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Blogs are already part of the view count trap and constant output dopamine hit provider worlds. Social media is just further down the trend line. In the early
by bnralt 4y ago
Blogs are already part of the view count trap and constant output dopamine hit provider worlds. Social media is just further down the trend line.
In the early days of websites people often just had articles organized by topic on their website that interested readers could peruse. There might be a "What's New" section to let people know what was updated, but other than that old content was treated as being just as relevant as new content.
The blog space flipped that. Instead of most of the information being presented non-chronologically with a possible area to let people know what's new, now information was prioritized by how new it was, with a possible area to list older posts. Old blog posts that don't make it to the list end up being well hidden and almost never read.
For most people, the appeal of a blog over the older long-form articles was that blogs provided a somewhat constant stream of new content. You hear this when people tell others how to blog - "right a blog post everyday/everyweek." With a personal website, you don't want your high quality articles drowned out in a sea of low level off the cuff writing. But most blogs thrive on that, because a stream of new articles is needed to keep people coming back. Almost no one would want to put a low effort website up that only says, "Man, watching the news this week. What is the world coming to?", but those kinds of hot takes are all over the blog world.
Additionally, on older sites comments often consisted of an individual e-mailing the author of a site, who might that have a page for useful reader comments. The blog comment space was about firing off quick reactions, getting a quick response, and then having the whole discussion buried a day (or sometimes mere hours) later as other blog posts supplanted the top one.
- kibwen 4y ago> In the early days of websites people often just had articles organized by topic on their website that interested readers could peruse. I remember it differently. Personal websites of the day were structured much like blogs would be, with a single index page listing all the articles in reverse-chronological order (or for the lazy/unconcerned with bandwidth, a big honking text file with new entries appended to the top). What you're describing wasn't the blog precursors, but the wiki precursors, with pages nicely organized according to topic (with copious links to the related sites in your webring). I agree that one of the biggest original draws of the "blog" concept was the convenient comments section, but in retrospect comments aren't at all necessary to the concept of "blogging", especially since the term now encompasses the pre-blog activity that was previously just "throwing up random articles on your own personal domain". As for the view count trap, we all prominently displayed our "N people have viewed this page" widgets on Geocities. :P
- bnralt 4y ago> Personal websites of the day were structured much like blogs would be, with a single index page listing all the articles in reverse-chronological order (or for the lazy/unconcerned with bandwidth, a big honking text file with new entries appended to the top). I don't think that was the norm at all outside of news sites. Like I said, there might be a what's new page, but I remember sites mostly organizing articles by topic, and updating them inside the article. See, for instance, the Marathon Story Page[1]. All of the articles are there on the side bar, organized by topic. There is a "What's New" section, but it's not useful for reaching the bulk of the site. It contains updates, not the content. The blog movement flipped this. You can see this shift in action by looking at the site superdickery.com. If you look at early versions of the site[2], it's nicely organized based on topic. Then at some point the join the ongoing trend and turn it into a blog[3], and almost all the content becomes obscure and difficult to find. [1] https://marathon.bungie.org/story/ https://marathon.bungie.org/story/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070829035629/http://www.superdickery.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20070829035629/http://www.superd... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20150831061840/http://www.superdickery.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150831061840/http://www.superd...
- gnramires 4y agoSee gwern.net for a nice knowledge-base style website. The problem with knowledge bases is there's a significant overlap with wikipedia: there should be a reason the information isn't in a public wiki. Usually personal research of experiences, I think. I think the blog format is simply the easiest to organize (with tags helping it), but I do think many bloggers would benefit from writing a knowledge base of personal research (but it is a lot more work than writing a blog post and letting search engines take care of discoverability for you).
- bnralt 4y agoI agree about gwern.net, that's actually one of the first things that popped into my mind. A lot of personal sites from academia still follow this approach as well (see Don Knuth's page[1], for example). In the early days of the web, most personal sites were like that (and most were hosted on university sites). There wasn't this idea that you should be producing a constant stream of thoughts on the hot topic of the day. [1] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/ https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/