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If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)
- lincolnq 5y agoIn the last few months, for some reason, my (completely unmaintained) LinkedIn has started to top search results for my name -- over my regularly updated personal website and blog (at lincolnquirk.com) when you search for my name on Google. The same has happened with a friend of mine whose blog is far more popular than mine. It's incredibly frustrating.
- criddell 5y agoWhy do you think that is? I'm thinking LinkedIn may be considered more authoritative or trustworthy than a personal blog. How is google to know that your blog is actually your blog? I've recently noticed more people writing on LinkedIn (which might just be my impression and not true) and I wonder if that's part of the reason?
- pixelgeek 5y agoI think that is part of a plan by LinkedIn to try to be more of a social platform
- nabla9 5y agoThey never went away. There are more of them and they are better than before.
- prionassembly 5y agoCan we maybe have a self-promotion thread? I'm at asemic-horizon.com
- TOGoS 5y agoSure, why not. Rarely updated, but I write about gridbeam and software at http://www.nuke24.net/plog/ http://www.nuke24.net/plog/. If you like reading about people's dreams, on the other hand, http://www.nuke24.net/dlog/ http://www.nuke24.net/dlog/
- fsflover 5y agoBlogs are still there. Try search engines which discourage cluttered web design to find them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764 and https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/
- mrweasel 5y agoBoth are very good for finding blogs about topics like diet, exercise, mindfulness and other topics which have been SEO’d to death on the major search engines.
- hyperstar 5y agoHow long has wiby existed? Does it only show pages that have been submitted explicitly?
- fsflover 5y ago> How long has wiby existed? HN history goes as far as 4 years ago claiming it's "new": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15394126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15394126.
- m-i-l 5y agoYou can also search personal websites on https://searchmysite.net/ https://searchmysite.net/ - kind of like wiby.me, but searching whole sites rather than individual pages, a little more transparent about what is in the index (e.g. queries to list all indexed domains), and with a moderation layer.
- george3d6 5y agoblogs are more alive than ever. they make up a smaller % of the internet, but that's because the use-base has increased.
- asicsp 5y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23205588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23205588 (May 16, 2020, 614 comments)
- SPBS 5y agoThe top comment: > You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading! > You may write a few more posts, but it's always the same story. A lot of work goes in, but not much comes out. I never understood this sentiment. Who cares if no one is reading? You blog because you have something to express on the internet, not because you're seeking attention from others. Content creation for the sole purpose of views is incredibly superficial.
- dvdkon 5y agoThe goal might not be to maximise "views", but if nobody reads it, why bother? No need to be popular by whatever metrics, but with no readers you might just not publish at all. (Unless you see writing itself as valuable in itself.)
- krapp 5y agoThe vast majority of blogs during the "golden age" of blogging went almost entirely, if not entirely, unread. In hindsight, I don't know why people bothered, but they did. I blogged on my own domain for years and I don't think anyone read any of it, but I still enjoyed it. Of course a lot of blogs were hosted on services like Blogger or Livejournal (which I also had,) and being able to create networks and friend/interest groups definitely increased visibility, but even then most things went unread and uncommented on.
- foxfluff 5y agoMaybe views are not the sole purpose, but isn't it a bit depressing to think that no-one ever reads or cares about what you put up? Surely you want someone to witness that expression and perhaps even engage with it.
- fjfaase 5y ago
- susam 5y agoWell, blogs are still very much there. I began blogging in 2006 and I still continue to write blog posts, mostly to take notes, share my thoughts, etc. I still follow my favourite bloggers via RSS feeds. I don't think the culture of blogging ever went away. The blogosphere along with its tag clouds are still very much there. I think what has changed in the last two decades or so is that a lot of new users have come on the Internet and this new generation of users spend most of their time in walled gardens thereby making the bloggers look like a small minority.
- vlkr 5y agoI think many (personal) blogs were killed by social media. You don't blog about your last weekend anymore, you just post some pictures on instagram or in your whatsapp groups.
- giansegato 5y agoWhich means - whether we like it or no - that social media were and are superior products when it comes to this specific use case, otherwise people won't be using it.
- Dudeman112 5y agoWhat do you mean by "superior product"?
- piaste 5y agoThey fulfill the same desire with less effort. Most people didn't blog in order to produce great art or advance human knowledge. Those who did, they tend to still blog. But most regular Joe bloggers just wanted to share ideas or experiences with other people, connect with them, and hear _their_ ideas and experiences. Writing a 500-word blog post was just the means to start a chat in the comments section. For them, Facebook or Twitter do it better. I remember when Tumblr started (it didn't have a specific culture yet). Some of my blogging friends opened a Tumblr just to share links and pictures, and kept to WordPress for long-form posts. Eventually, they quickly started spending more times in link exchanging and commenting on Tumblr than on WP.
- solarengineer 5y agoHow do you all discover blogs? I used to discover blogs via the Yahoo Directory, blog rolls (where we mention others' blogs as external links to follow up), Live Journal's listing, and cross-referencing of blog posts. Google search used to surface blog posts too. Now it's all on Medium - where I don't grudge those who want reliable hosting+discoverability and want to get paid for content, and where Medium charges for this. But I dislike that the content is "locked up" at Medium. I don't quite know how to explain this dislike, and I welcome any points of view that might help make this dislike go away.
- nxpnsv 5y agoI have discovered many blogs reading HN...
- s_dev 5y agoYeah -- off the top of my head: danluu.com, plover.com, ciechanow.ski, essays by pg and many others have very high quality writing and are insightful. I don't accept there is a shortage of blogs.
- flybrand 5y agoI’ve got one topic that gets a lot of referral traffic, and then people follow the other more rambling personal stories. Twitter and YouTube drive a lot of traffic too.
- manuelmoreale 5y agoI had the same experience. Have a few very popular posts that rank quite high even on Google (with absolutely no SEO bullshit done to them) but they represent maybe 5% of what I wrote about. People find me through those posts and end up sticky around for the more personal/rambly stuff.
- ant6n 5y agothere's a shortage of blog reading, meaning theres less of an incentive to write.
- tinyprojects 5y agoI've built a service that lets you create a micro-blog from a paper journal: https://paperwebsite.com/ https://paperwebsite.com/ It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about. Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in - the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still love them though. Here's my blog if you're interested: https://daily.tinyprojects.dev/ https://daily.tinyprojects.dev/
- slightknack 5y agoI vote that we add our blogs / other good blogs we have come across as children on this comment. I'll start, here's mine: - https://slightknack.dev/blog https://slightknack.dev/blog Here are some others: - https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com - https://www.gwern.net/index https://www.gwern.net/index - https://danluu.com https://danluu.com - https://tonsky.me/ https://tonsky.me/ - https://lemire.me/blog/ https://lemire.me/blog/ - https://waitbutwhy.com/ https://waitbutwhy.com/ - https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/ - https://blog.codinghorror.com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- scary-size 5y agoHere are mine: - https://franz.hamburg https://franz.hamburg - https://www.project-daily.com https://www.project-daily.com Some blogs I follow via RSS (using the awesome NetNewsWire app): - https://brendangregg.com https://brendangregg.com - https://brandur.org/ https://brandur.org/ - https://ferd.ca/ https://ferd.ca/
- fsflover 5y agohttps://xnux.eu https://xnux.eu
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI collect links to small and notable websites here. It's like 90% blogs: https://memex.marginalia.nu/links/bookmarks.gmi https://memex.marginalia.nu/links/bookmarks.gmi I think we've gotten curiously bad at linking to other websites in the last 20 years. It's really bad for discoverability. I don't know why it is, it's like everyone goes "oh, i've got a precious visitor at last, better not link anywhere so they'll stick around forever!" I think if my website contains interesting links, it makes people more likely to come back later, because they associate it with good feelings of discovery, and not bad feelings of being trapped.
- ms123 5y agoHave a look at https://nightfall.city https://nightfall.city and https://smol.pub https://smol.pub. Both were created to scratch this itch.
- codingdave 5y agoTheir about page talks about using reddit to post hate speech, then just link to it from their blog, to get around censorship on blogging platforms. I honestly cannot tell if this author is wanting that because they are truly passionate about freedom of speech, or if they are feeling personally stifled in expressing their opinions. Either way, this post feels like an attempt to say they want a blogging platform where they can post whatever they want, whether it be NSFW content, hate speech, or anything else.
- rchaud 5y agoIt was weird how the latter half of the post seemed completely detached from the first.
- kaetemi 5y agoOr just bring them back into the Google search results...
- veidr 5y agoYeah blogs are still here, BUT: (like email (sob) and telephone-calling (hooray)) a lot of people that once did blog don't anymore. Not in the "I had kids so my blog went dark for a few years" sense, but in the sense of "ooh twitter was invented and now I just emit a halfassed one-sentence brainfart or 5-second tiktok cellphone video and get way more dopamine hits". I've been reading blogs and perusing my self-curated NetNewsWire RSS feeds for 20+ years, and blogs never went away, RSS never died, Google Reader getting googled didn't really matter, etc. And there are probably technically more blogs now than ever before. But still, the blog kinda died, in the sense that it would be a lot more surprising to learn your friend's 80-year-old grandma has a blog today than it would have been in 2011. It went from an increasingly-mainstream thing to a decreasingly-mainstream thing.
- d3nj4l 5y agoYes - and all the people the author remembers with nostalgia are probably on Twitter now, doing more or less the same thing but with worse quality overall. Twitter gets a bad rap because of the hive mind (and it deserves every bit of that reputation), but there are tons of just normal people on there talking about their lives. In a way, Twitter made blogging much more accessible - most people couldn't sit down and write a 500-1000 word post, even one or two a year, but they can tweet every detail about their day, their projects, what they're thinking about and so on. Of course, it's not the same as a blog. I think the length "requirement" of a blog made it so only people with the time, dedication and skills (or lack of self-awareness) would keep them going, so if you were reading an established blog a bit of selection bias was at play. On Twitter you can tweet garbage day in day out and still be on the platform for years. Heck, you'd probably gain a significant following. I might be coming off as a Twitter fan or something but just to be clear: the site is cancer. It's impossible to stay on for longer than a year and not have your brain melt off by how it works, and they're becoming more and more closed and restrictive by the day. It's a shame because there's clearly something about the site that interests a mass audience, but I wish there was a service that was like Twitter but better. I know Mastodon exists but outside specific niche audiences it's never gained traction, but I hope it does take off eventually. Maybe the same applies to Facebook/Instagram/Other major social media provider as well, but I don't have any experience with platforms outside Twitter and Reddit so I couldn't say. Edit to expand on something: I mentioned that Twitter is interesting to mass audiences, and that's actually more important than you'd think. Speaking personally, before I went on twitter, I don't think I'd ever consistently read content posted by women. It's a natural result of being in a male-dominated industry and following male-dominated interests. On Twitter, though, because there were so many people of all walks of life I quickly followed a lot of interesting women who posted great content: women who were activists, historians, academics, homemakers and so on. That really was why I stuck around for so long on Twitter despite how awful the site is, and why I think any serious contender has to appeal to the normies, so to speak.
- raspyberr 5y agoLike everyone else responding, I think there's so so many blogs and personal sites around. Once you start looking and actually exploring the internet you'll find plenty. There's been a bit of resurgency with "indie web", digital gardens, etc. If anything there's probably more blogs now than there were before.
- krapp 5y ago> If anything there's probably more blogs now than there were before There's more everything than there was before. Despite popular opinion, the rest of the web didn't shrivel up and die when Twitter, Facebook and Youtube got popular.
- agent008t 5y agoDo you have any evidence for that? The message boards/blogs that I frequented a decade ago are all either gone or are a lot less active than they were before, and certainly have a lot fewer users. So it's not just activity per user that has gone way down, but the number of users as well.
- mkr-hn 5y agoDiscord killed off a lot of forums that survived Reddit. This is especially true for forums where chat threads were the most active.
- sergioisidoro 5y agoMedium, in an attempt to monetise blogging and give financial incentives to writing with paywalling, has absolutely damaged my perception of blogging. It was the perfect platform, and so nice to find interesting blogs and articles that only wanted to share information and stories. But then it started eating away the blog platform space, and then took all that hostage with paywalls. There's not that many companies I really dislike, but Medium is starting to be up there in the list.
- pixelgeek 5y agoI think the blog space was dead prior to Medium showing up. Medium seemed to be a way to try to get the better writers still out there into a single space. Then they realised they had to pay all those folks and killed the site with their paywall.
- shoto_io 5y agoContent marketing, medium and twitter crushed blogging. The first two are about the reputation of blogging and the third about lower levels of entry for most people. Sad but true.
- rchaud 5y agoMedium and Twitter siloed blogs into a 'recommended for you' type of delivery medium. Blogger was agnostic in that regard, it only showed your content, and the blogroll was set by the user.
- sschueller 5y agoWow, I guess I am really old. I can remember the time before blogs. This is like "If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be instagram" to me.
- firepoet 5y agoCurious.. what would you bring back?
- throwawaaaaay17 5y agoSubstack is driving a blog renaissance. A ton of high-quality niche blogs popping up everywhere. See, for example, https://antonhowes.substack.com/ https://antonhowes.substack.com/ (I'm not affiliated with the writer, though I am considering switching from free to paid)
- brabel 5y agoWhy would I use this instead of my own domain and a website hosted for free on Netlify or GitHub Pages? I can get quite a lot of views by posting my latest posts to the relevant forums (HN, Reddit, programming forums)... if there's any advantage I am not seeing, I actually do want to know.
- dilap 5y agoI follow a bunch of people on substack. Things I've noticed as a reader: - It's both an email newsletter and a very nicely designed, clean web page - There's an easy-to-use payments system (I pitch in a few bucks to my favorite blogs). The writer can control on a per-post basis how much extra content paid subs get -- whole post, whole post but no ability to comment, or just a preview of the post. - They've actively recruited excellent writers, offering them contracts with minimum $ guarantees. There's nothing mind-blowing about it, but it's really well and tastefully done, which is more than you can say about 99% of the commericial web offerings.
- Torwald 5y ago> Why would I use this instead of my own domain and a website hosted for free on Netlify or GitHub Pages? Email subscriptions made easy enough for a non-techie audience to subscribe.
- kowalevski 5y agosome blogs that are available on domain etc have form with email subscription (for example by using Convertkit service). i did this on my blog website.
- pantulis 5y agoOf course social media hit blogs hard on its day. I miss the times when a blogger would publish how bad her morning went, pictures of his new dog, or how great was the latest TV launch. This is basically all gone to social media. But I also think that the coffin in the nail was given by people like myself subscribing to too many sites that provide RSS feeds. Seems like a good idea, having all that info in your newsreader, but after all The Verge, Hacker News and a few other media can dwarf any personal blogs so your reader basically is infoxicated. The best way to discover blogs is... also reading blogs.
- q-base 5y agoI used to love photo-blogs. Not just single images like IG and the like, but just random photo-blogs where the people who took the pictures share a bit of thoughts/stories behind the pictures no matter how trivial. My biggest inspiration back in the day was probably Jon Olsson before he started video blogging instead. So I have started doing so myself and really enjoy the process of putting them together and sharing just because it is the kind of content I like to consume myself. If any of you have good recommendations on photo-blogs then please let me know. I will sure try some of the search-engines and discovery tools shared in this thread already. And for shameless self-promotion here is a link to where I will post going forward: https://jesperreiche.com/category/photography/ https://jesperreiche.com/category/photography/
- tarkin2 5y agoThere's medium. But medium is a horrible mess. There's Dev.to which is at least usable and something I will visit. There's a couple of problems with blogs. - Sometimes I only want to subscribe to an author's certain topics - There's still no good RSS reader; I use feedly, but its load-time puts me off it big time (I've tried plenty of others) - The tendency to sign up for walled garden platforms rather than platforms, or simply use normal websites, that federate well - The practical death of web rings for discoverability I've been thinking about the last point more: I don't really want to submit to a search engine's algorithm; I want someone's curated recommendations. Once I've have those curated recommendations I want something that lets me aggregate and interact.
- derekzhouzhen 5y ago> There's still no good RSS reader; I use feedly, but its load-time puts me off it big time (I've tried plenty of others) If you want a fast, in browser RSS reader I don't think anything can beat mine in load time: https://airss.roastidio.us https://airss.roastidio.us I recently have a show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28585353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28585353
- EGreg 5y agoWell, you're in luck. Wordpress powers 42% of the Web! I'm sure much of that is blogs, right?
- SMAAART 5y agoEvolution of offline information networks: Printing press -> Radio -> Television Evolution of online information networks: Blogs -> Podcasts -> Videos What is interesting is that: 1. Podcasts > Videos since they can be consumed in more places than Videos 2. People love and consume long forms podcasts (>1 hour)
- manuelmoreale 5y agoThe issue with podcast—which I absolutely love—is one of discoverability and distribution. Blogs can be easily indexable and searchable while podcasts are definitely not. Also, the vast majority of podcasts rely on 3rd party services to distribute their content on podcast apps. Which makes the entire infrastructure a lot more fragile than a simple self hosted blog IMO. They’re still an awesome medium though, especially for long conversations.
- TOGoS 5y agoDon't know why sibling is dead; perfectly good points about discoverability of podcasts. To which I reply: I have had success discovering podcasts when they had transcriptions on the page. Google for some words, hit upon page, say "I can't read all this now but hey there's a link to audio", download the entire series, transcode to 16kbps Opus using ffmpeg, put it on my phone, listen in the car. (The two examples I have in mind are https://www.psymposia.com/podcasts/plusthree/ https://www.psymposia.com/podcasts/plusthree/ and https://www.organism.earth/library/document/conversations-on-the-edge-of-magic https://www.organism.earth/library/document/conversations-on..., which would suggest that posting transcriptions with your audio is something that occurs to people after consuming a certain quantity of mushrooms, or maybe it's just that the stuff those people tend to say happens to match stuff I'm googling for. Something something "hierarchical power structures".)
- jefftk 5y agoThis post has several misconceptions and mistakes: Never any locking them out because you noticed suspicious activity or anything bogus like that and making them provide personal details. That is abuse of trust and abuse of people This misses why companies do this: to prevent account hijacking. It sucks to be locked out of your account, but it also sucks for someone to steal it. Various companies have made mistakes here, and some amount of false positives will happen with any detection system, but going all the way to "do not protect accounts" is not going to give a better experience for users on balance. no one is writing them because there's no platform for them Why not https://wordpress.com https://wordpress.com, or one of the many sites that hosts WordPress? Blogger was shut down by Google years ago Blogger is still running: https://blogger.com https://blogger.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogger_(service) Nowadays people won't share content simply because they don't trust the internet to share content to it. You have to provide for them to be anonymous and protected forever, which means letting people create accounts easily with just an email or something similar ... They have to be able to blog without thinking someone is going to bring it up and file it away forever and maybe they won't get a job because of it, or their tyrannical government will think they're an agitator and attack them or an adversary will use it for selective characger defamation sometime. This just isn't something that a blogging platform is going to be able to promise its users. Defending against countries is really hard, especially when your users are doing things that are (wrongly) against the law in those countries.
- hownottowrite 5y agoGoogle doesn’t get enough credit for destroying the blogging ecosystem. It was a masterful stroke of evil on many levels.
- butterisgood 5y agoI kind of miss the days when people had servers and ".plan" and ".project" files that folks could read via finger servers. We used them in college, but I guess folks would need shell accounts on unix systems to do that today? I miss lightweight internet stuff. Maybe gemini will bring some of that back? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
- Matthias1 5y agoI know Gemini has encouraged me to start a blog. Of course it’s possible to blog over HTTP. (I mirror my gemlog to my website.) But it’s so much more enjoyable to write and browse in an ecosystem that’s designed for it.
- koeng 5y agoHow do you mirror the gemlog to HTTP? I've found a lot of methods for like active proxies, but I'd really like something that could create a static site from my gem text files.
- JohnL4 5y ago.plan: None of your business. Go away. You have mail.
- moogly 5y agoBack in the mid-to-late 90s when it was (somewhat) popular for game developers to use .plan files, there were some gaming news sites like Shacknews and Blues News aggregating that content for you. These were definitely proto-blogs.
- d3nj4l 5y agoAs a minor counterpoint: I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. These days the only blogs I trust are the ones I see on the top of HN or lobsters, which is unfortunate because I have interests beyond tech and I find it very, very difficult to find good blogs I can read about those interests. I think that shows there is a problem with blogging that goes beyond just the medium. Consider that blogging is a decentralised ecosystem, so you have no central place for discovery outside of Google specifically and search generally. Being on the top of Google is an attractive proposition because it means many eyeballs and lots of ad revenue. Therefore it is natural that many new blogs exist to game the search engine, hence the term "blogspam". Some of the same incentives exist with large social media sites as well, but on Twitter and the like if you mute/block enough big people and follow only those you care about, your feed will eventually become clean enough to look at every day. So I think it is much more important to solve the discovery problem with blogs if you want them to get more traction.
- fallat 5y agoI feel like web rings really resolved this issue.
- hopesthoughts 5y agoI wish web rings were more of a thing. I mean sure they exist, but they aren't universally used like they were 20 years ago.
- kasbah 5y agoMetafilter and some hand-selected sub-reddits may fill that need for non-tech fields.
- mabub24 5y ago> I've come to dread blogs and newsletters because so many of them are written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. My way around that is to pay. I find paid newsletters/blogs tend to evade SEO crap, for good reason: no one actually likes writing or reading that shit. Also, usually by forgoing the SEO crap they can focus on niche topics and content because they focus on retaining subscriptions. The subscription also allows the writers to be more human for lack of a better description. They actually use their voice when writing instead of the generic SEO salesman pep, and they feel more comfortable with offering their real opinions and views.
- elzbardico 5y agovideo and podcasts killed blogs. When we figured out it the spoken world has truly dismal bandwidth compared to reading, it was already too late, blogs were dead. Also, SEO trickery completely drowned the honest blogger, not to mention rampant plagiarism from the same SEO farms.
- pixelgeek 5y ago> Also, SEO trickery completely drowned the honest blogger, not to mention rampant plagiarism from the same SEO farms. Well it makes it impossible to find any good information about a topic. I wonder if stackoverflow would be as popular if there weren't 101 content farm articles for every subject you want to search for.
- elzbardico 5y agoPeople could try books instead of stack overflow.
- marcodiego 5y agoI like the way blogs are written today. If a take care not to find them through google, I can even reach some good ones. A large proliferation of blogs has detrimental effects when searching. Except for SEO aberrations, currently only people who have really interesting things to say about a subject have incentives to write blogs and that is how things should be.
- eurasiantiger 5y agoPlenty of well-written, insightful and contemporary blogs on the Gemini network. Get off the web and into some other part of the internet.
- cdnsteve 5y agoBlogs should not be reliant by search engines, we need a better way to build trusted networks between content authors where tech Giants are not required.
- nly 5y agoOne thing I love about (most) blogs is that every post has a timestamp. Nothing worse than finding a useful article online, particularly with facts and figures in them, with no bloody timestamp
- mkr-hn 5y agoA weird advice worm ate its way through the blogosphere in the late 2000s and early 2010s that made people think that if content was "evergreen," it didn't need a time stamp. The reality is that even the best advice has a context of time and place, and translating it forward requires knowing that context. Some people still follow that advice, or don't even know about timestamps and just grabbed the first theme they liked that didn't have them. For example: so much advice in photography that gets repeated without thought is from a time when automation wasn't very reliable, or from the early transition to digital. So new photographers end up being miserable in full manual when they'd learn faster with a little computer help, or they burn $2000 on a lens they aren't skilled enough to use when their modern $50 kit lens is sharper than almost any of the legendary film-era lenses that didn't have to contend with 20+ megapixel sensors revealing all their flaws. Any blog post from the 2000s on the subject would have been mostly right back then, but without a timestamp, it's hard to know where it fits.
- hopesthoughts 5y agoThis is one of my big problems with WP, and I've been using it for like 16 years now. Most themes don't support timestamps. In fact, I'm not even sure I've ever used one.
- specialist 5y agoJust gimme a RSS news reader UI for my family, friends, and fellow geeks I follow. Call it blogs, myspace, friend feeds, listservs, whatever. Banning newsfeeds (algorithmic outrage machine) would probably do it. Moots most of the gamification and engagement toxicity. Then if virality remains an issue, nerf the gamification and engagement features. Retweets, shares, likes, and other bullshit.
- rawoke083600 5y agoYea I want the "readability" of blogs (nice text, little JS and no tracking) and the "discoverability of "reddit" I can pick any topic/genre and just go find the appropriate subreddit. Sort by "Top (month,year,all time)" and immediately be served with "good content" Just "searching" for any topic on Google can quickly lead you down a rabbit hole of SEO-focussed-thin-content !
- trwhite 5y agoI think Posthaven ticks a lot of these boxes. I never really anyone talking about it on here but it's been around for an age and I don't have anything to fault about it.
- peter_retief 5y agoI blog for myself and host on a linux box under my desk. Really just a place to store my images and ideas.
- FourthProtocol 5y agoThe under list of web sites under 1Mb (https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/) is a great resource if you're willing to spend the time browsing there.
- gavreh 5y agohttps://diff.blog https://diff.blog is also a pretty good discovery resource, I've found.
- adventured 5y agoBlogs today are just being hosted on Substack instead of Movable Type installations (circa the early 2000s) or Blogger and similar. The platforms play a game of never ending musical chairs, the winners change, the game doesn't stop. It makes sense blogging would see an integration move, that blends up some social media, email list, blogging, etc activities (social media, images/video/sound, email lists, text blogging/writing, pick a few and blend them). It's extremely obnoxious for the average person to attempt to do all of those things separately.
- mattmcknight 5y ago"But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago" Yet I still use it?
- jaimefjorge 5y agoIt seems to me that the problem described is less one of discoverability and more one of lack of content. Regardless, this gave me the idea that it would be generally interesting to have authenticity unbundled from Google. If you could create a subset of Google with the honest, transparent, human blogs/posts/websites, etc then you could search from content from those sites. It could be less news aggregator and more search engine untainted by money or robots. I’m thinking opt-in domains, with a small community selecting the domains/blogs. I’m sure this is not new. But I surely earn for a more authentic internet.
- makach 5y agoBlogs are great, and I still read a lot of blogs. Quite a few of them I learn about from this site. But the gold is really in the commment section. There is so much quality content and so much insight that I am not worried about the development of the internet. It is still a great place to be.
- athenot 5y agoThe way I see it, it's a bit like photography, which started as an expensive hobby, then got more and more mainstream with film processing shops all over the place. Then digital photography entered, first as low quality then with rivaling quality. Anybody who wants can now take high quality pictures, and almost everyone will occasionally produce a stunning photo; yet not everyone is a photographer. And that's ok. As the internet grew, blogging became a popular format to write long form and publish it. There was a golden window where search was still new and hadn't yet been gamified, and before the platforms providing what veidr here called quick dopamine hits[1]. Seeing blogging expand and at the same time be instantly searchable was great... but didn't last. Eventually a whole group of users wanted the benefits of exposure of their thoughts & content, without the hassle of writing long form. And I would say, for those users, social media is indeed the perfect medium. Those who do write in long form can still do so, it's just that discoverability has somewhat taken a step back. I contend that it's not a huge deal, as a long form fosters a more thoughtful pace instead of rewarding instant gratification. Links between blogs do help with discoverability, it just that it's an organic process that takes time. Of course, the upside is once a blog is discovered, one can easily go back and read the previous articles. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28592479
- pelasaco 5y agoThe title misses the (2020). This was already well discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23205588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23205588
- pixelgeek 5y agoInteresting that there has been no comment on the impact of social media on blogging. I had a blog to chronicle my gaming hobby for over a decade and I gave it up recently because the audience for that type of blog has disappeared. Most of the people that would read non-technical blogs have changed their browsing habits to mostly consume content on Facebook. Most commercial content has moved to social media. Forums have disappeared for the most part. My hobby, and I suspect a lot of hobbies, have moved on to social media. As an example, the local tabletop gaming community here at one point had four distinct forums and a large number of hobby blogs. All of that is now on Facebook. I think you can see the impact of that on the decline in Blogger support and Wordpress' move to include more tools and support for 'professional' bloggers. Wordpress is more and more a platform for those SEO huxsters. Blogs aren't going to come back to the internet until the audience for them comes back and that won't happen until social media, especially Facebook, is no longer capturing that audience.
- polynomial 5y agoI would only note that blogs originally didn't have an "audience" outside of the (then small) blogging community. The goal wasn't to amass followers or become an influencer, but just to share things you discovered and write about them in an interesting way, amongst a very small (certainly by modern web metrics) group of appreciative and like-minded people.
- pixelgeek 5y agoWhich makes me wonder if the format is just conducive to a large audience model?
- savingGrace 5y agoWhat is lobsters?
- singh_ 5y agolobste.rs
- stevoski 5y agoI have a feeling the author of this post wasn’t an active blogger themselves when the heyday of personal blogs ended. I blogged actively from 2008 to about 2015. Through some luck, I had a good sized audience right from the beginning. Sometime around 2012 or 2013, the amount of time the average person spent on social media got high enough that it became their default time sink. People simply stopped interacting with personal blogs in the way they used to. Writing blog posts every couple of days was fun when every new post would get a few comments from regular readers. But quite rapidly those comments simply stopped, and instead almost every comment was blog spam. In my opinion, it had nothing to do with the blogging platforms, and everything to do with the rise of social media.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoBring back the readers that read blogs and pay for them (through ads) and there will be blogs again.
- pixelgeek 5y agoThe audience quite simply isn't there any more. And I think ads are part of the problem. You get into that system and the next thing you know you are plotting out SEO strategies. I think that the micro-payment systems that were discussed ages ago would be a solution but the investment money went elsewhere.
- pixelgeek 5y agoI actually wrote about something similar to this a while ago on my own blog https://lolbat.github.io/zacblog/post/the-peril-of-social-media/ https://lolbat.github.io/zacblog/post/the-peril-of-social-me... (Ignore the original clickbaity headline) The TLDR for those that don't want to read it is that the blogs that are out there writing technical content have to compete with a lot of content farms and SEO farms and so they have to resort to the same tactics to show up in search results.
- DanielBMarkham 5y agoI went self-hosted about a year ago (again) using ghost and commento. So far I love it. I've been writing online since the first web pages and I started blogging around 2000 or so. (I think) The demise of blogging and the crap that is social media are both due to the same combination of two factors: zero friction to create content and instantaneous, perhaps wordwide feedback on whatever you create. Serious writing just isn't designed to work in this kind of world. You'll be drowned out by emotionally-manipulative crap and then people will build engines to churn out even more crap faster that's even more manipulative. I love the future, but my vision of the future of VR/AR/brain interfaces is something along the lines of getting instantaneously angry or sad at something and wanting to talk about it before you're even consciously aware of what you're angry or sad about. The words will come later and are besides the point. (Which is just like our brains work) Because of many innovations, printed text is simply too easily-manipulated and dispersed by technology to survive in any fashion similar to what it used to. I don't know what the answers are, but I'm experimenting. Because of social signaling, my blog is ad, pop-up, and tracking-free. I'm mixing in new formats with weekly video called "Nerd Roundup" where I just shoot the shit about tech stuff. I tried twitch and a couple of other new delivery platforms. I do have e-publications, but I do my best to downplay the idea of anybody buying them who are not serious about the topic. In short, my current strategy, like George in that famous episode of Seinfeld [1], is take whatever most people are doing and invert it. There might be a space there to make some kind of progress. I'm not sure. It's worth trying. I know that we need more people reasonably talking about various topics and doing so in-depth, and I know we're getting less and less of that. 1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697744/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697744/
- pixelgeek 5y ago> The demise of blogging and the crap that is social media are both due to the same combination of two factors: zero friction to create content and instantaneous, perhaps wordwide feedback on whatever you create. Serious writing just isn't designed to work in this kind of world. You'll be drowned out by emotionally-manipulative crap and then people will build engines to churn out even more crap faster that's even more manipulative. I spent the better part of a half hour trying to find a blog post a read about a month ago that talked about this very thing. It was one of the reasons why I stopped writing my old blog and moved to one where I effectively ramble on for my own amusement. I think that this is one of the biggest changes in the web in some time. Content is being produced for search engine placement and social media aggregation. Once someone hits a site and the ad loads the content has done its work. The author of the piece doesn't care if you found it interesting or informative. That is irrelevant. They got your click. Facebook and Google exacerbate this issue by owning the ad services that these sites use. It is a closed system that just feeds on itself.
- WhompingWindows 5y agoI think the internet evolved around and past blogs. They still exist, but much more entertaining forms of content, which use a lot more data and tech to host, have come to dominate. Think of the percentage internet mind-share web blogs had in 1995 vs. 2021, this seems to be mostly what folks are nostalgic for. Now there are hundreds of online news sources, hundreds of forums and games and billions of hours of video content. The old Internet, the way it used to be, will survive in its niche, but we can't kid ourselves that 99% of people want to read technical blogs. And even so, while I'm in that 1%, I find blogs overly simplistic, too focused on self-help, DIY, end your procrastination, here's why my chosen tool/kit/library is the best -- these are profoundly uninteresting. Every time a Paul Graham post rockets to the top of HN, I roll my eyes. Out of all the writing and profundity of the history of civilization, this is what we worship?
- wly_cdgr 5y agoSome strategies to find good blogs that have worked for me: * Starting with university departmental websites * Starting from records of "shop talk" industry conferences (e.g. Practice & GDC for games, as opposed to "fan service" cons like PAX) * Looking up the people who worked on some games / products I really like (e.g. found Michael Brough's blog this way) * Exploring GitHub and similar for interesting repos and looking up their main contributors (an interesting side observation you'll also end up making if you do this is how many of the best projects are essentially done by one person - i.e., 85%+ of the commits are theirs and they are clearly the main/sole driving force. Not really a surprise but cool to see nonetheless)
- gwenbell 5y agoPossible the only thing about [blogs](http://gwenbell.com/#GBnQXVaaT2CggWpq0hfqlqjePhu9m1jULjBHxMFunCc= http://gwenbell.com/#GBnQXVaaT2CggWpq0hfqlqjePhu9m1jULjBHxMF...) that changed is the shape?
- rchaud 5y agoHere are the "blogs" I've discovered recently: 1) Random side hustle site about making weekend planners and selling via Kindle Direct Publishing. Found on a search for "Affinity Publisher 5x8 template" 2) Website Builder Report: A site that does "reviews" of website builders, e.g. Squarespace and has a convenient coupon code for each site being reviewed. Found on a search for "static file CMS" 3) Plausible Analytics, which has stumbled upon the ultimate HN bait - criticizing Google Analytics. Found on HN, because where else would this appear? Seems like people aren't interested in writing words on the Internet unless they expect to get paid from it somehow.
- pixelgeek 5y ago> Seems like people aren't interested in writing words on the Internet unless they expect to get paid from it somehow. Google dramatically changed how content was found and also how much there was. Since Google has a effective stranglehold on online advertising they have become the effective "tastemaker" for the internet. If Google thinks it is popular then people write SEO focused content on that subject and that is what shows up when you search since those sites also host Google ads. Search engines are also not very good. The model that made sense for the pre-Google internet doesn't really produce meaningful result anymore
- daitangio 5y agoFacebook rulez, until years ago, I discovered I cannot say what I want (respecting people, for sure): some words are not permitted in groups name, and even some posts can be flagged as "inappropriate" by some AI. I understand why Facebook need to do it, but sometimes it limit my expressiveness (I am Italian, and my language has a very huge set of synonyms and nuances of terms). So I have kept my Blog alive and kicking in the last 20 years and it is my place where: - I can write what I want and I take my responsibilities - NO one can ban me from by blog - Users can comment and I decide the moderation rules. And yes I own my site comments. - No advertising I do not want. My pages are super fast - Nice printing capabilities - I can link other blogs/article I like - I store images on my own, to avoid to loose external image links. - I get tracebacks in comments. On the downside: - Video bandwidth can be a pain if you do not want advertising on it - I must pay for it (but for 5 bucks / month it is a good deal for the freedom to say what do you want). - I got less traction in respect of Facebook.
- alpineidyll3 5y agoBecause I feel the same way I make a blog post a month, but discoverability is a real problem for blogs. Google doesn't take kindly to them.
- gallerdude 5y agoI just started a new blog [1]. I can't explain why, but the whole thing is kind of terrifying. I don't want to become one of those blogs you find that have 300 articles since 2008. The kind of blogs only have 1 or 2 comments on each post, screaming into the void what's going on with their life. Because of this fear, the only way I ever did write something was basically to force myself to have something posted by the end of the weekend. But now I have the same fear again, so I'll probably have to do the same thing. [1] https://www.museum-on-the-coast.com/ https://www.museum-on-the-coast.com/
- HermanMartinus 5y agoI know it's platform specific. But the Bear trending page has a decent few good blogs on it: https://bearblog.dev/discover/ https://bearblog.dev/discover/
- chovybizzass 5y agono way man, webrings
- mark_l_watson 5y agoI have written a few thousand blog articles in the last 25 years, but that flow has gone to zero since what writing time I have has gone to writing books. I miss blogging but there is only so much time in life and deciding what not to do is important.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- derekzhouzhen 5y agoNo, blogs are still here. The casual blog readers are gone. Now there are a thousand good static site generators and free hosting in github page, vercel and netlify, publishing a blog has never been easier, at least for the people dare to call themselves hackers. However, the mass has moved on to social media to sink their idle time. The question every blogger should ask themselves should be: Am I writing because I have something to say, or just to sound important to people I don't even care about?
- jppope 5y agoFor those of you looking for blogs you can find new ones here: https://refined.blog https://refined.blog
- mikewarot 5y agoA lot of the bloggers I read back in the day would now be called influencers, and the attention they fed on moved to other platforms, like Facebook, etc. Writing a good blog post takes time and effort, and what's the point if nobody is going to be around to read it? We all need that dopamine hit to keep putting in the effort, don't we? >But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago, That was a shock to read, as I last posted to my blog there recently. However, Blogger isn't dead, I still post stuff there from time to time on my personal blog.[1] I tried to make a more coherent case for capabilities based security in Capabilities Digest[2], back in 2015 1 - http://mikewarot.blogspot.com http://mikewarot.blogspot.com 2 - http://capabilitiesdigest.blogspot.com/ http://capabilitiesdigest.blogspot.com/
- sourcecodeplz 5y agoBlogger is so underrated ... great platform. In my opinion the most valuable free service from Google after Search.
- BlueTemplar 5y agoAh, the irony of this being itself a rambling blogpost ending on the front page of HN...
- d3vmax 5y agoThere used to be a blog search which listed the top 100 blogs, it was called technorati. The current version is not a blog search. I used to have a blog that taught people how to create their msn spaces and add features to it. It used to be No. 5. I slowly stopped blogging around 2008. Most people moved onto SN for casual posting as the barrier to maintain is low. Serious bloggers are still there.
- BlueTemplar 5y agoJust like last time : I'm pretty happy with the many high quality blogs we have these days.
- BlueTemplar 5y agoThe second part is about trying to make a platform that isn't a platform. Platforms are bad ! Don't use them ! (Yes, I know about Substack - I guess it would be more accurate to say that platform inevitably get bad over time, as the public companies that create and/or buy them are driven by short-term profit first and foremost.)
- MathMonkeyMan 5y agoI consume most of my techy stuff here on Hacker News, and occasionally I come across a blog I like, and so subscribe to it using an RSS reader browser extension. Here are the blogs I'm currently following (one of them is mine): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <opml version="1.0"> <head> <title>Feed Subscriptions</title> </head> <body> <outline text="wingolog" title="wingolog" type="rss" xmlUrl="http://wingolog.org//feed" htmlUrl="https://wingolog.org/"/> <outline text="A Programming Blog" title="A Programming Blog" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.davidgoffredo.com/feed"/> <outline text="Probably Dance" title="Probably Dance" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://probablydance.com/feed" htmlUrl="https://probablydance.com"/> <outline text="Edward Snowden" title="Continuing Ed — with Edward Snowden" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/feed" htmlUrl="https://edwardsnowden.substack.com"/> <outline text="Beyond Loom Blog" title="Beyond Loom Blog" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://beyondloom.com/blog/rss.xml" htmlUrl="http://beyondloom.com/blog/index.html"/> <outline text="apenwarr" title="apenwarr" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://apenwarr.ca/log/rss.php" htmlUrl="https://apenwarr.ca/log/"/> <outline text="Writing - rachelbythebay" title="Writing - rachelbythebay" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml"/> </body> </opml>
- paulpauper 5y agoSubstack is the new blog. The problem most bloggers face is no traffic and readers. The failure rate is so high, I can understand why the medium overall has declined in popularity. I think videos and podcasts are easier to get traction and there is more money.
- schemescape 5y agoMy biggest motivation for starting an independent blog instead of posting on Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium, etc. is that I want to have possession of the content that I create. Even if it's possible to get data back out of the big platforms, I wouldn't be surprised if it's in some proprietary format that is difficult to later reuse.
- starf 5y agoWho here used to read "salami tsunami"? I think his name is Dusty Scott.
- fsckboy 5y agoblogs were the beginning of the death of the internet: content based around a person is basically celebrity culture, and the pressure is on to crank something out regardless of whether the celeb has anything to say. the slashdot/digg/reddit/hn model is better (though as a microcosm of blogging, the slashdot editors were too personality driven as well)
- notJim 5y agoAren't blogs just called substacks now?
- Giorgi 5y agoOne should keep in mind that explosion of blogs came because of the adsense, nowadays getting into adsense is extremely difficult and other monetization options do not make sense. Bloggers need motivation.
- wolpoli 5y ago> Now it says there are 40,000 but you only get 10 or 20 pages of results you can get to, all basically corporate and lame. This is a very serious issue with search engines today. Search engines falsely claim millions of matches, and not only does it do nothing to help us narrow down the millions by grouping or suggest additional keywords, but we can't actually get to the results. Do these results even exist? Are search engines basically precomputing results for keywords and it can't go outside of them anymore?
- design-of-homes 5y agoI started writing a blog in 2007 and continued writing fairly regularly until 2013. The subject of my blog: the design of high density housing. I am not an architect, but I developed a passion for the subject and wrote blog posts based on the books, papers and news I consumed. Why did I stop? Simply because hardly anyone was reading the blog! At first, I convinced myself I was writing for myself and an audience was not important. But over time, I came to realise that, although the size of the audience was not important to me, the interest and engagement of readers did matter (especially for a blog with a very niche topic). Hardly any readers commented on my blog posts (which was important to me). Today, there are lots of corporate blogs writing about their products, and there are single author bloggers trying to establish their "personal brand" - whatever that means! The writing style is often inflated, formal, corporate-sounding: in short, simply bland. What rarely comes across is the unique voice of the writer. And that's a shame.
- JacksonGariety 5y agoI write the best philosophy blog: https://hegelsbagels.net/ https://hegelsbagels.net/
- waspight 5y agoSo for the one that still blogs. Are you anonymous, not anonymous but with a pseoudonyme or not anonymous at all?
- motohagiography 5y agoWorking on launching a blog right now. The value prop is that it is guaranteed to make you smarter, each piece is a literary composition, and it is the best time and value for money you are likely to get that day. What we do with language online now is what we used to do with code in the 80's. We're still in the shitty 8-bit game stage of public discourse, Twitter is internet Tetris. Like code, good writing isn't just what it represents, it's what it does.
- brm 5y agoI'd bring back David Karp
- Brajeshwar 5y agoI was lucky to be part of the early blog sunrise around 2000. I was even more lucky to have a blog that was picked up, recognized by the likes of Macromedia, Adobe, and linked by a lot others. I believe there are a few references from few entries in Wikipedia and few other well known websites. When Google Adsense was a thing and fun, I had it running on my site for quite a long time. There was a time when I supported my Startup with the income from my blog. A few of my years in Mumbai was just living off of the income from my blog. 20+ years now, I just have my blog as a record and archive for all the fun, stupid, silly, and nonsense that I wrote. Now, I write for myself and perhaps for my kids to browse around in future and, may, laugh. I have no comments, no analytics, nothing at all now. I can understand the new generations loathing the likes of Blogs, Emails. However, I look at them as a digital record of my life. For instance, I stumble on people online and then I reply back to the email thread we had in 2005. How nice is that?
- xwdv 5y agoI’m wondering if bringing back an ancient technology, Web Rings, would solve this problem of blog discoverability a bit.
- hammyhavoc 5y agoThere's a lot of repetition, e.g. 'nowadays'. 3 uses in one post.
- billiam 5y agoLike every service in the history the Internet, blogs were great for the first few years, then got ruined by the uncontrolled nature of the medium, which is why we liked the Internet in the first place. Yes, I know, nothing new and lovely is being invented now, it was all great before, but honestly is it worth pining for a web page that took five minutes to read and was discovered by link trees rather than a tweet you read in 5 seconds that is discovered for you by a crappy algorithm?
- waltbosz 5y agoI too hearken for access to the Internet of ole. When content was real content, and love was poured into every keystroke. I spend the occasional free mental cycle pondering the reasons for the downfall of Internet quality. It's hard to put a finger on any one exact reason. The tttthis.com article reminds us that blogging platforms which lowered the barrier to entry for Internet publishing helped usher in all sorts new interesting voices and ideas. Perhaps it was the monetization of blogs which attracted the publishers of low quality. Once gold is found in the hills, more people come exploring.
- ElectricMind 5y agoPeople start with "hey I love this topic. Let me write about it and I don't care what anyone else think or fame or money" *1-2 years later success Same people "Let me write something so I can milk the cow. I stop writing about code but instead how to make cheese from the milk which I am about suck from the cow organically" As soon as your "passion" becomes "full-time" job , it is over. Any way I have to find my cow. Cioa
- fleddr 5y agoBlogging will not return to its former glory when you think it's a blogging platform problem. It has absolutely nothing to do with the product. What happened is mobile. People consume the vast majority of digital content via their phone, therefore short form content wins. Tweets and 5 second videos, not lectures. Besides the content being short form, "engagement content" wins. Say something stupid, controversial, rude...you win. You'll get seen. Your reasonable and balanced take....crickets. The other thing that happened is that the internet got a lot more crowded. Which basically means that everything gets gamed. All eye balls on 0.001% of content and no eye balls on 99.999% of other content creators. Even in what little remains of blogging, everything is gamed. Have a look at blogging platform Medium. Every single category and topic is spammed with low effort garbage, burying genuine and more serious authors. The genuine reader can no longer find their jewels, and the genuine author considers it all pointless now. No blogging platform can fix any of the above problems.
- jamesvandyne 5y agoBlogs like the author is looking for still exist (I write one at https://jamesvandyne.com https://jamesvandyne.com) and there's heaps more on https://micro.blog https://micro.blog. Blogs that aren't SEO fluff to get adsense money just don't appear in the search results. Discovery is the real issue. Finding these blogs independently or outside is nigh impossible. I've been thinking it might be fun to make a GeoCities-esque neighborhood directory site that you could add your blog to help with discovery. But could you (I) change my habits to stumble upon sites in the neighborhoods instead of opening HN/Twitter?
- dSebastien 5y agoOver the years, I collected hundreds of RSS feeds. It all started with Google Reader, then moved all around the map. I remember Feedburner, tt-rss, ... Finally I stuck with Feedly. Like many others, I hoarded feeds and consumed articles at random. I enjoyed using StumbleUpon to discover new sites on the Web, it was fun and I miss that vibe. I used to explore my feeds every single day. I would pick 5-10 articles, print them out at work (oops) and read those during my train commutes. I learned a ton that way. At some point I hit Feedly's free tier upper limit (800 or 1K feeds?) and stopped caring. Over time, I completely stopped checking the feeds and just let it go. I migrated over to Twitter and started following people rather than blogs; which has interesting benefits compared to just looking at articles through a feed reader: social interaction! As the flood of content keeps getting worse, I feel like it's harder and harder to find the interesting content, which is drowned by the long tail. I feel like we need better means to curate content collaboratively (a delicious 2.0? :p). Wonder what exists out there that isn't focused on a specific niche.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoBlogger has not been shut down: https://www.techrolet.com/2021/06/why-google-will-not-shut-down-blogger.html https://www.techrolet.com/2021/06/why-google-will-not-shut-d... I blog. Here's a view from the other side: It's nigh impossible to make money blogging. People hate every means that exists to monetize it. People hate ads. People hate SEO content with affiliate links. People hate content paid for via a content mill. Etc. If you do something original, they accuse you of being a shill or making things up etc and few people leave tips or kick in a few bucks via Patreon. You want to see more blog writing from original voices? Be willing to tip or support Patreon if they are looking to monetize it. Good writing takes time and practice and if you aren't willing to pay people, eh, quit your bitching. Wanting good writing for free is an expectation of slave labor. Don't be a creeper. There have been far too many people whose interest in my writing is lurid, overly personal and unhealthy. It's impacted me, my life and my writing and mostly not in a good way. Share the blog writing you think is good. Repost it somewhere. It's extremely hard to self promote. Many places have rules against that or which strictly limit it. Even where it is allowed, people act all judgy if you are self promoting. It has more credibility if someone else promotes your work. Engage constructively. Comments or reader interaction is enormously important for fueling the mind's ability to figure out what to say next on the topic. (Don't use this as an excuse to be mean and then claim "You asked for feedback!") I have no plans to engage with anyone who decides this comment somehow constitutes an invitation to be attacked, insulted and told how I'm somehow doing something wrong and it's my fault I can't make this work. It's not my fault. This is just one of those things where the world is currently broken and most writers are making a pittance.
- sockpuppet_12 5y agoIf you use https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ to search for blogs, you'll find all that kind of thing he laments is missing.
- rurban 5y agoNobody cares for blogs. Usenet was the real thing. Distributed discussions, free from censorship and disappearing hosters.
- silexia 5y agoBlogs are still out there, Google just stopped surfacing them in search. I used to get tens of thousands of visitors per month to my blog joelx.com. now I receive none to the articles from the last few years. I still write though.
- Goddiva004 5y agoWell that is what this is, so what do we want to talk about?
- Goddiva004 5y agoWell that is what this is so what do we actually want to talk about.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hopesthoughts 5y agoOK well that was 2020. Maybe fast forward to 2021, and blogs are here again. Or still here, I guess that depends on how you see things. To me blogging never died, but then again I don't go around randomly surfing blogger either. You're likely to run into spam that way.