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As 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

by d3nj4l 5y ago

As 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 ago
I feel like web rings really resolved this issue.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  I 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 ago
Metafilter 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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I’ve found the opposite: Switching to a paid/subscription model has ruined some of the writers I previously enjoyed. When they wrote for fun, not profit, the writings came out whenever they had something interesting enough to share. Now that it’s for-profit, the content is forced to come out faster and more frequently with posts that feel unnecessarily long to justify the cost. One author I previously enjoyed for well-researched topics that debunked popular opinions has been firing off un-researched posts with claims that can be debunked in 30 seconds of Googling. The topics feel like they’re being chosen to produce the most interesting teaser (to convince non-subscribers to subscribe) or SEO juice. It feels like the clickbait factor went way up overnight. Much of the magic of the past blogging era was that people were writing because they wanted to, not because they were fishing for clicks or subscriptions or pandering to future employers with every word. The move to paid takes some of that away.
mkr-hn 5y ago
I'm experimenting with a once every other month newsletter using Revue + the Twitter integration.[0] Tweeting is about the only way I've found to get views on stuff I write nowadays, and Twitter's analytics say I get tens to hundreds of profile views a month. Now there's a big signup button on there that pre-fills the email address. I have a theory that 99% of blog posts could fit in a tweet's worth of text or a short thread. Most things that need more length probably don't need SEO-friendly length (500+ words) and are better bundled up in a traditional newsletter. And the stuff that does need that length can just be the main part of the newsletter. [0] https://twitter.com/ViewfinderFox https://twitter.com/ViewfinderFox / https://newsletter.viewfinderfox.com/ https://newsletter.viewfinderfox.com/
adrianN 5y ago
The lack of central discovery is one of the main appeals of blogs imho. I don't want to discover blogs via a directory. I want to discover them through links from blogs I already read or recommendations from friends. I think blogs started dieing when they optimized for maximizing their audience instead of being locations where people write about stuff that interests them without an expectation of "making it".
- eddieroger 5y ago
  I actually think I would like a directory, because I fear the link-only propagation method would lead to echo chambers. But then how do you have a trustworthy directory, and how does it not also become an echo chamber. Reddit could almost be that, but clearly they don't have a handle on being not-an-echo-chamber yet.
- kixiQu 5y ago
  Handmade directories, like blogrolls, are a sweet spot IME: I keep mine at https://maya.land/blogroll.opml https://maya.land/blogroll.opml (human or machine-readable) and I've found a huge portion of what's on it via other people's recommendations.
  - sweuder 5y ago
    And now I'm perusing your recommendations, cheers!
    - kixiQu 5y ago
      My whole site was inspired by https://marijn.uk/linkroll/ https://marijn.uk/linkroll/ and https://href.cool/ https://href.cool/ , so while not everything they link to has an associated feed, I gotta shout them out as worth a look. :)
anovikov 5y ago
Isn't this the whole people of blogs today? "Write something Google bot will like reading"
- dsr_ 5y ago
  You're taking a tool -- a chef's knife -- and telling us that the point of it is to open packages from Amazon. Sure, you can do that. It will even work for that. But the tool has many, many more uses than that.
  - AA-BA-94-2A-56 5y ago
    This isn’t it at all. The blogs are in a race to the bottom in terms of quality because there is huge incentive to write for long-tail SEO rather than humans. This is a lot closer to tragedy of the commons.
    - dsr_ 5y ago
      The tragedy of the commons would be people chewing up a limited resource in a way that prevents other people from doing better things with it. What is the common resource that you think is being used up? If it's the brainpower of the people writing SEO blogs, it doesn't prevent other people using their own brains. If you think they are polluting the infosphere with crap, I can't really argue with that, but I can point out that it's generally ignorable and self-curing: when you don't make money at it, you stop. So if anything, it resembles a late-stage ponzi where people aren't paying in much but are getting nothing back.
lonk11 5y ago
Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is hard. And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust. Everyone wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know that others won't waste your attention? To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this link before you. When you downvote - your connections to those who upvoted become weaker. The strength of your connections to other feeds and users represents how useful their content recommendations have been to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how likely their future recommendations will be worth your time (ie, trust that they won't waste your time). The content is ranked according to the connection weights - so you get information from the sources that have shown to be content curators for you. I did a Show HN recently for this project that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643 [1] - like my comment here tries to draw your attention to my hobby project.
- erklik 5y ago
  > Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is hard. And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust. Everyone wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know that others won't waste your attention? > To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this link before you. When you downvote - your connections to those who upvoted become weaker. > The strength of your connections to other feeds and users represents how useful their content recommendations have been to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how likely their future recommendations will be worth your time (ie, trust that they won't waste your time). > The content is ranked according to the connection weights - so you get information from the sources that have shown to be content curators for you. > I did a Show HN recently for this project that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643 > [1] - like my comment here tries to draw your attention to my hobby project. I find this so interesting. OP complains about people constantly trying to sell him something which is why he was turned off of blogs. And what happens? Someone tries to sell him something for his problem of too much selling. Ah. What a world. Solution to too much selling is more selling.
varrock 5y ago
I've always wanted to blog because I love to write. However, I've been very hesitant to do so because of exactly what you described: the grind culture. I've felt immense pressure to make every post academic, but I realized that the blog should be for me first and foremost. In fact, my first blog post ever is describing the purpose behind my blog and _why_ I started it. It will help keep me accountable. However — I do wonder about this hypothetical: my blog (for whatever reason) blows up. Would I start to feel pressure to deliver content that starts trending towards "grind culture"? Or would I still be able to blog _for me_? I'm sure this is what some other content creators have faced before, especially in the YouTube community. If anybody has had this experience, I'd be curious to hear what you did.
- mattlutze 5y ago
  If you'd like to blog and write, maybe just write for yourself, don't put any trackers on it, don't put any ads on it. The grind culture thing comes from people trying to make money off of their blogs. So, don't do it for the money :) If you get to a point where your hosting provider comes knocking because you're generating too much traffic, you'll have a good inflection point to determine if there's some way to get the blog to pay for its own hosting without you having to change your approach (tip services are cool for this).
  - ikr678 5y ago
    Unfortunately, if you are quietly producing quality text content on a topic and not monetising it, someone else will steal it. I've seen this a few times in very non-technical domains, eg Fishing hardware and ceramic glazing. https://www.alanhawk.com/reviews/reviews.html https://www.alanhawk.com/reviews/reviews.html has frequently had content stolen and republished on seo gamed listicle sites or used verbatim in youtube videos.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  This is some serious premature optimization you are doing. The fact is nobody is going to read your blog post about why you are starting a blog, so you are basically just writing it for yourself. Which is fine - but you need to be aware that if you are writing for yourself there is basically a 0% chance your blog will ever get any amount of traffic. So keep writing for yourself and leave it at that but don't stress about problems you aren't going to have and calling yourself a content creator
coliveira 5y ago
You misunderstand blogs: you can find the good ones only by personal referral or by actively trying. If you have to search Google, then you'll, by definition, find only the ones that are optimizing for search engines. There is no way to solve this problem, and I think the same is true for other forms of social interaction.
- grifball 5y ago
  Can you recommend a good blog then?
  - __turbobrew__ 5y ago
    https://nullprogram.com/ https://nullprogram.com/
kowalevski 5y ago
btw does anyone have invite to lobste.rs? i have technical blog (not great but i try to improve it) and i'd like to share content on lobsters to have feedback.
- ngngngng 5y ago
  I'm new to this, but looks like you need to start in their irc chat and get to know people to receive an invite. #lobsters libera
dsr_ 5y ago
The way to find good blogs is to start by asking technical questions in whatever subject you are interested in. If you want to read about barbeque, you need to start with a technical question about barbeque; if you want to read about Greek history, you need a question about that. Eventually you will find somebody knowledgeable who is writing about that subject. They will in turn link to others, or comment on others, and so forth. Discussion groups and forums and such are useful.
- leetcrew 5y ago
  great advice, and I'd add that it doesn't even have to be a particularly intelligent question. I found bret devereaux's excellent blog by googling "game of thrones historical accuracy" and got far more than I expected.
- maskros 5y ago
  Discussion groups and forums used to be useful, but now they're dying out and being replaced by undiscoverable walled garden facebook groups and discord servers...
  - pixelgeek 5y ago
    This was my immediate response. The number of forums available has plummeted. And as @maskros says, they are all in private Facebook groups now. Private because no-one wants their personal life trickling into their Facebook feed in case someone from work sees it.
    - wyclif 5y ago
      On Facebook, you don't need to use a private group for privacy. You set up a different audience group that isn't public and change the audience to one that is non-public.
      - pixelgeek 5y ago
        That may be true but if you moderate a group you get requests from people to make it private who either don't know this or don't know the difference. Or don't trust Facebook to just change the way 'privacy' works
Jugurtha 5y ago
I have installed a Chrome extension to remove certain "data science" blogs from my search results because they just dominate, but allow posts from practically anyone. I'm not interested in the teachings of a data virgin on machine learning. I have muted and blocked accounts on Twitter as well because of that: people clearly never having touched real data talking about ML projects, recommending libraries to manage lifecycle, etc. All that "audiencing" doesn't suit me, especially when it's clearly BS with no value, not even an entertainment value.
- rchaud 5y ago
  The UX/UI area is just as bad. It's nearly impossible to find authoritative discussions outside of conference slide decks, which aren't ideal for reading as standalone documents, as they only have bullet points. However there is no shortage of useless "app redesign" case studies from complete amateurs. And it's always the same ones too: Starbucks, Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram and Spotify. How about a public health website? Or a university application system? Or something "boring" that's much more realistic for a case study than a billion dollar corp's app?
  - Jugurtha 5y ago
    It's one point I make whenever I get the chance to talk with students who ask me on how to work on portfolio to demonstrate skills. I tell them to try and solve a problem for real and make a product. They'll learn so much more than playing house. Databsases, the language, front-end, sales, getting users, killing hypotheses, product design, product management, prioritization, making tradeoffs, etc.
dfxm12 5y ago
only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. I really wonder, is the money from ads good enough that publishing content like this profitable, even with all the blogspam competition?
- pixelgeek 5y ago
  Given how many sites there are that do it I would say 'yes'.
shadowgovt 5y ago
I'm working on a hypothesis that there is something I call the "AM radio effect," which, roughly speaking, is "As communication technologies progress in comfort and convenience, the older generation will become dominated by hucksters who try to take advantage of those who cannot or will not switch." It's my explanation for - what happened to AM radio as FM, satellite, and podcasting came to dominate the American driving experience - what happened to landline telephone as point-to-point communication became dominated by cellphones, smartphones, and increasingly non-phone-voice-network audio and videoconferencing technologies I wouldn't be surprised if blogs suffer the same problem in the era of microblogging and centralized microblogging services.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  What happened to landlines? What I witness was that innovation stopped. For instance landlines could have been upgraded to support text messaging (just as they use a modem to send caller ID they could use a modem to send and receive texts.) Cordless phones, answering machines and such could have all gotten better but they didn't. Most irksome, landlines don't support deliverability features such as STIR/SHAKEN so if you live in a place where cell phones don't work you might have trouble getting people to pick up when you ring them. That's different from AM radio which, driving across upstate NY, I came to the impression that the only program you could expect to get reliably was the Rush Limbaugh show. If you were lucky around sunset you might catch a black power show from Philadelphia...
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    > What happened to landlines The majority of incoming calls on landlines now are people trying to scam the callee. [https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/almost-half-your-phone-calls-next-year-will-be-scams-spam-a-new-study-says.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/almost-half-your-phone-ca...]. And the majority of AM radio content now is low-audience long-tail content (or mass-commodified syndicated content, like Rush Limbaugh) that is a medium for pushing low-quality bulk advertising for questionable products. To expand upon the hypothesis (and this is half-baked and incomplete, so take it with several grains of salt): as technology evolves, people move to more comfortable / more convenient technology. AM is not comfortable or convenient; it's interfered with by too many EM flux sources in the modern world. Landline is not comfortable or convenient for the reasons you noted relative to modern alternatives. The people who do not move off these technologies are various flavors of captive audiences: people who can't buy FM radios or don't want to adopt new stations / find content in new locations, people who can't use a cellphone, etc. As mainstream content creation leaves these channels, the vacuum is taken over by hucksters trying to take advantage of these captive audiences. The incentives to do so are lack of alternative content and a "softer" target audience (easier to fool, especially since these technologies were once mainstream and trusted so many of their users still believe they are, even after the hucksters have taken them over). I have relatives who still believe "They wouldn't call me if they didn't have business with me; how would they know my number?" And I still have relatives who believe AM news radio is news.
wibagusto 5y ago
The problem with social media sites is their algorithms are focused on profitability. If you follow a local restaurant and then move to another city they will push ads and show content tied to your geolocation (which makes sense—not saying that’s bad per se). But they dictate what you should see and when. With blogs it used to be about the RSS feed, which had one job: to nudge users when new content is available. But ultimately users (or news aggregators) had control over what the algorithm does. The problem with blogs as pointed out is content discovery. How can content be discoverable without commercial interests? Social media platforms make content discovery simple and effective. On top of that, the barrier to entry is low—a two or three step on boarding process which is free (as in beer) to-boot. Anyone know of good content-discovery platforms? Podcasts are interesting because multiple platforms support them so they exist somewhat in the borderland. Might be an interesting case study being podcast discover ability vs blogs vs social media. All that being said, I think we simply have to go beyond the first page of search engine results to find the good stuff. Not finding stuff is a form of laziness when we are used to getting a quick info-fix on Wikipedia. But standardized P2P protocols might be nice too—good incentive for a crypto currency?
goatkey 5y ago
I really enjoy The Browser[0] newsletter for this reason. They find very very good articles that often also end up on the front page of HN. I’ve found a lot of great new blogs / magazines this way. —- 0: https://thebrowser.com/ https://thebrowser.com/
FlyingSnake 5y ago
“Most books should have been an article, most articles should’ve been a tweet.” Blogging just for the sake of blogging is what caused their decline in the first place. If the blogpost can’t be easily understood within first few lines, it’s a wasted opportunity. The a reason Morgan House, Derek Sivers are still relevant.
- hopesthoughts 5y ago
  That's putting too much in Twitter. What if it disappears one day?
sysadm1n 5y ago
> Being on the top of Google is an attractive proposition because it means many eyeballs and lots of ad revenue Hence the proliferation of 'splogs' or Spam-Blogs. Also in terms of social media, most people who experience a viral blogpost that spreads like wildfire throughout the net, invariably try to recreate that past success. It's the sole motivation of clickbait and sensationalist articles. More eyeballs, more AD revenue and also fake Internet Points in general to be had.
cavalcade119 5y ago
I get the Thinking About Things newsletter [1], which focuses on sending out articles by lesser known blogs. I don't know how they do it but they seem to know about all the fascinating blogs before they make it big. It's been a great way to discover interesting but not sponsored, SEO'd-to-death content. [1] http://thinking-about-things.com/ http://thinking-about-things.com/
schemescape 5y ago
I wish there was some way to "undo" my contribution to a site's advertising revenue when I start reading and discover the page is just SEO garbage (e.g. when I see a sentence that starts with "many reviewers noted that ...").
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  This is a “feature”. There’s so much content out there whose sole purpose is to drive advertising revenue, either with complicity of the brand being advertised or incidentally (as targeting is never 100% reliable, there’s always a bit of “leakage” where an ad would be displayed next to irrelevant or content that the advertiser would normally object to - at scale that leakage is money someone can capitalise on). A lot of people rightfully mention that we lack a proper micropayments system for the web and while that’s true, I don’t think it’s the only problem. A lot of people’s careers and companies are built on this parasitic model where they don’t actually provide any tangible value and only profit off leftover scraps, which wouldn’t be sustainable in a completely paid-for model because the end-user doesn’t actually get any value out of it and thus would never willingly pay money for this “service”.
  - FiggyPudding 5y ago
    Some of these comments seem to support that LBRY thing that was on HN again recently if using it for blog docs instead of videos
- coldpie 5y ago
  Install an ad blocker and use direct payment to fund ethical business models.
omegalulw 5y ago
> faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to This cracked me up good lol. Btw, another big problem is people writing "blogs" as if they were experts without having expertise e.g. machine learning medium articles making wild unsubstantiated. It's so misleading, especially because ML is already not particularly rigorous due to black box models.
dude4you 5y ago
What are your interests? I know a shitload of good blocks.
hammyhavoc 5y ago
I don't even think a good chunk of what's at the top of HN is anything other than "SEO'd content". The quality is definitely diminishing in recent months.
cratermoon 5y ago
Or, with a slight rewording: > I've come to dread the internet and social media because so many of is written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil. It's the nature of the attention economy and ubiquitous ad tech.
wyclif 5y ago
I was disappointed that the author never mentioned ownership. A lot of the problems discussed there are caused by not owning your own content. It's still super easy to register a domain and roll your own content using Ghost, Hugo, or 11ty.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
SEO destroyed the cooking/recipe blogs. What was once a "Ingredients:" .... "Instructions:" ... "Tip: goes well with sour cream", is now a whole story, how the author woke up one day, when the were 7, and noticed they peed their bed, and then their mother came to check on them, and started cleaning the pee, and the dog was barking, and the dog also pooped that day, and there was wheel of fortune on tv, and a friend came over for a lunch, but they ordered pizza for lunch, and then there was a rerun of mission impossible on tv, and then daddy had a beer or five, and mommy made sandwiches, and those sanwiches remind the author of this chicken tikka masala recipe, that was converted to a non-spicy vegan variant.
wibblewobble123 5y ago
Your comment shows you didn’t read the page fully. I miss when people had time to read a whole page. The author already wrote about blogs that are trying to get views with various tactics vs old proper blogs that were just people rambling about their quirky interests or bad day.
ashtonkem 5y ago
The number of blogs that try and stretch out a simple “how much <X> is <good/bad/enough>“ into a few hundred words by defining every <explicative deleted> term is infuriating. Just tell me the number already! I know what all the terms mean, I just forgot what the right number is! SEO content farming is really destroying the web.
hopesthoughts 5y ago
I've been personal blogging since 2003, and I still do so, although a lot shorter form these days. Not everyone blogs just for SEO purposes, I couldn't care any less about SEO. In fact, I don't even pay attention to analytics.

by d3nj4l 5y ago

fallat 5y ago

I feel like web rings really resolved this issue.

hopesthoughts 5y ago
I 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 ago

Metafilter 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.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I’ve found the opposite: Switching to a paid/subscription model has ruined some of the writers I previously enjoyed. When they wrote for fun, not profit, the writings came out whenever they had something interesting enough to share. Now that it’s for-profit, the content is forced to come out faster and more frequently with posts that feel unnecessarily long to justify the cost. One author I previously enjoyed for well-researched topics that debunked popular opinions has been firing off un-researched posts with claims that can be debunked in 30 seconds of Googling. The topics feel like they’re being chosen to produce the most interesting teaser (to convince non-subscribers to subscribe) or SEO juice. It feels like the clickbait factor went way up overnight. Much of the magic of the past blogging era was that people were writing because they wanted to, not because they were fishing for clicks or subscriptions or pandering to future employers with every word. The move to paid takes some of that away.

mkr-hn 5y ago

I'm experimenting with a once every other month newsletter using Revue + the Twitter integration.[0] Tweeting is about the only way I've found to get views on stuff I write nowadays, and Twitter's analytics say I get tens to hundreds of profile views a month. Now there's a big signup button on there that pre-fills the email address. I have a theory that 99% of blog posts could fit in a tweet's worth of text or a short thread. Most things that need more length probably don't need SEO-friendly length (500+ words) and are better bundled up in a traditional newsletter. And the stuff that does need that length can just be the main part of the newsletter. [0] https://twitter.com/ViewfinderFox https://twitter.com/ViewfinderFox / https://newsletter.viewfinderfox.com/ https://newsletter.viewfinderfox.com/

adrianN 5y ago

The lack of central discovery is one of the main appeals of blogs imho. I don't want to discover blogs via a directory. I want to discover them through links from blogs I already read or recommendations from friends. I think blogs started dieing when they optimized for maximizing their audience instead of being locations where people write about stuff that interests them without an expectation of "making it".

eddieroger 5y ago
I actually think I would like a directory, because I fear the link-only propagation method would lead to echo chambers. But then how do you have a trustworthy directory, and how does it not also become an echo chamber. Reddit could almost be that, but clearly they don't have a handle on being not-an-echo-chamber yet.
kixiQu 5y ago
Handmade directories, like blogrolls, are a sweet spot IME: I keep mine at https://maya.land/blogroll.opml https://maya.land/blogroll.opml (human or machine-readable) and I've found a huge portion of what's on it via other people's recommendations.
- sweuder 5y ago
  And now I'm perusing your recommendations, cheers!
  - kixiQu 5y ago
    My whole site was inspired by https://marijn.uk/linkroll/ https://marijn.uk/linkroll/ and https://href.cool/ https://href.cool/ , so while not everything they link to has an associated feed, I gotta shout them out as worth a look. :)

anovikov 5y ago

Isn't this the whole people of blogs today? "Write something Google bot will like reading"

dsr_ 5y ago
You're taking a tool -- a chef's knife -- and telling us that the point of it is to open packages from Amazon. Sure, you can do that. It will even work for that. But the tool has many, many more uses than that.
- AA-BA-94-2A-56 5y ago
  This isn’t it at all. The blogs are in a race to the bottom in terms of quality because there is huge incentive to write for long-tail SEO rather than humans. This is a lot closer to tragedy of the commons.
  - dsr_ 5y ago
    The tragedy of the commons would be people chewing up a limited resource in a way that prevents other people from doing better things with it. What is the common resource that you think is being used up? If it's the brainpower of the people writing SEO blogs, it doesn't prevent other people using their own brains. If you think they are polluting the infosphere with crap, I can't really argue with that, but I can point out that it's generally ignorable and self-curing: when you don't make money at it, you stop. So if anything, it resembles a late-stage ponzi where people aren't paying in much but are getting nothing back.

lonk11 5y ago

Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is hard. And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust. Everyone wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know that others won't waste your attention? To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this link before you. When you downvote - your connections to those who upvoted become weaker. The strength of your connections to other feeds and users represents how useful their content recommendations have been to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how likely their future recommendations will be worth your time (ie, trust that they won't waste your time). The content is ranked according to the connection weights - so you get information from the sources that have shown to be content curators for you. I did a Show HN recently for this project that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643 [1] - like my comment here tries to draw your attention to my hobby project.

erklik 5y ago
> Discovery of good sources of information such as blogs is hard. And I think the biggest problem is the lack of trust. Everyone wants to grab your attention [1]. So how do you know that others won't waste your attention? > To solve this problem I am building https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com that cultivates trust as you rate content. When you upvote a link you connect stronger to the feed that posted it (which could be a blog's feed) and to other users that upvoted this link before you. When you downvote - your connections to those who upvoted become weaker. > The strength of your connections to other feeds and users represents how useful their content recommendations have been to you in the past and they could be used as a measure of how likely their future recommendations will be worth your time (ie, trust that they won't waste your time). > The content is ranked according to the connection weights - so you get information from the sources that have shown to be content curators for you. > I did a Show HN recently for this project that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28405643 > [1] - like my comment here tries to draw your attention to my hobby project. I find this so interesting. OP complains about people constantly trying to sell him something which is why he was turned off of blogs. And what happens? Someone tries to sell him something for his problem of too much selling. Ah. What a world. Solution to too much selling is more selling.

varrock 5y ago

I've always wanted to blog because I love to write. However, I've been very hesitant to do so because of exactly what you described: the grind culture. I've felt immense pressure to make every post academic, but I realized that the blog should be for me first and foremost. In fact, my first blog post ever is describing the purpose behind my blog and _why_ I started it. It will help keep me accountable. However — I do wonder about this hypothetical: my blog (for whatever reason) blows up. Would I start to feel pressure to deliver content that starts trending towards "grind culture"? Or would I still be able to blog _for me_? I'm sure this is what some other content creators have faced before, especially in the YouTube community. If anybody has had this experience, I'd be curious to hear what you did.

mattlutze 5y ago
If you'd like to blog and write, maybe just write for yourself, don't put any trackers on it, don't put any ads on it. The grind culture thing comes from people trying to make money off of their blogs. So, don't do it for the money :) If you get to a point where your hosting provider comes knocking because you're generating too much traffic, you'll have a good inflection point to determine if there's some way to get the blog to pay for its own hosting without you having to change your approach (tip services are cool for this).
- ikr678 5y ago
  Unfortunately, if you are quietly producing quality text content on a topic and not monetising it, someone else will steal it. I've seen this a few times in very non-technical domains, eg Fishing hardware and ceramic glazing. https://www.alanhawk.com/reviews/reviews.html https://www.alanhawk.com/reviews/reviews.html has frequently had content stolen and republished on seo gamed listicle sites or used verbatim in youtube videos.
weird-eye-issue 5y ago
This is some serious premature optimization you are doing. The fact is nobody is going to read your blog post about why you are starting a blog, so you are basically just writing it for yourself. Which is fine - but you need to be aware that if you are writing for yourself there is basically a 0% chance your blog will ever get any amount of traffic. So keep writing for yourself and leave it at that but don't stress about problems you aren't going to have and calling yourself a content creator

coliveira 5y ago

You misunderstand blogs: you can find the good ones only by personal referral or by actively trying. If you have to search Google, then you'll, by definition, find only the ones that are optimizing for search engines. There is no way to solve this problem, and I think the same is true for other forms of social interaction.

grifball 5y ago
Can you recommend a good blog then?
- __turbobrew__ 5y ago
  https://nullprogram.com/ https://nullprogram.com/

kowalevski 5y ago

btw does anyone have invite to lobste.rs? i have technical blog (not great but i try to improve it) and i'd like to share content on lobsters to have feedback.

ngngngng 5y ago
I'm new to this, but looks like you need to start in their irc chat and get to know people to receive an invite. #lobsters libera

dsr_ 5y ago

The way to find good blogs is to start by asking technical questions in whatever subject you are interested in. If you want to read about barbeque, you need to start with a technical question about barbeque; if you want to read about Greek history, you need a question about that. Eventually you will find somebody knowledgeable who is writing about that subject. They will in turn link to others, or comment on others, and so forth. Discussion groups and forums and such are useful.

leetcrew 5y ago
great advice, and I'd add that it doesn't even have to be a particularly intelligent question. I found bret devereaux's excellent blog by googling "game of thrones historical accuracy" and got far more than I expected.
maskros 5y ago
Discussion groups and forums used to be useful, but now they're dying out and being replaced by undiscoverable walled garden facebook groups and discord servers...
- pixelgeek 5y ago
  This was my immediate response. The number of forums available has plummeted. And as @maskros says, they are all in private Facebook groups now. Private because no-one wants their personal life trickling into their Facebook feed in case someone from work sees it.
  - wyclif 5y ago
    On Facebook, you don't need to use a private group for privacy. You set up a different audience group that isn't public and change the audience to one that is non-public.
    - pixelgeek 5y ago
      That may be true but if you moderate a group you get requests from people to make it private who either don't know this or don't know the difference. Or don't trust Facebook to just change the way 'privacy' works

Jugurtha 5y ago

I have installed a Chrome extension to remove certain "data science" blogs from my search results because they just dominate, but allow posts from practically anyone. I'm not interested in the teachings of a data virgin on machine learning. I have muted and blocked accounts on Twitter as well because of that: people clearly never having touched real data talking about ML projects, recommending libraries to manage lifecycle, etc. All that "audiencing" doesn't suit me, especially when it's clearly BS with no value, not even an entertainment value.

rchaud 5y ago
The UX/UI area is just as bad. It's nearly impossible to find authoritative discussions outside of conference slide decks, which aren't ideal for reading as standalone documents, as they only have bullet points. However there is no shortage of useless "app redesign" case studies from complete amateurs. And it's always the same ones too: Starbucks, Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram and Spotify. How about a public health website? Or a university application system? Or something "boring" that's much more realistic for a case study than a billion dollar corp's app?
- Jugurtha 5y ago
  It's one point I make whenever I get the chance to talk with students who ask me on how to work on portfolio to demonstrate skills. I tell them to try and solve a problem for real and make a product. They'll learn so much more than playing house. Databsases, the language, front-end, sales, getting users, killing hypotheses, product design, product management, prioritization, making tradeoffs, etc.

dfxm12 5y ago

only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to. I really wonder, is the money from ads good enough that publishing content like this profitable, even with all the blogspam competition?

pixelgeek 5y ago
Given how many sites there are that do it I would say 'yes'.

shadowgovt 5y ago

I'm working on a hypothesis that there is something I call the "AM radio effect," which, roughly speaking, is "As communication technologies progress in comfort and convenience, the older generation will become dominated by hucksters who try to take advantage of those who cannot or will not switch." It's my explanation for - what happened to AM radio as FM, satellite, and podcasting came to dominate the American driving experience - what happened to landline telephone as point-to-point communication became dominated by cellphones, smartphones, and increasingly non-phone-voice-network audio and videoconferencing technologies I wouldn't be surprised if blogs suffer the same problem in the era of microblogging and centralized microblogging services.

PaulHoule 5y ago
What happened to landlines? What I witness was that innovation stopped. For instance landlines could have been upgraded to support text messaging (just as they use a modem to send caller ID they could use a modem to send and receive texts.) Cordless phones, answering machines and such could have all gotten better but they didn't. Most irksome, landlines don't support deliverability features such as STIR/SHAKEN so if you live in a place where cell phones don't work you might have trouble getting people to pick up when you ring them. That's different from AM radio which, driving across upstate NY, I came to the impression that the only program you could expect to get reliably was the Rush Limbaugh show. If you were lucky around sunset you might catch a black power show from Philadelphia...
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  > What happened to landlines The majority of incoming calls on landlines now are people trying to scam the callee. [https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/almost-half-your-phone-calls-next-year-will-be-scams-spam-a-new-study-says.html https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/almost-half-your-phone-ca...]. And the majority of AM radio content now is low-audience long-tail content (or mass-commodified syndicated content, like Rush Limbaugh) that is a medium for pushing low-quality bulk advertising for questionable products. To expand upon the hypothesis (and this is half-baked and incomplete, so take it with several grains of salt): as technology evolves, people move to more comfortable / more convenient technology. AM is not comfortable or convenient; it's interfered with by too many EM flux sources in the modern world. Landline is not comfortable or convenient for the reasons you noted relative to modern alternatives. The people who do not move off these technologies are various flavors of captive audiences: people who can't buy FM radios or don't want to adopt new stations / find content in new locations, people who can't use a cellphone, etc. As mainstream content creation leaves these channels, the vacuum is taken over by hucksters trying to take advantage of these captive audiences. The incentives to do so are lack of alternative content and a "softer" target audience (easier to fool, especially since these technologies were once mainstream and trusted so many of their users still believe they are, even after the hucksters have taken them over). I have relatives who still believe "They wouldn't call me if they didn't have business with me; how would they know my number?" And I still have relatives who believe AM news radio is news.

wibagusto 5y ago

The problem with social media sites is their algorithms are focused on profitability. If you follow a local restaurant and then move to another city they will push ads and show content tied to your geolocation (which makes sense—not saying that’s bad per se). But they dictate what you should see and when. With blogs it used to be about the RSS feed, which had one job: to nudge users when new content is available. But ultimately users (or news aggregators) had control over what the algorithm does. The problem with blogs as pointed out is content discovery. How can content be discoverable without commercial interests? Social media platforms make content discovery simple and effective. On top of that, the barrier to entry is low—a two or three step on boarding process which is free (as in beer) to-boot. Anyone know of good content-discovery platforms? Podcasts are interesting because multiple platforms support them so they exist somewhat in the borderland. Might be an interesting case study being podcast discover ability vs blogs vs social media. All that being said, I think we simply have to go beyond the first page of search engine results to find the good stuff. Not finding stuff is a form of laziness when we are used to getting a quick info-fix on Wikipedia. But standardized P2P protocols might be nice too—good incentive for a crypto currency?

goatkey 5y ago

I really enjoy The Browser[0] newsletter for this reason. They find very very good articles that often also end up on the front page of HN. I’ve found a lot of great new blogs / magazines this way. —- 0: https://thebrowser.com/ https://thebrowser.com/

FlyingSnake 5y ago

“Most books should have been an article, most articles should’ve been a tweet.” Blogging just for the sake of blogging is what caused their decline in the first place. If the blogpost can’t be easily understood within first few lines, it’s a wasted opportunity. The a reason Morgan House, Derek Sivers are still relevant.

hopesthoughts 5y ago
That's putting too much in Twitter. What if it disappears one day?

sysadm1n 5y ago

> Being on the top of Google is an attractive proposition because it means many eyeballs and lots of ad revenue Hence the proliferation of 'splogs' or Spam-Blogs. Also in terms of social media, most people who experience a viral blogpost that spreads like wildfire throughout the net, invariably try to recreate that past success. It's the sole motivation of clickbait and sensationalist articles. More eyeballs, more AD revenue and also fake Internet Points in general to be had.

cavalcade119 5y ago

I get the Thinking About Things newsletter [1], which focuses on sending out articles by lesser known blogs. I don't know how they do it but they seem to know about all the fascinating blogs before they make it big. It's been a great way to discover interesting but not sponsored, SEO'd-to-death content. [1] http://thinking-about-things.com/ http://thinking-about-things.com/

schemescape 5y ago

I wish there was some way to "undo" my contribution to a site's advertising revenue when I start reading and discover the page is just SEO garbage (e.g. when I see a sentence that starts with "many reviewers noted that ...").

Nextgrid 5y ago
This is a “feature”. There’s so much content out there whose sole purpose is to drive advertising revenue, either with complicity of the brand being advertised or incidentally (as targeting is never 100% reliable, there’s always a bit of “leakage” where an ad would be displayed next to irrelevant or content that the advertiser would normally object to - at scale that leakage is money someone can capitalise on). A lot of people rightfully mention that we lack a proper micropayments system for the web and while that’s true, I don’t think it’s the only problem. A lot of people’s careers and companies are built on this parasitic model where they don’t actually provide any tangible value and only profit off leftover scraps, which wouldn’t be sustainable in a completely paid-for model because the end-user doesn’t actually get any value out of it and thus would never willingly pay money for this “service”.
- FiggyPudding 5y ago
  Some of these comments seem to support that LBRY thing that was on HN again recently if using it for blog docs instead of videos
coldpie 5y ago
Install an ad blocker and use direct payment to fund ethical business models.

omegalulw 5y ago

> faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil to This cracked me up good lol. Btw, another big problem is people writing "blogs" as if they were experts without having expertise e.g. machine learning medium articles making wild unsubstantiated. It's so misleading, especially because ML is already not particularly rigorous due to black box models.

dude4you 5y ago

What are your interests? I know a shitload of good blocks.

hammyhavoc 5y ago

I don't even think a good chunk of what's at the top of HN is anything other than "SEO'd content". The quality is definitely diminishing in recent months.

cratermoon 5y ago

Or, with a slight rewording: > I've come to dread the internet and social media because so many of is written by grind culture freaks who only write faux-insightful SEO'd content as a way to build an audience to sell snake oil. It's the nature of the attention economy and ubiquitous ad tech.

wyclif 5y ago

I was disappointed that the author never mentioned ownership. A lot of the problems discussed there are caused by not owning your own content. It's still super easy to register a domain and roll your own content using Ghost, Hugo, or 11ty.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

SEO destroyed the cooking/recipe blogs. What was once a "Ingredients:" .... "Instructions:" ... "Tip: goes well with sour cream", is now a whole story, how the author woke up one day, when the were 7, and noticed they peed their bed, and then their mother came to check on them, and started cleaning the pee, and the dog was barking, and the dog also pooped that day, and there was wheel of fortune on tv, and a friend came over for a lunch, but they ordered pizza for lunch, and then there was a rerun of mission impossible on tv, and then daddy had a beer or five, and mommy made sandwiches, and those sanwiches remind the author of this chicken tikka masala recipe, that was converted to a non-spicy vegan variant.

wibblewobble123 5y ago

Your comment shows you didn’t read the page fully. I miss when people had time to read a whole page. The author already wrote about blogs that are trying to get views with various tactics vs old proper blogs that were just people rambling about their quirky interests or bad day.

ashtonkem 5y ago

The number of blogs that try and stretch out a simple “how much <X> is <good/bad/enough>“ into a few hundred words by defining every <explicative deleted> term is infuriating. Just tell me the number already! I know what all the terms mean, I just forgot what the right number is! SEO content farming is really destroying the web.

hopesthoughts 5y ago

I've been personal blogging since 2003, and I still do so, although a lot shorter form these days. Not everyone blogs just for SEO purposes, I couldn't care any less about SEO. In fact, I don't even pay attention to analytics.