5 ms·

Since HN seems to be on a blog-kick lately, I'll repost the idea that I'm still waiting for someone to build: A blogverse of some kind that allows for algorith

Since HN seems to be on a blog-kick lately, I'll repost the idea that I'm still waiting for someone to build: A blogverse of some kind that allows for algorithmic discoverability & aggregation (ala Medium) without the bullshit/terrible UX. The real value proposition of Medium is that a well-made aggregator benefits readers and writers alike. Readers find more authors they like, writers find more audience. There are also network effects with shared comment logins, inter-blog citations, etc. I really think a blogging renaissance is waiting to happen. These ingredients plus a business model not reliant on ads, massive js overhead, and other nonsense could jumpstart it.

woozymans 6y ago
I just hacked together a little blog directory recently - woozymans.com.
bachmeier 6y ago
What I want is a Yahoo-style directory for blogs. Blog owners can put their blog in exactly one category. Users can star the blogs they like, similar to GitHub, and identify the low quality click generators/marketing blogs. I personally find Medium to be a horrible way to find content. Maybe it works for new content, if that's what you're after.
- gen220 6y ago
  The success of search engines prompted Yahoo to ditch its original product (the curation and categorization of the web) in favor of its competitors automated (and thereby game-able) crawl-index-search approaches. Now, decades later, there seems to be a shared yearning for the curated web, perhaps in response to the low signal:noise ratio of search. Isn't it funny, how the world works in cycles? Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. I think the GP has a point, that the need for a sustaining business model tends to strongly conflict with this equilibrium. Wikipedia has sort of evolved to partially fill this niche, but it periodically struggles with funding. I agree there's not a similar filling for blogs, yet: maybe GitHub will evolve there, but it will face the same pressure of other platforms owned by public for-profit companies.
  - bachmeier 6y ago
    I was probably one of the last users of their original directory. It was my browser homepage until the day they removed it. I eventually stopped using it because it didn't keep up. These days, search is for many purposes completely useless. If I want to find someone to do work on my house, the last place I'll go is Google. It's truly amazing just how worthless the results are. You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. I imagine it's a fraud-ridden garbage dump if you actually try to use Google to find businesses to do work for you. On the topic of blogs - not completely useless, but overrun with shallow, uninformative trash posts by SEO experts. I think Google is more vulnerable now than at any time in the past 20 years.
    - Jaruzel 6y ago
      > You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. It's worse if you are non-US. Google seems to think that anywhere in the UK is local to me for businesses, and that's AFTER I've added loads of filters to stop American results from showing.
  - olah_1 6y ago
    > Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. Moving away from ads towards human-centric curation is a primary design feature of the decentralized web.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Wikipedia doesn't struggle for funding. It just happens to be like many other organizations that eat up whatever funding they get regardless.
    - goodmachine 6y ago
      Not sure why you're getting downvotes. Wikipedia looks to be well funded indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
- godot 6y ago
  Fun anecdote -- in the late 90s I maintained several web sites (personal/hobby ones) and by far the best source of traffic for them was Yahoo directory pages. I didn't know the SEO game (if there was even one at the time) and while search engines brought a small amount of traffic, majority of visitors came from Yahoo. When I launched a new hobby site, the goto marketing plan was to apply to add it to Yahoo. Granted, we're talking about the range of dozens to maybe a hundred or two visitors a day, so it's not web scale :)
- kickscondor 6y ago
  I run a Yahoo-style directory for blogs and articles I find: https://href.cool/ https://href.cool/. I'd personally like to see more personal directories rather than big monolithic directories of everything - those tend to collect spam.
  - johntash 6y ago
    I like this idea, but I feel like it's shifting the problem to "how do you discover cool directories made by other people?" Maybe an idea would be something like what you have, but using some sort of standard that could be pulled down similar to rss feeds?
    - kickscondor 6y ago
      Well, it’s my opinion that technology can’t solve the discovery problem. I know we want it to. But at some point the technology has to evaluate the content. It can’t - so technology gives the content to humans to evaluate. However, it can’t evaluate the humans’ capabilities. :/ You discover a directory like mine just as you would discover any other link, johntash - by coming across it as you read, perhaps on Hacker News. If there were more directories, they would be easier to discover. They happen to be richer discovery points than a normal blog or profile page.
  - kfk 6y ago
    This is great. Will you allow other "friends" to create their own directories to? I'd like to contribute. Just found: https://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-paths-to-graceland/ https://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-pat... Thanks!
    - kickscondor 6y ago
      Certainly - if you email me (kicks@kickscondor.com) a link to your directory, I will absolutely include it here: https://href.cool/Web/Directory https://href.cool/Web/Directory There is also some discussion about this kind of thing here: https://forum.indieseek.xyz https://forum.indieseek.xyz Good to meet you, Alessio.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> plus a business model not reliant on ads Is anyone anywhere close to this?
- CodeyWhizzBang 6y ago
  Weirdly, Medium seems to be the closest.
- coopsmgoops 6y ago
  Medium has a revenue sharing thing where a medium pro users fees are allocated to write depending on what the user reads. I don't know anyone who has medium pro though.
ubac 6y ago
A question for you (and everyone): how important do you think it is that the algorithmic discoverability be married to a single platform/aggregator? What if you just had better algorithmic discoverability across all writing on the internet, regardless of where it's hosted? I get that that would miss some of the benefits you mention (shared comment logins for example) but I'm wondering if people think it would capture 80% of the same benefits or, like, <50%. And I don't think for the discoverability to work there's any innate reason it has to be restricted to a single blogging platform.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  Personally, I've started seeing algorithmic discoverability as an anti-feature that mainly serves the interests of the attention economy. For my part, I want more long-form, thoughtful articles that offer an enriching read. Not only have we got a good decade or two's worth of experience showing that no algorithmic discovery system ever favors that kind of thing over content that's morally equivalent to Five Minute Crafts, but I've got a couple decades' worth of experience telling me that, since long-form bloggers tend to link each other quite a lot, never needed an algorithm to help me with discovery in the first place. If I want anything, it's algorithmic filtering: Take the feeds I'm already subscribed to, and filter out the stuff that I tend to skip over without reading. Because my blog feed already delivers me a couple hours' worth of reading a day, so I can afford to be choosy.
  - ordinaryradical 6y ago
    Yeah, this is very true. I may have overstated my initial idea. When I think more about it, maybe what I'm looking for is handcrafted curation, but that let's anyone share their curation speccs and discover relevant things to curate from. To me, that suggests some kind of algorithmic component, maybe in the form of search, voting, etc., but I wouldn't necessarily want the whole thing driven by either machine or mob.
  - gen220 6y ago
    Like stitchfix, but for magazine articles, blog posts and books. I might be cynical, but I think humans do this much better than any algorithm I've ever seen. :) For myself, I usually read in two "phases". I collect material from sources that are usually high quality for me, and do some superficial skimming to trim out the content I don't particularly care for. Later, when I'm more "in the mood" or have a long period of time, I pop() and read(). The stack gets pretty large at times, but it only takes a couple days of vacation to blow through most of it. If I pass over something in the stack enough times, it gets free()'d. I don't know if I'd trust an algorithm to do either of these stages for me. I'd trust an algorithm provide input to phase (1), but never to replace phase (1).
bpodgursky 6y ago
Personally, many of my good reading suggestions come from a trusted network. I trust a few people to only recommend content of a type that is high-quality and interesting to me. I do think it's important to have an element of discoverability for new content (otherwise there's no real way for a writer to bootstrap into visibility), but I think an important element is being able to follow and trust content aggregators. Maybe algorithmic curation will be trustable in a decade, but right now it feels too gameable, and too easy to degenerate into thinkbait.
- manx 6y ago
  I also felt that I value personal recommendations much more than from huge aggregators or algorithms. I wanted to give these 1-to-1 recommendations a better vehicle than WhatsApp. So I created an app for it: https://onelink.to/listo https://onelink.to/listo It's still early, but already usable.
notJim 6y ago
I tend to be skeptical that "$x but better" is a viable business in the VC era or maybe on the internet at all. On the internet, where publishing is easy, but distribution is hard, it seems like there's already a natural tendency toward winner-takes-all. Execution matters somewhat, but at some point, I think it comes down to who can throw more capital at the problem. I'm interested in this problem space, because current social media tools leave me somewhat dissatisfied. But I'm also skeptical about how you'd build it successfully.
fermienrico 6y ago
I am gonna work on this evening. Thanks.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Same. So far - https://awesomeblogclub.searchableguy.now.sh https://awesomeblogclub.searchableguy.now.sh it's not ready yet but I would love to hear more about what features people want. Email is in the profile.
  - fermienrico 6y ago
    I applaud the effort, looks very nice - I will contact you.
    - searchableguy 6y ago
      Sure thing. Going to open source it after it's done. I have been thinking of using activity pub and making discovery decentralized so people can host their own curation and share with each other. I will have to look more into it though.
Ayesh 6y ago
I don't even want to have a medium.com account for their crappy UI and hostile paywalls, but I doubt those who use medium regularly actually discover new blogs. HN is one of my primary sources to read new things, and I'm already blind to medium's footer read-more links.
new_here 6y ago
You may be interested in https://able.bio https://able.bio Myself and a partner are building this, here are a few points: - It's a community to read and write about building things with technology - Clean, fast and light UX + Markdown editor (https://able.bio/new https://able.bio/new) - Bootstrapped with low overheads. No outside investment removes pressure to grow at all costs and the lapse on integrity that we see more of each day. - No data lock-in. Export your posts in a single JSON file (containing Markdown + HTML versions) accompanied by all images. - We're finishing up a big set of data portability / data respect features, which we plan to announce soon. The aim is to build a community of capable people with a genuine interest in technology and attach a job board to the site. Companies can then pay to display their vacancies on the job board and users can take a look whenever they like. No popups, banners or any of that dodgy/spammy crap getting in between users and the reading/writing. In this age we see integrity towards our users as a differentiator. Building it is fairly straightforward and fun. Some learnings we've gained in terms of 'jumpstarting' it: - a lot of people are vehemently sceptical after the Medium debacle. - creating a feed that prioritises good content without "censoring" dev spam or trivial posts is tricky when coming off a smaller user base. For example, upvotes can have outsized effects. - getting regular volume of good content so that people use Able as source of news/inspiration/learning. We've had some great posts from people but we need just that little bit more to get the flywheel going. As soon as someone posts something, activity on the site goes up but then dies down again. It's the classic building vs. promoting trade-off. However, we've chosen to get data portability and respect right first as we believe this is fundamental. We're wrapping that up now and then have loads of learnings and ideas we want write about. We feel that same potential 'renaissance' you're talking about and this is how we want to try and activate it. If you feel inclined, have a look and let us know what you think.
- manx 6y ago
  Regarding the upvoting problem: Try using only downvotes and sort by downvotes*age. This should solve a lot of problems that usually come with upvoting systems, e.g. false negatives (good articles with bad score).
  - blobster 6y ago

woozymans 6y ago

I just hacked together a little blog directory recently - woozymans.com.

bachmeier 6y ago

What I want is a Yahoo-style directory for blogs. Blog owners can put their blog in exactly one category. Users can star the blogs they like, similar to GitHub, and identify the low quality click generators/marketing blogs. I personally find Medium to be a horrible way to find content. Maybe it works for new content, if that's what you're after.

gen220 6y ago
The success of search engines prompted Yahoo to ditch its original product (the curation and categorization of the web) in favor of its competitors automated (and thereby game-able) crawl-index-search approaches. Now, decades later, there seems to be a shared yearning for the curated web, perhaps in response to the low signal:noise ratio of search. Isn't it funny, how the world works in cycles? Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. I think the GP has a point, that the need for a sustaining business model tends to strongly conflict with this equilibrium. Wikipedia has sort of evolved to partially fill this niche, but it periodically struggles with funding. I agree there's not a similar filling for blogs, yet: maybe GitHub will evolve there, but it will face the same pressure of other platforms owned by public for-profit companies.
- bachmeier 6y ago
  I was probably one of the last users of their original directory. It was my browser homepage until the day they removed it. I eventually stopped using it because it didn't keep up. These days, search is for many purposes completely useless. If I want to find someone to do work on my house, the last place I'll go is Google. It's truly amazing just how worthless the results are. You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. I imagine it's a fraud-ridden garbage dump if you actually try to use Google to find businesses to do work for you. On the topic of blogs - not completely useless, but overrun with shallow, uninformative trash posts by SEO experts. I think Google is more vulnerable now than at any time in the past 20 years.
  - Jaruzel 6y ago
    > You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. It's worse if you are non-US. Google seems to think that anywhere in the UK is local to me for businesses, and that's AFTER I've added loads of filters to stop American results from showing.
- olah_1 6y ago
  > Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. Moving away from ads towards human-centric curation is a primary design feature of the decentralized web.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Wikipedia doesn't struggle for funding. It just happens to be like many other organizations that eat up whatever funding they get regardless.
  - goodmachine 6y ago
    Not sure why you're getting downvotes. Wikipedia looks to be well funded indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
godot 6y ago
Fun anecdote -- in the late 90s I maintained several web sites (personal/hobby ones) and by far the best source of traffic for them was Yahoo directory pages. I didn't know the SEO game (if there was even one at the time) and while search engines brought a small amount of traffic, majority of visitors came from Yahoo. When I launched a new hobby site, the goto marketing plan was to apply to add it to Yahoo. Granted, we're talking about the range of dozens to maybe a hundred or two visitors a day, so it's not web scale :)
kickscondor 6y ago
I run a Yahoo-style directory for blogs and articles I find: https://href.cool/ https://href.cool/. I'd personally like to see more personal directories rather than big monolithic directories of everything - those tend to collect spam.
- johntash 6y ago
  I like this idea, but I feel like it's shifting the problem to "how do you discover cool directories made by other people?" Maybe an idea would be something like what you have, but using some sort of standard that could be pulled down similar to rss feeds?
  - kickscondor 6y ago
    Well, it’s my opinion that technology can’t solve the discovery problem. I know we want it to. But at some point the technology has to evaluate the content. It can’t - so technology gives the content to humans to evaluate. However, it can’t evaluate the humans’ capabilities. :/ You discover a directory like mine just as you would discover any other link, johntash - by coming across it as you read, perhaps on Hacker News. If there were more directories, they would be easier to discover. They happen to be richer discovery points than a normal blog or profile page.
- kfk 6y ago
  This is great. Will you allow other "friends" to create their own directories to? I'd like to contribute. Just found: https://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-paths-to-graceland/ https://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-pat... Thanks!
  - kickscondor 6y ago
    Certainly - if you email me (kicks@kickscondor.com) a link to your directory, I will absolutely include it here: https://href.cool/Web/Directory https://href.cool/Web/Directory There is also some discussion about this kind of thing here: https://forum.indieseek.xyz https://forum.indieseek.xyz Good to meet you, Alessio.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> plus a business model not reliant on ads Is anyone anywhere close to this?

CodeyWhizzBang 6y ago
Weirdly, Medium seems to be the closest.
coopsmgoops 6y ago
Medium has a revenue sharing thing where a medium pro users fees are allocated to write depending on what the user reads. I don't know anyone who has medium pro though.

ubac 6y ago

A question for you (and everyone): how important do you think it is that the algorithmic discoverability be married to a single platform/aggregator? What if you just had better algorithmic discoverability across all writing on the internet, regardless of where it's hosted? I get that that would miss some of the benefits you mention (shared comment logins for example) but I'm wondering if people think it would capture 80% of the same benefits or, like, <50%. And I don't think for the discoverability to work there's any innate reason it has to be restricted to a single blogging platform.

mumblemumble 6y ago
Personally, I've started seeing algorithmic discoverability as an anti-feature that mainly serves the interests of the attention economy. For my part, I want more long-form, thoughtful articles that offer an enriching read. Not only have we got a good decade or two's worth of experience showing that no algorithmic discovery system ever favors that kind of thing over content that's morally equivalent to Five Minute Crafts, but I've got a couple decades' worth of experience telling me that, since long-form bloggers tend to link each other quite a lot, never needed an algorithm to help me with discovery in the first place. If I want anything, it's algorithmic filtering: Take the feeds I'm already subscribed to, and filter out the stuff that I tend to skip over without reading. Because my blog feed already delivers me a couple hours' worth of reading a day, so I can afford to be choosy.
- ordinaryradical 6y ago
  Yeah, this is very true. I may have overstated my initial idea. When I think more about it, maybe what I'm looking for is handcrafted curation, but that let's anyone share their curation speccs and discover relevant things to curate from. To me, that suggests some kind of algorithmic component, maybe in the form of search, voting, etc., but I wouldn't necessarily want the whole thing driven by either machine or mob.
- gen220 6y ago
  Like stitchfix, but for magazine articles, blog posts and books. I might be cynical, but I think humans do this much better than any algorithm I've ever seen. :) For myself, I usually read in two "phases". I collect material from sources that are usually high quality for me, and do some superficial skimming to trim out the content I don't particularly care for. Later, when I'm more "in the mood" or have a long period of time, I pop() and read(). The stack gets pretty large at times, but it only takes a couple days of vacation to blow through most of it. If I pass over something in the stack enough times, it gets free()'d. I don't know if I'd trust an algorithm to do either of these stages for me. I'd trust an algorithm provide input to phase (1), but never to replace phase (1).

bpodgursky 6y ago

Personally, many of my good reading suggestions come from a trusted network. I trust a few people to only recommend content of a type that is high-quality and interesting to me. I do think it's important to have an element of discoverability for new content (otherwise there's no real way for a writer to bootstrap into visibility), but I think an important element is being able to follow and trust content aggregators. Maybe algorithmic curation will be trustable in a decade, but right now it feels too gameable, and too easy to degenerate into thinkbait.

manx 6y ago
I also felt that I value personal recommendations much more than from huge aggregators or algorithms. I wanted to give these 1-to-1 recommendations a better vehicle than WhatsApp. So I created an app for it: https://onelink.to/listo https://onelink.to/listo It's still early, but already usable.

notJim 6y ago

I tend to be skeptical that "$x but better" is a viable business in the VC era or maybe on the internet at all. On the internet, where publishing is easy, but distribution is hard, it seems like there's already a natural tendency toward winner-takes-all. Execution matters somewhat, but at some point, I think it comes down to who can throw more capital at the problem. I'm interested in this problem space, because current social media tools leave me somewhat dissatisfied. But I'm also skeptical about how you'd build it successfully.

fermienrico 6y ago

I am gonna work on this evening. Thanks.

searchableguy 6y ago
Same. So far - https://awesomeblogclub.searchableguy.now.sh https://awesomeblogclub.searchableguy.now.sh it's not ready yet but I would love to hear more about what features people want. Email is in the profile.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  I applaud the effort, looks very nice - I will contact you.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    Sure thing. Going to open source it after it's done. I have been thinking of using activity pub and making discovery decentralized so people can host their own curation and share with each other. I will have to look more into it though.

Ayesh 6y ago

I don't even want to have a medium.com account for their crappy UI and hostile paywalls, but I doubt those who use medium regularly actually discover new blogs. HN is one of my primary sources to read new things, and I'm already blind to medium's footer read-more links.

new_here 6y ago

You may be interested in https://able.bio https://able.bio Myself and a partner are building this, here are a few points: - It's a community to read and write about building things with technology - Clean, fast and light UX + Markdown editor (https://able.bio/new https://able.bio/new) - Bootstrapped with low overheads. No outside investment removes pressure to grow at all costs and the lapse on integrity that we see more of each day. - No data lock-in. Export your posts in a single JSON file (containing Markdown + HTML versions) accompanied by all images. - We're finishing up a big set of data portability / data respect features, which we plan to announce soon. The aim is to build a community of capable people with a genuine interest in technology and attach a job board to the site. Companies can then pay to display their vacancies on the job board and users can take a look whenever they like. No popups, banners or any of that dodgy/spammy crap getting in between users and the reading/writing. In this age we see integrity towards our users as a differentiator. Building it is fairly straightforward and fun. Some learnings we've gained in terms of 'jumpstarting' it: - a lot of people are vehemently sceptical after the Medium debacle. - creating a feed that prioritises good content without "censoring" dev spam or trivial posts is tricky when coming off a smaller user base. For example, upvotes can have outsized effects. - getting regular volume of good content so that people use Able as source of news/inspiration/learning. We've had some great posts from people but we need just that little bit more to get the flywheel going. As soon as someone posts something, activity on the site goes up but then dies down again. It's the classic building vs. promoting trade-off. However, we've chosen to get data portability and respect right first as we believe this is fundamental. We're wrapping that up now and then have loads of learnings and ideas we want write about. We feel that same potential 'renaissance' you're talking about and this is how we want to try and activate it. If you feel inclined, have a look and let us know what you think.

manx 6y ago
Regarding the upvoting problem: Try using only downvotes and sort by downvotes*age. This should solve a lot of problems that usually come with upvoting systems, e.g. false negatives (good articles with bad score).
- blobster 6y ago