Awesome Lists[1] but for this. There are some great blogs that I never, ever would have found, unless some random person on Mastodon pointed me to them, and I want there to be a way to find them. I don't even want to say findable blogs are bad necessarily. Discoverability isn't what it used to be. 1. https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome

thaumasiotes 6y ago
StumbleUpon was pretty good for this.

polote 6y ago

Just liking a post in which I discribed a tool I created to help finding 'original posts' and therefore blog from HN publications https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093990 I'm going through all post published on hn everyday to discover those contents, maybe I could publish my daily findings

bachmeier 6y ago

I really like this, and I think the key is that you have to submit your own posts, so that there is engagement. I suggest having some kind of requirement that authors engage with comments. Otherwise it could turn into Twitter: someone posts material in an attempt to promote themselves (even if there's no attempt to sell anything) but they refuse to engage with most people. That's super boring, and there are other places to do that.

fossuser 6y ago
Yeah the summaries and text only posts are meant to help with that. It could be worth asking authors explicitly to engage with comments too. I’ll add that if it looks like people are only dropping links to promote.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
m01 6y ago
I feel that if in general you want the authors to engage, I would ask the audience to post the comments on the author's blog (for those blogs that support comments). In this specific case it's a bit trickier because you want authors to post their content, and this may or may not be in line with your goal, depending on whether you e.g. prioritise build another community (social network?) of people interested in blogging or reducing reliance on <big centralised websites>. I would prefer reducing the comment fragmentation in this kind of a context.

mraza007 6y ago

Thanks for making this

radoncnotes 6y ago

This is a great idea for aggregating blogs. I am very happy with the initiative. Blogging isn't dead but it has become more niche.

dasqxi 6y ago

The subreddit appears to entirely miss the difference between a "blog" and a "post." The former is a collection of posts, and the subreddit seems to consist exclusively of posts, not blogs. What the the HN post was lamenting was that there aren't blogs as a whole that you can follow anymore. The subreddit doesn't quite seem to be filling the void that had been identified.

fossuser 6y ago
This seems pedantic to me? The reason for people to submit a post they like is to interest people in their blog and focus discussion about a specific post in the comments. Submitting the homepage is less interesting. People that like the post can follow the blog (the homepage of which is easy to find from a post). Also, the wiki is a place for the collection of blog links generally.

redis_mlc 6y ago

> No ads on your blogs (no ad-farms), some light ads may be allowed on a per-blog exception basis. So no way to montize blogs for the creators. Are you serious? > Add your post. This is not a list of blogs, you have to repost each article. Perfect for full-time SEO spammers, but a burden on normal bloggers.

fossuser 6y ago
I’m not against creators making money, but the default stance should be no-ad with exceptions for light ads on quality blogs when necessary. This whitelists the spam problem which is more effective and reduces the incentive to push large volumes of low quality content that only exists to serve ads. Creators can also make money via paid subscriptions and Patreon, both of which are better models than ads. You’re not supposed to spam every post you’ve written, you’re supposed to post an interesting one that introduces people to your blog so they can then follow if they like it. The wiki is a ‘portal’ of links to the blogs themselves. The post requirement is better for engagement and more likely to get people interested in your blog if they like the post.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

some_furry 6y ago

I'll believe blogging isn't dead when more small blogs make the HN front page.

qznc 6y ago

For a lean mobile view add ".compact" to the end: https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/.compact https://old.reddit.com/r/hnblogs/.compact

im3w1l 6y ago

May I recommend a webring?