16 ms·

How the blog broke the web (2017)

191 points by sph 4y ago

k__ 4y ago
I remember 2002 or something, where my friends in Germany all started blogging. One tech friend said it was bullshit. Who wants a guestbook you write into all by yourself? I found this a hilarious explanation of what a blog is.
Viliam1234 4y ago
I think a good solution is to have both a wiki and a blog. They serve different needs. Wiki is for maintaining information that can later be updated. New pages can start very short, or maybe just a list of links; you will expand them later, or maybe not. Blog is where you write something when you have a coherent message, and then the article becomes read-only, a part of history. In the past I would have added "forum" as a third category, but these days it is probably better to use an existing platform. You need to go where other people are, unless you want to become a full-time moderator of your own forum. What else is there? Sometimes you want to make an interactive application. Or maybe upload some photos (but you could also do that in a blog or on a wiki). An alternative approach would be to only install a wiki, and implement the blog on it, e.g. using pages like "2023-01-20" for blog articles.
ilyt 4y ago
That sounds weirdly gatekeepy. How dare those new peasants not slave away in HTML mines before they can get their content shown!
- robjan 4y ago
  If it's gatekeeping, it's also hypocritical since the article is in blog format.
kerrsclyde 4y ago
I have a client who's web site is a series of pages within folders, no database, no scripting, html pages only. It's a complete joy to work on. Problems are rare and easily resolved, I look forward to updating it. I can't help thinking more small and medium sized web sites should be setup like this.
- voltaireodactyl 4y ago
  This with added markdown support is basically how blot.im works and it’s what got me actually working on a site (albeit in blog ish format). Not affiliated just a happy customer.
  - nintendo1889 4y ago
    What do you think about trump 'selling secrets', in the light of the recent story of Sergey Shestakov and Charles McGonigal? Again, I don't like taking sides. Just searching for absolute truth. We will never get there, but we can try. ref to your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34019912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34019912
    - voltaireodactyl 4y ago
      This is a thread focused on markdown and html based SSBs. If you would like to continue our political discussion, you are welcome to contact me on my website, where I occasionally write about related issues. But HN guidelines suggest this unrelated thread is not the place for such a conversation.
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
    One of my go-to projects when learning a new programming language: Build a markdown based blog with it. Usually quite simple and you learn a lot about a language doing that.
  - doctor_eval 4y ago
    That looks really cool. It seems to be a SSG hooked up to Dropbox/gdrive/git, with no front end. What a great idea.
- nine_k 4y ago
  I suppose things like a "design update", let alone "rebranding", never happen to this client? Unless every page is entirely unique, a web site consisting of raw HTML pages has a lot of repetition / redundancy, and coordinated updates become repetitive, too. Authoring, too. The upside, of course, is that there's literally nothing to go wrong in the pipeline, because there is none beside the upload operation. I can imagine that sites like https://ciechanow.ski https://ciechanow.ski where every page appears custom-made could be managed like that.
sushibowl 4y ago
There's lots of tools around nowadays that allow you to build a site that doesn't conform to the blog format, but the old web hasn't really made a comeback. I think there is truth in the author's statement: > Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it. writing up whatever daily musing into a short-form article is much easier than carefully organizing and categorizing an entire library of work, so there will be more of that around. Writing a 140 character update on your social feed is even easier, so there will be more of that. The old web hasn't totally disappeared, by the way. It's just much harder to find in a sea of other content that has grown much faster. And blogs are only a small part of that. SEO advertising clickbait spam sites are drowning out a lot of content on the web, because they are extremely low effort and there's money to be made in them.
- planb 4y ago
  I think what really happened is revealed when you just change 2 words: > When something is easy, more people will do it. I'm sure there are way more quirky, personal and lovely websites out there than 20 years ago. There's just orders of magnitude more other content. The whole article has a vibe of "old man yelling at clouds".
- JackMorgan 4y ago
  I think of https://wiki.c2.com/ https://wiki.c2.com/ where pages are organized like a graph, but within a page you might see a thread of paragraphs from people replying to each other. That's an interesting mashup of the two ideas.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  cf https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu
phoebos 4y ago
Reminds me of these (https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html) digital garden style personal websites.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I wonder how much RSS/Atom has driven the chronological feed to become such a fundamental building block in website design.
- ilyt 4y ago
  RSS ? Not really. RSS aggregators however... I don't think even at its peak RSS alone was popular enough to the average user but it did popularize the whole "get a bunch of sources and aggregate updates into one stream" idea, and that's essentially what both facebook and twitter is.
firasd 4y ago
This is interesting but I don't think it's what "broke the web". What really broke it is that those 20-30 million people who would have made hobbyist blogs or posted to forums are now part of the 200million (twitter) or 2 billion+ (FB) who just post on social media instead. Almost nobody is out there blogging about gardening just cause they like the topic, the new gardening content on the web is all SEO driven
- krapp 4y ago
  > Almost nobody is out there blogging about gardening just cause they like the topic, the new gardening content on the web is all SEO driven The reality is almost everyone posting on social media about gardening is doing so because they like the topic. The purely market-driven "influencers" are a minority, although they seem otherwise because they're the ones most aggressively tuning their content for the algorithms. And even then, people who make money from their content can also care about what they're doing.
  - firasd 4y ago
    Yeah that's the distinction I was making--the hobbyists have gone to social media, and the people registering domains and using a self-hosted CMS are trying to make a biz out of it Although Substack seems to be causing a little renaissance of hobbyist blogging
- dageshi 4y ago
  The ones who actually made hobbyist blogs probably went to youtube because a youtube channel is actually much better than a blog from the pov of the hobbyist. Of course it's harder to search video than a blog from the pov of someone looking for information but that's not the hobbyists problem.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  80 gardening bloggers: https://codesupply.co/gardening-blogs/ https://codesupply.co/gardening-blogs/ Optimized for SEO driven possibly, but the question is, is it still useful? The web still has all kinds of niche content, it just takes a bit of time to find it. Publishing content has diverged a great deal since 1993 and if someone is passionate about a topic, they will share it in a format they like. It might not be a classic blog post, but what matters in the end? The web is not broken IMHO.
nickelpro 4y ago
Reference sites still exist, Wikipedia isn't organized by reverse-chronological and MediaWiki is a far more formidable CMS than MT ever was. Same goes for ReadTheDocs, Sphinx, Jekyll, Hugo, or any number of static site generators that power the infinite libraries of documentation, reference material, and personal sites on the web. What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. What the author fails to consider is that this diminished position has nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with the population of people who were coming online in the early 2000s. The strangeness and lovable oddities of the early web were a function of the people who populated it. The generic, least common denominator status quo of the now is similarly defined because everyone is online, and so the content distribution reflects that. Everyone's Eternal September comes at some point, for the author it was October 2001. Internet is full, AOL users go home.
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  > What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. When I stumble upon a Web 1.0 living fossil, it's a delight every time. Someone felt an overpowering need to say something, they made a website about their favorite topic (be that shoelace knots, unsolved mysteries of Ancient Mediterranean literature, their train trip from Europe to North Korea or the CUBIC NATURE OF TIME), wrote everything they wanted to say and mostly stopped. They didn't enter into a parasocial relationship with millions of people, they didn't try to get rich by producing content, they didn't become slaves to The Algorithm, they didn't ruin the brilliance of their first LPs by producing a dozen more.
  - syntaxfree 4y ago
    I’m not fond of people who take ratheism as a major inteeest or even component of their identity, but pocm.info is just lovely.
    - 4y ago
gnz11 4y ago
“Broke the Web”? I really dislike headlines like these. Movable Type and blogs didn’t “break” the Web - not now or back then either. Blogging and the blog layout was just one emergent trend of this era. Flashed based sites were another trend that emerged alongside blogs. Folks were still hand coding HTML and FTPing the files to a server. Directory/brochure style sites didn’t go anywhere. Through all these trends the Web has always been there like a good friend. Nothing “broke” it and nothing will for the foreseeable future.
amadeuspagel 4y ago
Why are negative trends so often portrayed as inevitable? Why not create or at least point to some examples of the kind of website you like? Maybe it's more appealing? No responsibility. No need to question your ideas: Do I really want a blog or a non-chronological website? Of course, you're going to have a blog, everything else is already "broken".
greatNespresso 4y ago
Liked the article but my feeling is that, at the end of the day, nobody cares about the tools you choose. People are only interested in the end results. There's nothing preventing you from building your site out of manually crafted HTML pages (I do for instance) and I would even dare to say that it has never been easier to do so (things like Emmet make it really easier to produce HTML content from your text editor of choice, services like cloudflare pages or vercel take less than a minute to go from local to public). CMS made it easier indeed for not-so-technical-savvy folks to push stuff on the WWW but is it actually a bad thing? At the end of the day, it's the content that matters in my opinion.
jimbler 4y ago
You can't go home again. I think an argument could be made that tools like Moveable Type and Blogger and Wordpress made the web. And, another argument could probably be made that seo-chum "articles" like this (and ad networks) broke the web. But, really Twitter and FB and YouTube are probably the most likely killers.
philipwhiuk 4y ago
It's not worse because it's easier for people who don't want to learn a mark-up language to post their ideas.
rgrieselhuber 4y ago
Despite the somewhat clickbaity title, which I didn’t mind so much, the salient point is near the bottom, about Chronos. This is always worth being aware of and on guard against. The are other, richer models available.
SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
I loved the insight of how the chronological method of organization took over the zeitgeist of the early Internet, pushing out the handcrafted lists/hierarchies into weird niches in the sidelines, and eventually leading to it being superseded by the algorithmic-sorting that dominates the web today. It is not that we can't make a non-chronological (or non algorithmic-sorting) website now a days, we obviously can as there are many comments here listing various CMSs. But it is about how the vast majority of people don't do feel inclined to participate on the non-chrono/non-algo internet (either because they don't like it or don't know it). For them to put something out there in the internet is synonymous to put it on a chrono/algo format.
ciroduran 4y ago
If you want to blog away with simply editing HTML pages, but have no time for coming up with a template, or spend time with databases or static page generators, there's Zonelets https://zonelets.net/ https://zonelets.net/
6stringmerc 4y ago
In a more short-hand summary: When money creeps into art or intellectual pursuits that originated from personal interest, they usually race to the bottom. There's nothing wrong with blogs. There is a lot wrong with the internet as an advertising machine. Heck, the comments here frequently are first-hand blog entries on a subject and I enjoy it very much. Now if it was monetized, I'm not sure if the signal to noise would be as equivalent.
getoffmyyawn 4y ago
This article seems like the author's personal memories asserted to sound like a comprehensive history. However, as someone online since 1993, with my own domain since 1995, I have different memories. By 1996, we had AOL Hometown, Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire, and more. All offering various forms of build tools and early CMS features. The old weird web is still out there if you take the time to look. I would argue there are actually more quirky personal pages now than ever before.
syntaxfree 4y ago
So this is one of probably tens of thousands of websites (and I mean just with this overpriced provider-tool, many more people roll with more customized stuff) that are librarian-like but generated with an user-friendly tool: https://publish.obsidian.md/zero-chroma-infinity/ https://publish.obsidian.md/zero-chroma-infinity/ We’re here, man.
college_physics 4y ago
It takes some digging to agree with the headline, but it feels true at some level. Clearly it is the walled social media gardens that really "broke the web" and in far more fundamental ways (as in: posts that are schematic (e.g. 140 chars), that are not accessible unless logged in, where discovery is platform/algorithmic driven and not user driven etc). These platforms flurished because they made it very easy for people to participate. In the (hypothetical) absence of social media, blogs could be accused of making it (merely) easy to follow a particular pattern of content creation. This is a little bit like accusing writers or composers of blindly following a genre instead of crafting their own. Yes all genres are inventions and it is important not to stiffle that creative process, but it is not reasonable to expect the majority to do that...
dusted 4y ago
> It was boring, tedious, and involved. As a hobby, it _IS_ cozy as hell.
foobarbecue 4y ago
Reports of the old web's death are greatly exaggerated.
prmoustache 4y ago
I think what the author is missing is that for a long time most of the social and "chronologically updated" part of the internet was done outside of the Web and on different protocols, mainly NNTP and IRC.
rcarmo 4y ago
Blogs didn’t break the web, rampant advertising and social networks did. I disguised my personal Wiki as a blog, but it’s been going on for over 20 years now and I suspect many people would do the same if they weren’t distracted off writing and sharing content by get rich quick schemes and the evolution of dopamine hooks like TikTok…
sph 4y ago
Some of my favourite "digital garden" websites: - http://100r.co/ http://100r.co/ - https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html Made by the same people, but the second is more technical. I can't deny that there is a certain sense of visiting someone's home (in this case someone's sailboat) that is completely absent in the modern, sterile and utilitarian blog format. It is a pleasure to get lost following interesting links, chancing upon slightly dusty, delightful corners. This is why I appreciate what https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ is doing, a lot. Every single one of those websites featured in the home page is not only nostalgic, but a treasure trove that someone manually collected and organised. It is ironic and sad that as technology improved, we lost Frontpage, manually written HTML and the soul in personal websites, now many are just stock Jekyll templates hosted on a github.io domain. As someone that has struggled to blog all my career, I wonder if organising my thoughts cleanly into a polished but fleeting article just doesn't fit my way of thinking, and I would be better served by a personal website just about stuff I care about, which I keep updated over the years, and might go a bit dusty over time. Not a shop window, not a magazine, but an open garage full of thingamajigs collected over the years. -- More written words on digital gardens: - https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden - https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/ https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/
- bovermyer 4y ago
  I do this, too. My site https://benovermyer.com https://benovermyer.com has a blog, but the more interesting stuff is all the _other_ pages. The most frequently updated page is the list of books I've read. Do you have a "digital garden" site?
  - sph 4y ago
    Not yet, but I've been hacking on Kirby to create a regular blog-style personal website and I just want to throw everything out and have a way to host pure Markdown. Someone recommended PicoCMS elsewhere. That's my weekend sorted. You are one step away from a garden. Move those links out of "KB" and collect them in the home page. RSS is a bit harder to do on that type of websites. Here's my crappy definition of a digital garden: a website where most likely you have to write your RSS updates by hand. Not the literal XML but you will have to keep a changelog, because the cool stuff is outside the blog section. See also: https://journal.miso.town/ https://journal.miso.town/
bulgur 4y ago
[dead]
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> "Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it." This has an upside (i.e., anyone and everyone can do it), as well as a downside (i.e., anyone and everyone can do it). When you can find your way through excessive noise (and ads) it's worth it. Quality signals can be paradise. Unfortunately, at this point, the noise is outpacing the ability to mitigate it. Gold is getting more and more difficult to find.
janvdberg 4y ago
The author seems to be arguing that the technology (i.e. MT in this case or CMS-es in general) that enabled many more people to blog (and therefore they all look alike) is what broke the web. I understand the sentiment. But I rather have more people blogging than not. Because blogs are the web. Many more people should be blogging.
- brazzy 4y ago
  It sounds like you missed the main point of the author: the blog-CMSs did not just impose a certain look, they also imposed some fundamental assumptions about the content, namely that content is produced as a steady stream of distinct "posts", and that the newest posts are the most interesting and massively more visible than "old" ones. And that is a very different kind of content than webpages that are not inherently ranked in importance and discoverable through a TOC, where updates don't necessarily add new pages but often also extend or modify older ones. Blogs are not the web. That you could even think of making that statement is the most resounding confirmation that the author is right.
oersted 4y ago
I suppose that, in a way, the chronological model is a reaction to the immense volume that the Internet grew into. Only focusing on new content can be a good way to drastically reduce the time spent deciding what to actually read or watch. It is also a good way to help everyone focus on a few things at a time so we can have meaningful conversations about them together. Forums, Blogs, RSS, Newsletters, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News... Sure you often first filter for (or subscribe, or get recommended) content from topics and people that you know you like. But there's still too much stuff to choose from. If you just look at the content from the last day, it is much more manageable to decide what is worth your time. If you come back most days, you know you won't miss much quality content and it will all be mostly fresh and relevant.
rcarr 4y ago
I hadn’t heard of movable type before skimming that post but I would argue that a lot of web homogenisation nowadays is because of iPhones and iPads. In the early days, there were only computers so you knew that whoever was going to be interacting with your site was doing so through a keyboard and mouse and using a monitor. Now you don’t know if your user is interacting via a touch screen or mouse nor what size their screen is going to be. To fix this, people started gravitating towards certain ways of doing things to ensure a better user experience. You absolutely can make a weird old style blog, but getting it to look nice on an iPhone will likely be a pain in the arse so you either have to invest time in coding and testing it at different screen sizes or accept that the site is only going to be usable by desktop users. Everything is a tradeoff.
cadbox1 4y ago
I think a combination of chronological and topical organisation is best because each has their own audience. Topics are great for visitors exploring your content for the first time and chronological updates are great for followers already familiar with your work. This is the concept i’m exploring in my app, Kapa Notes. You write notes by topic and it generates timeline updates for you that you can edit as you like. I went with an outline based editor to reduce the friction of managing topics as much as possible. https://kapanotes.com https://kapanotes.com https://kapanotes.com/cadbox1 https://kapanotes.com/cadbox1
AndrewStephens 4y ago
There are many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery but blogs are low down on that list. The real problem is that building a web page is much, much harder today than it was 25 years ago. Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing. Today you have to take into account not just monitors, but cell phones, and tablets of various resolutions and aspect ratios. And if you want something that looks as good as all the rest of the web you need fonts, fancy css, maybe some javascript controls. And that doesn't even take into account that all this is a moving target. I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance. I have a personal website and it has taken me years to get it looking the way I want. Every time I try something interesting (animation, javascript, etc) I have to test it widely. People who just want to put up a website about their favorite trees don't want to do that.
- cpsns 4y ago
  > I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance. My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine. It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.
  - AndrewStephens 4y ago
    That was my opinion for a while as well. It depends on your audience but about 50% of hits to my site come from one mobile device or another and in the end I felt I had to put the effort in to support them.
    - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
      What is this "audience" you speak of? I've run a blog for 25 years. First, it was FrontPage, then a custom PHP site, then a custom Rails app, and now Wordpress. The only thing that hits it is web crawlers. I do it because I must.
Ensorceled 4y ago
What really broke the web? 1. SEO click bait crap gumming up the works. 2. Walled gardens (there are many, but Facebook is the worst) 3. Rampant polarization driven by bad actors; governments (both local and foreign), political organizations, extremists, and corporations. 4. Ad tech siphoning off the value of the web and enabling the worst of the other issues. Blogs wouldn't even make my top ten.
- nunez 4y ago
  i definitely think seo is a bigger killer of the web than blogs are The Old Web was mostly blogs!
- bachmeier 4y ago
  The first was certainly a big player, but that came about as a result of the rise of Google, which replaced links as the primary way to navigate the web. Once Google claimed its place, the web turned into a game to generate clicks rather than a place to put good content.
- snarf21 4y ago
  I would argue that all of those (and even more) reasons are the same reason. Ad tech driving the "free" web is the source of all the problems. Outrage (faux) is more profitable than journalism and information sharing.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    That's hard to argue against, especially when targeting and tracking is taken into account.
azangru 4y ago
The article is internally inconsistent. Consider the following quotes: > The early web itself, of course, was pretty exclusive: first, you had to be online, then you had to know HTML, and that wasn’t enough, you also had to have a hosting account, and know how to use it. [1] > Culturally, though, it was devastating. Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page. [2] > Movable Type didn’t just kill off blog customization. It (and its competitors) actively killed other forms of web production. [3] > The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died. [4] > There are no more quirky homepages. There are no more amateur research librarians. All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience. That’s not cool at all. [5] The claim about the death of the personal homepage puzzles me. If we consider statement (1), which says that people had to be fairly technically literate to set up their own, custom and quirky, homepages, then the same is true today. There are lots and lots of personal pages created by web developers for themselves; some quirky others less so. In absolute numbers, they must have multiplied. In relative numbers, they are dwarfed, of course, by all the social media apps that make it easy to just start typing into an input field somewhere. We have both the means for sufficiently skilled people to express their creativity, and low-entry-bar instruments for the rest. What's not to like? What exactly has died?
- rchaud 4y ago
  I find that lots of developers do not have a website. Many just have a Twitter and Github and that's it.
bachmeier 4y ago
Previous submission from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470426 There have been others, but that's the only one with a discussion.
myfonj 4y ago
For those interested, that "Mozilla Museum" site pictured is and Mozilla banners came from [1] (it is visible in status bar tooltip in the screenshot, so just to save you some typing). That broken "Animation: Mozilla destroys Internet Exploder" is archived [2]. [1] http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/ http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/ [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20000816155258/http://www.remarcable.net/images/mozilla-kicking-ass.gif http://web.archive.org/web/20000816155258/http://www.remarca...
pwinnski 4y ago
I created my first website in 1994, and started blogging (weekly, rather than daily) in 1995, so this was a nice walk down memory lane. I too lament how much more difficult it is to build something completely independently than it was then, while rejoicing at how much more accessible building something is for more people, even if it means leaning on existing infrastructure.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
> Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page. This is my fear with AI and other tools. Consuming more will not make us any better. The whole point of existence is alchemy: the art of changing as a person while doing something. No matter how fast we can produce or consume, there will always be more of it and everything will have less meaning. I remember those first blogs. They indeed had a personality and a quirkiness we have since lost from the internet.
- jmbwell 4y ago
  I was recently looking through WordPress themes. I remember some years ago, it was easy to find all kinds of quirky themes that were easy to quirk up even further. Today, there are lots of well prepared themes, but they’re all fundamentally the same: designed to “monetize” “content” with the broadest possible “reach” for someone’s “brand,” in service to modern “creator” culture. And just as you say, the more of it there is, the less any of it seems to mean.
AndyNemmity 4y ago
There were way more than 23 blogs in 1999. I can't even imagine how you get to that number. If blog means, updated page that moves in reverse chronological order. I would have called it a diary in 1999, but many of my friends from IRC had these.
swyx 4y ago
> The potato gun girl and gerbil genetics guy found they didn’t want to write updates. It didn’t make sense. Their sites should have remained a table of contents, a reference tool, an odd and slightly musty personal library… the new “posts” format simply didn’t work for what they wanted to do. It felt demanding, and oppressive. > But they’d already switched. They’d already spent all that time and energy and optimism. To switch back, they’d have to go through that process all over again. Only worse, of course, because they’d have to build the new (old) site completely from scratch. They had no tool to give it shape. except there was. Wikipedia and other wikilike software. the start of this essay was very strong but ignoring the facts to push a point of view is a really poor end to an otherwise strong piece

191 points by sph 4y ago

k__ 4y ago

I remember 2002 or something, where my friends in Germany all started blogging. One tech friend said it was bullshit. Who wants a guestbook you write into all by yourself? I found this a hilarious explanation of what a blog is.

Viliam1234 4y ago

I think a good solution is to have both a wiki and a blog. They serve different needs. Wiki is for maintaining information that can later be updated. New pages can start very short, or maybe just a list of links; you will expand them later, or maybe not. Blog is where you write something when you have a coherent message, and then the article becomes read-only, a part of history. In the past I would have added "forum" as a third category, but these days it is probably better to use an existing platform. You need to go where other people are, unless you want to become a full-time moderator of your own forum. What else is there? Sometimes you want to make an interactive application. Or maybe upload some photos (but you could also do that in a blog or on a wiki). An alternative approach would be to only install a wiki, and implement the blog on it, e.g. using pages like "2023-01-20" for blog articles.

ilyt 4y ago

That sounds weirdly gatekeepy. How dare those new peasants not slave away in HTML mines before they can get their content shown!

robjan 4y ago
If it's gatekeeping, it's also hypocritical since the article is in blog format.

kerrsclyde 4y ago

I have a client who's web site is a series of pages within folders, no database, no scripting, html pages only. It's a complete joy to work on. Problems are rare and easily resolved, I look forward to updating it. I can't help thinking more small and medium sized web sites should be setup like this.

voltaireodactyl 4y ago
This with added markdown support is basically how blot.im works and it’s what got me actually working on a site (albeit in blog ish format). Not affiliated just a happy customer.
- nintendo1889 4y ago
  What do you think about trump 'selling secrets', in the light of the recent story of Sergey Shestakov and Charles McGonigal? Again, I don't like taking sides. Just searching for absolute truth. We will never get there, but we can try. ref to your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34019912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34019912
  - voltaireodactyl 4y ago
    This is a thread focused on markdown and html based SSBs. If you would like to continue our political discussion, you are welcome to contact me on my website, where I occasionally write about related issues. But HN guidelines suggest this unrelated thread is not the place for such a conversation.
- zelphirkalt 4y ago
  One of my go-to projects when learning a new programming language: Build a markdown based blog with it. Usually quite simple and you learn a lot about a language doing that.
- doctor_eval 4y ago
  That looks really cool. It seems to be a SSG hooked up to Dropbox/gdrive/git, with no front end. What a great idea.
nine_k 4y ago
I suppose things like a "design update", let alone "rebranding", never happen to this client? Unless every page is entirely unique, a web site consisting of raw HTML pages has a lot of repetition / redundancy, and coordinated updates become repetitive, too. Authoring, too. The upside, of course, is that there's literally nothing to go wrong in the pipeline, because there is none beside the upload operation. I can imagine that sites like https://ciechanow.ski https://ciechanow.ski where every page appears custom-made could be managed like that.

sushibowl 4y ago

There's lots of tools around nowadays that allow you to build a site that doesn't conform to the blog format, but the old web hasn't really made a comeback. I think there is truth in the author's statement: > Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it. writing up whatever daily musing into a short-form article is much easier than carefully organizing and categorizing an entire library of work, so there will be more of that around. Writing a 140 character update on your social feed is even easier, so there will be more of that. The old web hasn't totally disappeared, by the way. It's just much harder to find in a sea of other content that has grown much faster. And blogs are only a small part of that. SEO advertising clickbait spam sites are drowning out a lot of content on the web, because they are extremely low effort and there's money to be made in them.

planb 4y ago
I think what really happened is revealed when you just change 2 words: > When something is easy, more people will do it. I'm sure there are way more quirky, personal and lovely websites out there than 20 years ago. There's just orders of magnitude more other content. The whole article has a vibe of "old man yelling at clouds".
JackMorgan 4y ago
I think of https://wiki.c2.com/ https://wiki.c2.com/ where pages are organized like a graph, but within a page you might see a thread of paragraphs from people replying to each other. That's an interesting mashup of the two ideas.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
082349872349872 4y ago
cf https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu

phoebos 4y ago

Reminds me of these (https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html) digital garden style personal websites.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

I wonder how much RSS/Atom has driven the chronological feed to become such a fundamental building block in website design.

ilyt 4y ago
RSS ? Not really. RSS aggregators however... I don't think even at its peak RSS alone was popular enough to the average user but it did popularize the whole "get a bunch of sources and aggregate updates into one stream" idea, and that's essentially what both facebook and twitter is.

firasd 4y ago

This is interesting but I don't think it's what "broke the web". What really broke it is that those 20-30 million people who would have made hobbyist blogs or posted to forums are now part of the 200million (twitter) or 2 billion+ (FB) who just post on social media instead. Almost nobody is out there blogging about gardening just cause they like the topic, the new gardening content on the web is all SEO driven

krapp 4y ago
> Almost nobody is out there blogging about gardening just cause they like the topic, the new gardening content on the web is all SEO driven The reality is almost everyone posting on social media about gardening is doing so because they like the topic. The purely market-driven "influencers" are a minority, although they seem otherwise because they're the ones most aggressively tuning their content for the algorithms. And even then, people who make money from their content can also care about what they're doing.
- firasd 4y ago
  Yeah that's the distinction I was making--the hobbyists have gone to social media, and the people registering domains and using a self-hosted CMS are trying to make a biz out of it Although Substack seems to be causing a little renaissance of hobbyist blogging
dageshi 4y ago
The ones who actually made hobbyist blogs probably went to youtube because a youtube channel is actually much better than a blog from the pov of the hobbyist. Of course it's harder to search video than a blog from the pov of someone looking for information but that's not the hobbyists problem.
tiborsaas 4y ago
80 gardening bloggers: https://codesupply.co/gardening-blogs/ https://codesupply.co/gardening-blogs/ Optimized for SEO driven possibly, but the question is, is it still useful? The web still has all kinds of niche content, it just takes a bit of time to find it. Publishing content has diverged a great deal since 1993 and if someone is passionate about a topic, they will share it in a format they like. It might not be a classic blog post, but what matters in the end? The web is not broken IMHO.

nickelpro 4y ago

Reference sites still exist, Wikipedia isn't organized by reverse-chronological and MediaWiki is a far more formidable CMS than MT ever was. Same goes for ReadTheDocs, Sphinx, Jekyll, Hugo, or any number of static site generators that power the infinite libraries of documentation, reference material, and personal sites on the web. What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. What the author fails to consider is that this diminished position has nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with the population of people who were coming online in the early 2000s. The strangeness and lovable oddities of the early web were a function of the people who populated it. The generic, least common denominator status quo of the now is similarly defined because everyone is online, and so the content distribution reflects that. Everyone's Eternal September comes at some point, for the author it was October 2001. Internet is full, AOL users go home.

orthoxerox 4y ago
> What the author is bemoaning is the loss of the eclectic, bespoke, personal-style of homepage that existed in the early web. These sites still exist of course, they're just a much smaller percentage of the content. When I stumble upon a Web 1.0 living fossil, it's a delight every time. Someone felt an overpowering need to say something, they made a website about their favorite topic (be that shoelace knots, unsolved mysteries of Ancient Mediterranean literature, their train trip from Europe to North Korea or the CUBIC NATURE OF TIME), wrote everything they wanted to say and mostly stopped. They didn't enter into a parasocial relationship with millions of people, they didn't try to get rich by producing content, they didn't become slaves to The Algorithm, they didn't ruin the brilliance of their first LPs by producing a dozen more.
- syntaxfree 4y ago
  I’m not fond of people who take ratheism as a major inteeest or even component of their identity, but pocm.info is just lovely.
  - 4y ago

gnz11 4y ago

“Broke the Web”? I really dislike headlines like these. Movable Type and blogs didn’t “break” the Web - not now or back then either. Blogging and the blog layout was just one emergent trend of this era. Flashed based sites were another trend that emerged alongside blogs. Folks were still hand coding HTML and FTPing the files to a server. Directory/brochure style sites didn’t go anywhere. Through all these trends the Web has always been there like a good friend. Nothing “broke” it and nothing will for the foreseeable future.

amadeuspagel 4y ago

Why are negative trends so often portrayed as inevitable? Why not create or at least point to some examples of the kind of website you like? Maybe it's more appealing? No responsibility. No need to question your ideas: Do I really want a blog or a non-chronological website? Of course, you're going to have a blog, everything else is already "broken".

greatNespresso 4y ago

Liked the article but my feeling is that, at the end of the day, nobody cares about the tools you choose. People are only interested in the end results. There's nothing preventing you from building your site out of manually crafted HTML pages (I do for instance) and I would even dare to say that it has never been easier to do so (things like Emmet make it really easier to produce HTML content from your text editor of choice, services like cloudflare pages or vercel take less than a minute to go from local to public). CMS made it easier indeed for not-so-technical-savvy folks to push stuff on the WWW but is it actually a bad thing? At the end of the day, it's the content that matters in my opinion.

jimbler 4y ago

You can't go home again. I think an argument could be made that tools like Moveable Type and Blogger and Wordpress made the web. And, another argument could probably be made that seo-chum "articles" like this (and ad networks) broke the web. But, really Twitter and FB and YouTube are probably the most likely killers.

philipwhiuk 4y ago

It's not worse because it's easier for people who don't want to learn a mark-up language to post their ideas.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago

Despite the somewhat clickbaity title, which I didn’t mind so much, the salient point is near the bottom, about Chronos. This is always worth being aware of and on guard against. The are other, richer models available.

SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago

I loved the insight of how the chronological method of organization took over the zeitgeist of the early Internet, pushing out the handcrafted lists/hierarchies into weird niches in the sidelines, and eventually leading to it being superseded by the algorithmic-sorting that dominates the web today. It is not that we can't make a non-chronological (or non algorithmic-sorting) website now a days, we obviously can as there are many comments here listing various CMSs. But it is about how the vast majority of people don't do feel inclined to participate on the non-chrono/non-algo internet (either because they don't like it or don't know it). For them to put something out there in the internet is synonymous to put it on a chrono/algo format.

ciroduran 4y ago

If you want to blog away with simply editing HTML pages, but have no time for coming up with a template, or spend time with databases or static page generators, there's Zonelets https://zonelets.net/ https://zonelets.net/

6stringmerc 4y ago

In a more short-hand summary: When money creeps into art or intellectual pursuits that originated from personal interest, they usually race to the bottom. There's nothing wrong with blogs. There is a lot wrong with the internet as an advertising machine. Heck, the comments here frequently are first-hand blog entries on a subject and I enjoy it very much. Now if it was monetized, I'm not sure if the signal to noise would be as equivalent.

getoffmyyawn 4y ago

This article seems like the author's personal memories asserted to sound like a comprehensive history. However, as someone online since 1993, with my own domain since 1995, I have different memories. By 1996, we had AOL Hometown, Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire, and more. All offering various forms of build tools and early CMS features. The old weird web is still out there if you take the time to look. I would argue there are actually more quirky personal pages now than ever before.

syntaxfree 4y ago

So this is one of probably tens of thousands of websites (and I mean just with this overpriced provider-tool, many more people roll with more customized stuff) that are librarian-like but generated with an user-friendly tool: https://publish.obsidian.md/zero-chroma-infinity/ https://publish.obsidian.md/zero-chroma-infinity/ We’re here, man.

college_physics 4y ago

It takes some digging to agree with the headline, but it feels true at some level. Clearly it is the walled social media gardens that really "broke the web" and in far more fundamental ways (as in: posts that are schematic (e.g. 140 chars), that are not accessible unless logged in, where discovery is platform/algorithmic driven and not user driven etc). These platforms flurished because they made it very easy for people to participate. In the (hypothetical) absence of social media, blogs could be accused of making it (merely) easy to follow a particular pattern of content creation. This is a little bit like accusing writers or composers of blindly following a genre instead of crafting their own. Yes all genres are inventions and it is important not to stiffle that creative process, but it is not reasonable to expect the majority to do that...

dusted 4y ago

> It was boring, tedious, and involved. As a hobby, it _IS_ cozy as hell.

foobarbecue 4y ago

Reports of the old web's death are greatly exaggerated.

prmoustache 4y ago

I think what the author is missing is that for a long time most of the social and "chronologically updated" part of the internet was done outside of the Web and on different protocols, mainly NNTP and IRC.

rcarmo 4y ago

Blogs didn’t break the web, rampant advertising and social networks did. I disguised my personal Wiki as a blog, but it’s been going on for over 20 years now and I suspect many people would do the same if they weren’t distracted off writing and sharing content by get rich quick schemes and the evolution of dopamine hooks like TikTok…

sph 4y ago

Some of my favourite "digital garden" websites: - http://100r.co/ http://100r.co/ - https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/home.html Made by the same people, but the second is more technical. I can't deny that there is a certain sense of visiting someone's home (in this case someone's sailboat) that is completely absent in the modern, sterile and utilitarian blog format. It is a pleasure to get lost following interesting links, chancing upon slightly dusty, delightful corners. This is why I appreciate what https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ is doing, a lot. Every single one of those websites featured in the home page is not only nostalgic, but a treasure trove that someone manually collected and organised. It is ironic and sad that as technology improved, we lost Frontpage, manually written HTML and the soul in personal websites, now many are just stock Jekyll templates hosted on a github.io domain. As someone that has struggled to blog all my career, I wonder if organising my thoughts cleanly into a polished but fleeting article just doesn't fit my way of thinking, and I would be better served by a personal website just about stuff I care about, which I keep updated over the years, and might go a bit dusty over time. Not a shop window, not a magazine, but an open garage full of thingamajigs collected over the years. -- More written words on digital gardens: - https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden - https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/ https://tomcritchlow.com/2019/02/17/building-digital-garden/

bovermyer 4y ago
I do this, too. My site https://benovermyer.com https://benovermyer.com has a blog, but the more interesting stuff is all the _other_ pages. The most frequently updated page is the list of books I've read. Do you have a "digital garden" site?
- sph 4y ago
  Not yet, but I've been hacking on Kirby to create a regular blog-style personal website and I just want to throw everything out and have a way to host pure Markdown. Someone recommended PicoCMS elsewhere. That's my weekend sorted. You are one step away from a garden. Move those links out of "KB" and collect them in the home page. RSS is a bit harder to do on that type of websites. Here's my crappy definition of a digital garden: a website where most likely you have to write your RSS updates by hand. Not the literal XML but you will have to keep a changelog, because the cool stuff is outside the blog section. See also: https://journal.miso.town/ https://journal.miso.town/

bulgur 4y ago

[dead]

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> "Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it." This has an upside (i.e., anyone and everyone can do it), as well as a downside (i.e., anyone and everyone can do it). When you can find your way through excessive noise (and ads) it's worth it. Quality signals can be paradise. Unfortunately, at this point, the noise is outpacing the ability to mitigate it. Gold is getting more and more difficult to find.

janvdberg 4y ago

The author seems to be arguing that the technology (i.e. MT in this case or CMS-es in general) that enabled many more people to blog (and therefore they all look alike) is what broke the web. I understand the sentiment. But I rather have more people blogging than not. Because blogs are the web. Many more people should be blogging.

brazzy 4y ago
It sounds like you missed the main point of the author: the blog-CMSs did not just impose a certain look, they also imposed some fundamental assumptions about the content, namely that content is produced as a steady stream of distinct "posts", and that the newest posts are the most interesting and massively more visible than "old" ones. And that is a very different kind of content than webpages that are not inherently ranked in importance and discoverable through a TOC, where updates don't necessarily add new pages but often also extend or modify older ones. Blogs are not the web. That you could even think of making that statement is the most resounding confirmation that the author is right.

oersted 4y ago

I suppose that, in a way, the chronological model is a reaction to the immense volume that the Internet grew into. Only focusing on new content can be a good way to drastically reduce the time spent deciding what to actually read or watch. It is also a good way to help everyone focus on a few things at a time so we can have meaningful conversations about them together. Forums, Blogs, RSS, Newsletters, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News... Sure you often first filter for (or subscribe, or get recommended) content from topics and people that you know you like. But there's still too much stuff to choose from. If you just look at the content from the last day, it is much more manageable to decide what is worth your time. If you come back most days, you know you won't miss much quality content and it will all be mostly fresh and relevant.

rcarr 4y ago

I hadn’t heard of movable type before skimming that post but I would argue that a lot of web homogenisation nowadays is because of iPhones and iPads. In the early days, there were only computers so you knew that whoever was going to be interacting with your site was doing so through a keyboard and mouse and using a monitor. Now you don’t know if your user is interacting via a touch screen or mouse nor what size their screen is going to be. To fix this, people started gravitating towards certain ways of doing things to ensure a better user experience. You absolutely can make a weird old style blog, but getting it to look nice on an iPhone will likely be a pain in the arse so you either have to invest time in coding and testing it at different screen sizes or accept that the site is only going to be usable by desktop users. Everything is a tradeoff.

cadbox1 4y ago

I think a combination of chronological and topical organisation is best because each has their own audience. Topics are great for visitors exploring your content for the first time and chronological updates are great for followers already familiar with your work. This is the concept i’m exploring in my app, Kapa Notes. You write notes by topic and it generates timeline updates for you that you can edit as you like. I went with an outline based editor to reduce the friction of managing topics as much as possible. https://kapanotes.com https://kapanotes.com https://kapanotes.com/cadbox1 https://kapanotes.com/cadbox1

AndrewStephens 4y ago

There are many suspects in the "who killed the web" mystery but blogs are low down on that list. The real problem is that building a web page is much, much harder today than it was 25 years ago. Back then you could slap together some HTML, add a picture and an under-construction GIF and call it a day. Everyone with their huge 800x600 monitors would see the same thing. Today you have to take into account not just monitors, but cell phones, and tablets of various resolutions and aspect ratios. And if you want something that looks as good as all the rest of the web you need fonts, fancy css, maybe some javascript controls. And that doesn't even take into account that all this is a moving target. I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance. I have a personal website and it has taken me years to get it looking the way I want. Every time I try something interesting (animation, javascript, etc) I have to test it widely. People who just want to put up a website about their favorite trees don't want to do that.

cpsns 4y ago
> I still see personal websites that are almost unreadable on small phones, for instance. My personal website is like that and I’ve made no effort to improve the phone experience. I really don’t care if phone users have access or not, on every other device it looks fine. It’s a personal website, if it looks good on my machine that’s enough for me.
- AndrewStephens 4y ago
  That was my opinion for a while as well. It depends on your audience but about 50% of hits to my site come from one mobile device or another and in the end I felt I had to put the effort in to support them.
  - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    What is this "audience" you speak of? I've run a blog for 25 years. First, it was FrontPage, then a custom PHP site, then a custom Rails app, and now Wordpress. The only thing that hits it is web crawlers. I do it because I must.

Ensorceled 4y ago

What really broke the web? 1. SEO click bait crap gumming up the works. 2. Walled gardens (there are many, but Facebook is the worst) 3. Rampant polarization driven by bad actors; governments (both local and foreign), political organizations, extremists, and corporations. 4. Ad tech siphoning off the value of the web and enabling the worst of the other issues. Blogs wouldn't even make my top ten.

nunez 4y ago
i definitely think seo is a bigger killer of the web than blogs are The Old Web was mostly blogs!
bachmeier 4y ago
The first was certainly a big player, but that came about as a result of the rise of Google, which replaced links as the primary way to navigate the web. Once Google claimed its place, the web turned into a game to generate clicks rather than a place to put good content.
snarf21 4y ago
I would argue that all of those (and even more) reasons are the same reason. Ad tech driving the "free" web is the source of all the problems. Outrage (faux) is more profitable than journalism and information sharing.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  That's hard to argue against, especially when targeting and tracking is taken into account.

azangru 4y ago

The article is internally inconsistent. Consider the following quotes: > The early web itself, of course, was pretty exclusive: first, you had to be online, then you had to know HTML, and that wasn’t enough, you also had to have a hosting account, and know how to use it. [1] > Culturally, though, it was devastating. Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page. [2] > Movable Type didn’t just kill off blog customization. It (and its competitors) actively killed other forms of web production. [3] > The old web, the cool web, the weird web, the hand-organized web… died. [4] > There are no more quirky homepages. There are no more amateur research librarians. All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience. That’s not cool at all. [5] The claim about the death of the personal homepage puzzles me. If we consider statement (1), which says that people had to be fairly technically literate to set up their own, custom and quirky, homepages, then the same is true today. There are lots and lots of personal pages created by web developers for themselves; some quirky others less so. In absolute numbers, they must have multiplied. In relative numbers, they are dwarfed, of course, by all the social media apps that make it easy to just start typing into an input field somewhere. We have both the means for sufficiently skilled people to express their creativity, and low-entry-bar instruments for the rest. What's not to like? What exactly has died?

rchaud 4y ago
I find that lots of developers do not have a website. Many just have a Twitter and Github and that's it.

bachmeier 4y ago

Previous submission from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17470426 There have been others, but that's the only one with a discussion.

myfonj 4y ago

For those interested, that "Mozilla Museum" site pictured is and Mozilla banners came from [1] (it is visible in status bar tooltip in the screenshot, so just to save you some typing). That broken "Animation: Mozilla destroys Internet Exploder" is archived [2]. [1] http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/ http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/ [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20000816155258/http://www.remarcable.net/images/mozilla-kicking-ass.gif http://web.archive.org/web/20000816155258/http://www.remarca...

pwinnski 4y ago

I created my first website in 1994, and started blogging (weekly, rather than daily) in 1995, so this was a nice walk down memory lane. I too lament how much more difficult it is to build something completely independently than it was then, while rejoicing at how much more accessible building something is for more people, even if it means leaning on existing infrastructure.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

> Suddenly people weren’t creating homepages or even web pages, but they were writing web content in form fields and text areas inside a web page. This is my fear with AI and other tools. Consuming more will not make us any better. The whole point of existence is alchemy: the art of changing as a person while doing something. No matter how fast we can produce or consume, there will always be more of it and everything will have less meaning. I remember those first blogs. They indeed had a personality and a quirkiness we have since lost from the internet.

jmbwell 4y ago
I was recently looking through WordPress themes. I remember some years ago, it was easy to find all kinds of quirky themes that were easy to quirk up even further. Today, there are lots of well prepared themes, but they’re all fundamentally the same: designed to “monetize” “content” with the broadest possible “reach” for someone’s “brand,” in service to modern “creator” culture. And just as you say, the more of it there is, the less any of it seems to mean.

AndyNemmity 4y ago

There were way more than 23 blogs in 1999. I can't even imagine how you get to that number. If blog means, updated page that moves in reverse chronological order. I would have called it a diary in 1999, but many of my friends from IRC had these.

swyx 4y ago

> The potato gun girl and gerbil genetics guy found they didn’t want to write updates. It didn’t make sense. Their sites should have remained a table of contents, a reference tool, an odd and slightly musty personal library… the new “posts” format simply didn’t work for what they wanted to do. It felt demanding, and oppressive. > But they’d already switched. They’d already spent all that time and energy and optimism. To switch back, they’d have to go through that process all over again. Only worse, of course, because they’d have to build the new (old) site completely from scratch. They had no tool to give it shape. except there was. Wikipedia and other wikilike software. the start of this essay was very strong but ignoring the facts to push a point of view is a really poor end to an otherwise strong piece