12 ms·

What happened to blogging for the hell of it?

256 points by bovermyer 3y ago

zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago
I got bored of it the same way I got bored of writing in a physical journal
andrewalan 3y ago
[dead]
paulorlando 3y ago
Amen.
diogenes4 3y ago
1. Most people don't have anything interesting to say. 2. People who do have interesting things to say deserve to get paid for their work. 3. Other platforms (e.g. TikTok) provide a more natural medium for interaction and response. 4. If you're just aiming to write, there's always journals. I journal and I find it very satisfying. 5. Obviously, people still blog, even if the scene is dominated by capital's obsession with SEO.
- crawancon 3y ago
  6. Entities on the internet either copy your work and claim credit, harass you because of your opinions, or use your works against you(mining, social engineering, marketing).
- theshrike79 3y ago
  1. That didn't stop people blogging before :D 2. Money happened pretty much. First people started monetising their blogs, then they turned into books, which turned into multiple books and youtube channels and then it was no longer a blog and more of a company. and additionally: 6. The younger generation is used to having their actual face plastered all over the internet and thus feel more natural making videos with their own face and voice. -- I, and I think a good part of the HN crowd, are in the generation where we had actual friends we only knew by their handle/nickname and never saw their face unless there was a meetup of some sort and we actually went there. For me, using my own face, or even name, to present any sort of content just feels wrong in a visceral way.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    I think you missed #3 when commenting on #1 People didn't have much interesting to say before, but they didn't have much else to do. Now with #3, other platforms, they spend a lot of time on those other places writing short quips all day.
- izzydata 3y ago
  There is no way to know what people will find interesting. There is a healthy gap between someones content being absolutely not worth reading and being professional. I think more people should have hobbies and they should write about their experiences even without it necessarily being interesting. I also don't think it needs to be about making money. Once you start trying to get paid for your hobbies it becomes work and not fun. With an online blog rather than an offline journal you can easily share it with friends. I think the main difference here between TikTok and other huge social media is that less is more. I don't see much point in a million anonymous strangers looking at my posts. I don't think there is anything "natural" about these huge social media platforms. This kind of socialization feels very unnatural to me. Mostly do to the parasocial relationships that occur from the million people to one person style interactions.
- simonw 3y ago
  "Most people don't have anything interesting to say." I couldn't disagree more. People are /fascinating/. There's definitely a skill in figuring out what you can say that's most likely to interest other people, but that's a learnable skill. One of the skills of a great communicator is being able to help pull the interesting stuff out of people.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
geek_at 3y ago
Couldn't agree more with the sentiment. I started blogging [1] in 2012 as a kind-of documentation of my work and thought processes (especially with raspberry pi projects) because when after a year on not working with a specific technology I forgot many aspects or challenges I had to overcome and I was sick of re-googling fixes for problems I have already fixed in the past. Blogging has been a blessing for me and I have hit the top of hacker news a few times and even though I don't monitize my blog in any way (not even affiliate links) I still feel good about other people learning things from my projects or mistakes. For me this is the truest form of blogging [1] https://blog.haschek.at https://blog.haschek.at
izzydata 3y ago
I started a random blog of my own for no particular reason recently. Even if nobody reads it I think I enjoy the whole 90s internet vibe of people having individual personal websites. Everyone being on Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon or wherever has no personality to it.
- city41 3y ago
  When LiveJournal first launched my friends and I all got one. We treated it as a sanitized for public consumption diary, and we all posted regularly. It was really neat and really fun. I miss when the internet was more care free.
- baggachipz 3y ago
  I like writing blog posts about things which interest me, have no comments, and no ads. I post links to it on Mastodon, where I have exactly zero followers. Nothing wrong with just putting it out there.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I did that for awhile, almost as a notepad - I still get a few comments here and there randomly because someone finds just what they wanted in a search.
- wvenable 3y ago
  I also started a random blog out of no where recently. I had been thinking about for a while because I post random thoughts all over the Internet and felt like I should have a place where they are collected. Also started a few tech hobbies and actually putting stuff out into the world is how the hobby grows. I've benefited from the writings and videos of others and wanted to pay that forward.
femiagbabiaka 3y ago
Great read. I think the shift in internet culture towards everyone being an “expert” in their domain as opposed to sharing their experience (or sharing “vibes” if you will) has been very toxic. One example: was talking to my cousin the other day, there was a YouTube feature she misses called video replies. Around the 2010s, that feature was used in hair and makeup communities to share videos purely about an experience or journey. So you wouldn’t necessarily be reviewing a product for general purpose, just saying “this is how I used this thing and how it worked for me.” Now? It is so (potentially) lucrative to be an influencer making normative statements that not doing so seems pointless, even looked down upon as possibly spreading misinformation. Something critical has been lost.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  And now we have "reaction videos" where a more famous internet celebrity with millions of followers watches random funny videos and gets paid for it - while the actual creators don't get anything.
  - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
    Yes, this feels like an obvious gap -- although of course the incentive will be to create videos that are easily reacted to -- in fact it already is.
  - DiabloD3 3y ago
    But it is well known that these "reaction videos" are largely fake, and the creators are operating an advanced ad revenue scam, and somehow producing fake views on YouTube and not getting caught (or at least, YouTube is not publicly speaking about this, and most likely knows internally). Either YouTube is going to ban them and try to claw back literally years of money from them, or this is going to explode in the news in the next 2-3 years and Google is going to have to explain to their largest advertisers where their money went.
    - theshrike79 3y ago
      We'll see how that goes. There's some really interesting Youtube drama going on where a literal multimillionaire Twitch streamer/Youtuber doxxed another Youtuber by streaming their actual home while standing on their front yard. Something that's extremely illegal by Californian law. But the offending internet-celebrity has a habit of not being affected by any kind of lawsuits because they bring in millions of viewers (34M viewers on Youtube) and are too good for business to actually kick off the platform.
muhammadusman 3y ago
My blog is for the purpose of just having a blog. I love to write medium-long stuff there. I’ll go from life updates to some technical thing I learned or am learning. I have various topics like keyboards, photography, typography, and other interests that I will write 2 or 3 posts about and then move onto a different topic. I find it impressive that people can have just one topic to write about but I can’t stick to one. I also don’t have a lot of readers. Anything between 100-200 unique visitors a month, nothing to monetize off of.
eatonphil 3y ago
There are many great bloggers out there. Some of my favorites: - nullprogram.com - zserge.com - eli.thegreenplace.net - smalldatum.blogspot.com - rachelbythebay.com - muratbuffalo.blogspot.com - sirupsen.com - brooker.co.za/blog/ - jack-vanlightly.com - utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/ - jvns.ca
- whydoyoucare 3y ago
  Actually, posts on HN routinely lead me to several fantastic blogs! So yes, there are people writing interesting stuff in a blog as opposed to byte-sized nibbles on social media, and I enjoy them. Thanks for these recommendations. :)
- femiagbabiaka 3y ago
  Adding to this list: danluu.com
  - eatonphil 3y ago
    Yes that's a fantastic one.
- xuancanh 3y ago
  https://notes.eatonphil.com/ https://notes.eatonphil.com/ is also great :).
  - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
    Wow I didn’t make the connection. Indeed, a fantastic blog!
- welder 3y ago
  blog.codinghorror.com and I must mention my own blog when filtered to the engineering category https://wakatime.com/blog/category/engineering https://wakatime.com/blog/category/engineering
- whiona 3y ago
PaulHoule 3y ago
The blogging-SEO connection is also so unnatural to the way capital thinks, yet it's developed because it works. I mean, tell a Realtor that nobody gives a f2k about a Realtor in their town and you'll never get a link to a plain ordinary web site and that they should blog if they want attention and the vast majority of them will think you're insane. Except for the Realtor who runs a blog about your town and ranks #1.
kevinventullo 3y ago
If the author is not trying to make money, but rather “write creatively and have fun,” then why consult startpage.com or other online lists? Those are written for people who want to make money. If you want to blog for the hell of it, then just do it. Write about whatever you want. Baldur’s Gate, whatever. I have a two-post blog about some esoteric math I thought was cool. Very few people care and that’s fine.
efields 3y ago
Twitter.
Apreche 3y ago
Making and sharing work without profit motive still exists. You just can’t find it with Google.
blueferret 3y ago
I've blogged on and off for many years. Personal, work, and in between. Maybe it's just me, but I find blogs have a lifespan. There's a period wherein they provide fulfillment as well as value, followed by a period where one or both of those tends to slip away. When both have left, it's time to stop. Right now my only blog is for my freelance consulting biz (blueferret.consulting). I've debated a Substack for a different project as well...something of a philosophy discussion, wherein I'd clarify a set of ideas out in public. Because I can, and because I think others would enjoy seeing it too.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
To answer the headline, nothing happened to it. Writing about stuff for writings sake and just to get it out of your head into some form is still very much a thing. That said, it is possible to make (varying amounts) of money writing a blog, and so it attracted a huge number of people who wanted to do that, and as a ready market various "corpo" types sprung up to "feed their dreams" for a small fee. And this is where the disaster happens. When companies that index the web make 99.9% of their money selling ads on that index, and the index is a place where wannabes ask the question "how do I make money on a blog" ask that question, you gets something not unlike unconstrained algae growth in a badly maintained aquarium of things "popping out of the woodwork" to fill that demand. As a result, if you used that to measure "What happened" you would easily come to the conclusion that nobody does this any more, after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new? Yeah, that would be a really cool thing but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that and so decided to cancel that part of their offering. Yes, I'm still mad about it :-)
- doggerel 3y ago
  Aren't there places away from the conventional protocols where people still blog and the world is innocent? I'm serious. I came across some of these communities nearly a year ago while reading about solar powered servers. And after I forgot how I found them, I've thought of them about once a month and wondered what the hell is wrong with me for forgetting. They were incredibly neat and niche spaces, full of very idiosyncratic websites and things that had no commercial point. It was fantastic.
  - ghewgill 3y ago
    Are you perhaps thinking of https://geminiprotocol.net https://geminiprotocol.net?
    - doggerel 3y ago
      YES! This was one of the things I came across. Thank you!
marssaxman 3y ago
I remember when the blogging world became "obsessed with this corpo nonsense", and it was a very strange experience. Blogs had been a kind of distributed social media, global conversation among creative weirdos, but eventually some tipping point of public awareness happened and seemingly overnight people just would not shut up about the idea of making money writing a blog, making a living as a blogger, which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant. But they were persistent, they were noisy, there were eventually more of them than there were of us, and... well. That was a long time ago now, and I wouldn't even know where to start looking for interesting blogs of the old style, if they still exist.
- catlover76 3y ago
  > which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant I lol'd and now would like to see these work somehow "Uber for dinner guests" if your social circle isn't sufficiently cool and there are people you are inviting you want to impress.
  - kej 3y ago
    I recently finished reading Chesterton's "The Club of Queer Trades", and one of the jobs in there was a paid dinner guest who even set up the conversation so the client could make witty remarks.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    "token white person as a service" is a thing in China. It's apparently a very big deal in business circles that you have SOMEONE non-Asian in your party.
    - RedCondor 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - Cerium 3y ago
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Why do you need to google "blog post ideas" when you have so many thoughts assailing your brain? What do you expect?
- mike_hock 3y ago
  He wants to put his bachelor's degree to use that he paid X amount of money for. He has the same blogging-as-a-job mindset. Why is (for example) Raymond Chen's blog interesting? Because he has a real job that gives him stories to blog about and occasionally vent his frustration, and the result is entertaining but real, useful information. He doesn't spend time pondering what to write about next. You don't need a degree in creative writing to blog. You need a real job or hobby to have something to blog about. I don't care about some rando's opinion on some video game, whether he writes like Shakespeare or not.
  - whiona 3y ago
    Hi Mike! It’s cool if you didn’t enjoy my post, but there are some rather strange assumptions about me in here just because I happen to enjoy computer games, and was at a bit of a loss as to what I wanted to write about that day. I have a full-time job that I think is pretty cool (I’m a librarian) but I prefer to keep my work life at work, and my internet life on the internet. Never the twain shall meet. I am also a she who has many other hobbies. :) I know there’s a bit of a stereotype that anyone who likes computer games must be a male NEET living in their mom’s basement, but it’s pretty inaccurate to reality!
- joemi 3y ago
  Indeed. Searching for phrases like that are exactly why he got some many not-just-for-the-hell-of-it hits. The people who are most in need of ideas about what to blog about are those that are doing it just because they heard their company's site needs a blog. So those are the kind of answers most people searching for "blog post ideas" are looking for. People who are blogging just for the hell of it don't typically need to search for ideas, since they just post about whatever they want.
  - 3y ago
ge96 3y ago
I do blog about whatever thing I'm working on. I know that what gets hits are the tutorials... but I also like to thought dump but I give any readers a warning ahead of time. Somewhat unfortunately I have been lazy/writing under some platform, which it does mean having an audience.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Most points made in a blog post can be boiled down to 280 characters if you focus.
Zigurd 3y ago
Short form video happened. I reach more people for non-commercial posts about software development that way. There are a few topics that are hard to cover that way, but very few that can't be shortened to fit. Like tweets were, it's a discipline.
iwanttocomment 3y ago
Nobody here has mentioned the real reason public blogging has died off, which is that with the modern public Internet, the risk of being attacked - doxxing, harassment, or simply the grind of moderating comments - has completely eliminated any desire any normal person would have to interface publicly (or anything more than pseudonymously) with the world apart from a profit motive.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  Yup. It's a real hassle just to keep the spammers and skiddies at bay. Not worth the trouble.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  I turned off comments a long time ago because the effort required to get a signal-to-noise ratio I liked was more than the value I got from the good comments. I'm glad I did it. If you want to comment on a blog post, drop me an email.
  - tasty_freeze 3y ago
    I have a few websites dedicated to some old microcomputers. They are niche and very few people care. I work on them in bursts and then they sit there for years before the next bout of updates. It is often an excuse to take advantage of the latest CSS or whatever. Anyway, many years ago I added a message board to most of them so passersby could share their recollections and nostalgia. At first it was a PITA to keep out the spam. But message boards are so passe that not only is it rare to get a new comment, but it is rare to get spam too.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      I love the tiny message boards that implement a completely effective captcha with things like "How many bits wide is the 8088?"
      - meatmanek 3y ago
pacomerh 3y ago
I suppose most people want to monetize everything. Articles about how you can monetize writing articles, so you write these articles about how you would monetize and the cycle never ends and the web because harder to navigate. Now you need a clever app that filters through the BS.
bombdailer 3y ago
best blog is from ran prieur - also a great source of other interesting blogs.
jaylittle 3y ago
I blog just for the hell of it. No client side trackers, no ads, just the spew of thoughts I need to get out of my head by vocalizing them. It costs me money every month and brings in no revenue and I fucking love it. https://jaylittle.com/ https://jaylittle.com/ The personal, honest and vulnerable (emotionally, not security-wise) internet is still out there, ya just got to look a bit harder for it nowadays.
- jayrwren 3y ago
  bruh, that loads WAY too fast. you gotta slow that role, have a splash, prompt for signing up for newsletter, display some ads, prompt to disable ad blocker, etc etc.
  - jaylittle 3y ago
    LOL I'll stick with my throwback to what websites used to be like when they were simple, quick to load and asked visitors only for their attention and not much else ;)
- Minor49er 3y ago
  The posts "My Career Misery is in the Eye of the Beholder" and "Code Monkey Mid-Life Crisis" hit pretty close to home
  - jaylittle 3y ago
    Glad to know that I'm not the only one feeling out of place in tech as of late. Thanks for sharing!
    - Little_Kitty 3y ago
      > Utilized Low Code Tools at Client’s Request for the Web Front End Work Oof! Nice to find someone else who recognises explicitly that management is in no way a natural career progression path, it may have been decades ago, but in the current market we often see seniority / value confused with team management when the two need have little relation.
DANmode 3y ago
Concise reply: What happened to reading blogs for the hell of it, instead of doom-scrolling social media? Even one-two commenters a week can keep the spirit of a blog up. But usually not one per year.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I'm not sure about commentors being able to preserve the spirit. I'll be charitable and not name the blog, but I still RSS-follow one blog that is one of the oldest, most respectable, and once most-read in its subject area. It still gets comments regularly, but always by the same handful of people who are 1) obviously on the autistic spectrum, and 2) all getting on in years, because younger generations no longer follow blogs. The effect is sad, it makes the blogging feel even more declassé. In fact, its image would only improve by the owner turning off comments entirely and perhaps moving to a static site generator.
kukkeliskuu 3y ago
I have been blogging since 2004. I have four blogs that I currently write to regularly. Many others are more like archives. Three of the active blogs are public and two of them are similar, about dancing, but in different languages, one IT related. The private blogs have been the most useful for my thinking. The active private blog has no readers at the moment. I kind of miss the period from 2004 to perhaps 2009 when there was a community around blogging. But even then I was intentionally very marginal. I have never tried to attract readers, more the opposite. There may be benefits from writing, such as publicity. But I dom’t think that is necessary a very useful motivation on the long term. It seems to me that the only reasonable reason for writing is that you have this internal urge to write, to understand whst you think. You will know what you want to write. It does not matter if people do not read it, because you are writing for yourself.
tarkin2 3y ago
Once the marketers found out you could make money from blogs, they became insincere/fronts. Once your employers became aware of your blog, they became sedated online portfolios. Social media has obviously taken people away from long-form, too.
wolpoli 3y ago
How do you even find blogs to read these days? In mid-2000s, I worked in a company using beta version of WPF and I was able to search for an error message, and it brings back blogs where people actually posted about the issue I encountered. These days, if blogs still exist, search isn't showing them anymore, preferring to provide results from the same few Stack Overflow/issues aggregators/documentation aggregators mixed together.
- constantly 3y ago
  Finding the first one is the challenge. After that just click through the webring for equally good blogs and content.
- raybb 3y ago
  Maybe checkout the Kagi smallweb project https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
- kaycebasques 3y ago
  When I really love something, I find myself just checking the site periodically to see if they've published anything new recently. Astronomy Photo Of The Day makes this more predictable because I expect to see 1 new post every day. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html Lower down in this thread someone recommends a set of blogs to follow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37920919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37920919 In other words, maybe word-of-mouth recommendations like what you see here on HN is the best way to find blogs...
jayrwren 3y ago
blogging died when google killed google reader. yes, some other readers tried, but nothing was as fast and as nice to use as google reader.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I have a system where I write markdown files that get zipped and a password I don’t know is applied. I’m just accumulating this journal nobody can read and it feels pretty therapeutic. There isn’t an audience and can’t be an audience.
- expertentipp 3y ago
  You write there what you'll do to your enemies or the only copies of private keys and bitcoins?
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    It’s where I keep the disaster recovery plans for work.
wduquette 3y ago
I still blog for the hell of it. Been doing it since December, 1996.
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
This is a weird rambly post. Blogs became "corpo" like 15 years ago. But in the last 3-4 years there's definitely been a return to "blogging for the hell of it".... especially around these parts. Tech people just doing writeups on their projects, something random they learned, discovered etc. After like the 5 years preceding that it's been refreshing that more posts shared around here are like personal blogs and not just news sites etc.
rhelz 3y ago
We all used to have steady jobs which paid the bills.
herunan 3y ago
It turned into a numbers game because becoming popular online equates to money. The biggest catalyst for that? Social media. Since then, social media has become the window into people’s thoughts. Blogging is an additional ‘tool’ to get a bigger cut under your rules.
cortesoft 3y ago
It seems pretty straightforward to me. Someone who writes a blog for money is going to 1) Spend more time on it, because it is their source of income and not a hobby. They don't have to just do it in their spare time. 2) Be motivated to write it even when they don't feel like it, therefore putting out a more consistent product and gaining more readers. 3) Be more motivated to generate an audience, meaning advertising their blog and/or writing content that will generate a lot of clicks. In short, you are more likely to encounter blogs written by people trying to make money because they are going to do more things to get the blog in front of you, in order to make that money.
OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago
Nothin'. I have had a blog for 10 years. Pure vanity. When I feel like getting something out for whatever reason, it is there. No one reads it, there's no money in it, and that's just fine.
kabes 3y ago
What happener with doing anything for the hell of it. Seems like everything one does need to have a business plan behind it these days.
- livrem 3y ago
  That was my thought as well. I feel like everything that I used to (and sometimes still) do as a hobby has become super-commercialized and 99% of those interested in doing that thing only wants to do it for the money and not as a hobby. The entire world wide web I guess is a good example. But people are seriously paying professional game masters to run table-top RPGs for them and so on.
telliott99 3y ago
Longtime HN reader, I finally made an account to comment on this. I started a blog in 2008. Math and genetics, time-insensitive material. I worked hard on the quality. Page views 1-10K per post overall. In 2018-2019 the page views dropped to 1%. I still write, but now it's just for me. And BTW, still waiting for a visitor from Tonga.
- stemitom_ 3y ago
  [dead]
keithnz 3y ago
blogging seemed to fall off as tweeting picked up.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Text sucks, but it was a necessity before the advent of streaming video and cellphone cameras. Now you can find all of that blog content over in video form on youtube and tiktok.
- meatmanek 3y ago
  Funny, I have a similar observation but the opposite opinion: I realized that my favorite major platform these days is Youtube because there's a ton of great content there that is harder to find elsewhere. Unfortunately, a lot of that content would be much better in written form. As an example, I recently watched a video about the best weapons in Tears of the Kingdom that was over 40 minutes long, but all that information could have been a ~3000-word blog post. Yes, some of the information is best conveyed in video form (demonstrating certain effects with in-game footage), but a lot of the content was essentially just the creator explaining out loud why certain combinations work well. For the bits of information that work better as video, the author could embed a short video into the article. It probably would've been a lot less effort for the creator to make a listicle or blog post with a section for each of the weapons shown, and it would certainly save the viewers a lot of time. But then such a blog post would probably make way less money than the Youtube video. Youtube does a better-than-average job of paying creators for popular content, and they've fostered a network effect where audiences go to Youtube when looking for certain types of information. All this means that the incentives push people to create video content even when another medium would suit the content better.
- Gud 3y ago
  Text is faster and searchable. Video has its places, but text hardly sucks.
karaterobot 3y ago
> So I consulted my friend Startpage.com with the obvious prompt: "blog post ideas." My first thought is that a lot of people are blogging for the hell of it (me, nonstop, for decades), but that they accidentally typed "blog post ideas" into a search engine, and got what they deserved. That is, the problem is with search engines returning trash, and not with the nonexistence of blogs that aren't trash.
m0rissette 3y ago
I blog without ads but then again I haven’t blogged in years lol mattharris dot org
panyam 3y ago
Hmm i thought it was still there. Problem is discoverability and the insane high bar on "sexy ui"? I maintain a personal blog (ive been waiting for ages to put it out thanks to fear of ridicule but time to break free of the shame) - http://buildmage.com/ http://buildmage.com/ where I just write about the random side (and possibly unfinished) things I dabble in pure fun, some learning, some sharing. Probably good thing discoverability is hard!
Macha 3y ago
Social media took the "small posts" off personal blogs onto bigger sites. Now it feels like a blog post has to be big and important. And that's a hard threshold to work up to.
waingake 3y ago
When you hear Zizek talk about ideology this is what he means. The ideology of capitalism influences us in certain ways, such as desiring to capitalize off our audience, the goal subtly shifts to increasing metrics such as readers, likes, shares. What really changed about blogging is that people started to care about these metrics more and more. In the early internet one wrote a blog post without really expecting anyone to read it! ( although someone stumbling upon it was paradoxically more likely before we switched to social media platforms etc ) As such I'd argue the author wrote more authentically.
bluerooibos 3y ago
Capitalism - where only things which turn a profit are deemed worthwhile.
ProgrammerMatt 3y ago
it's possible the ones that are trying to make money are the ones who are more likely to be found
voussoir 3y ago
A few months ago there was an HN thread calling for personal blogs, and it accumulated almost 2,000 comments. Plenty of blogs to be found, if you like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081
- h2odragon 3y ago
  Might be time for another. Or a monthly "self promotion" post alongside the jobs posts
  - nighmi 3y ago
    I made it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932996
pard68 3y ago
my take is that "blogging for the hell of it" is larger than ever but harder than ever to find.
renewiltord 3y ago
It's still going on, and it's naturally micro-communities. It's just drowned out by the sheer volume of content possible because social media lowered the cost of writing to near zero. The Planet Debian RSS aggregator is an example https://planet.debian.org/ https://planet.debian.org/ But there's lots of blogs out there. I did stop blogging but not for a good reason: I had a server with 11 y or something uptime and when the VPS provider wanted to turn it off I'd forgotten what I did. I've got the backups, though. So one day perhaps.
alliao 3y ago
This post really reminds me of my relationship with hackernews, I was elated for a period having found a source of constant interesting bits from the net, then for a brief period I got quite shell shocked; for every second article seemingly talking about one interesting thing always turned into "then I found my calling and started xyz.com and it'd make world a better place". Luckily I got quite good at noticing the tone and have since avoided bunch of them, but still.
justinlloyd 3y ago
I still blog, non-anonymously just for the hell of it, less so than I used to due to the pandemic, but I still have my cooking blog (which contains no life stories), programming blog, personal blog (consisting of quips, jokes, movie reviews, music reviews, stupid comics and observations on life) and a few other outlets. Once I work through some things, I will blog some more and also make some more comic books. I still keep my musings reasonably weird. I also pull old stuff from my journals and transcribe them into blog posts, with appropriately old date attached. My public writings go back some 40+ years with actual blog posts going back 28 years since some of my personal websites began in 1995. https://justinlloyd.li/blog/hippos-and-ducks-are-verbotten/ https://justinlloyd.li/blog/hippos-and-ducks-are-verbotten/ https://justin-lloyd.com/ https://justin-lloyd.com/ - it's not a blog, it's my C.V., and it has a space invaders game on the web page. https://github.com/JustinLloyd/retro-chores https://github.com/JustinLloyd/retro-chores - it's a software project written like a blog Some people like it, other people tell me they hate it (usually the space invaders game (wow! much unprofessional!1!) and it makes me un-hirable. Oddly enough the people telling me I am un-hirable are usually the people I would never consider working for, who in the next breath also try to convince me I should take a sizable pay cut to work for them. The oodly weird and just for the sake of it are still out there, in fact, I dare say, more so than it ever was, but frequently people complain about the state of the web, and then immediately open up Facebook or Twitter or use Google to go find their next distraction. Discoverability remains a problem, especially given Google's almost hostile ecosystem of search that favours the recent and viral over the older and evergreen.
altairprime 3y ago
Search engines happened. Once random assholes could find me and fling shit at me, I walked away from ‘blogging’ and never looked back. Since then, I’ll only write posts on sites that can’t be searched without being logging in. It’s the way it used to be, before webcrawlers and social media ruined our lives, and it’s better for it.
mikewarot 3y ago
It's simple... you write something, and then nobody ever comments on it, or links to it. It used to be that Google pushed blog results to the front, then backed off as they chased profit instead of quality. The demise of Google Reader didn't help matters. Google essentially killed blogging single handed.
firemelt 3y ago
google kill it, I just wish I could hide pinterest, quora and medium from my search result
justsomehnguy 3y ago
Just because some shmucks insist what the coffee should be only served in a mushy mix of fruits and vegetables, or be prepared, brewed and consumed only by a very specific procedures - doesn't mean you can't just enjoy your cup made in a old beaten jezwa or, why the hell no, just that 3-in-1 mix which still evokes the memories of subsistence on it and instacook ramen back in the day. You are free to write about anything. And everyone is free to visit your writing. Or not to.
mnky9800n 3y ago
Influencers all started making money and then everyone else decided they should make money and then nobody ever read my livejournal anyways so why bother continue writing it.
samsquire 3y ago
You can write for your own and other's edification. I use GitHub README.md to host and easily have access to my blog everywhere. It is effective.
amai 3y ago
The blog https://kottke.org/ https://kottke.org/ is alive and kicking since 25 years.
mortallywounded 3y ago
If you need to google "blogging ideas" you're probably out of ideas and shouldn't be writing, or you're looking for corpo non-sense and that's what you found.
whiona 3y ago
Hello! I am the author of this post. I never expected more than 10 people to read it max because it was a rambly thing that I dashed off pretty quickly. I’ve received some really interesting responses and emails as a result, as well as many recommendations of cool blogs to read!! Thank you for all those. I’ve seen some folks expressing their incredulity that a writer would need to do an internet search for ideas, so I wanted to add a bit of context. I’ve got some ideas for future posts jotted down in my notes app, but nothing that I feel I am ready to go ahead with writing yet. I still wanted to write something that day just to exercise my writing “muscle,” as it were. I like to do personal journalling and write fanfiction (yeah, cringe, I know) and in both of those online communities there are lots of ways to find cool prompts from other writers for if you have writer’s block. There are whole lists of questions to answer in your journal to help jumpstart some self-reflection. In fandom spaces, there are tons of “fan weeks” (or months) where there will be a prompt or two per day, and the challenge is to write something based on that prompt. I’ve really enjoyed consulting those to spark an idea when I’m not sure what to do, and I’ve written some pieces I am really proud of based on those prompts. So I (naively, I now realize) assumed that there might be cool blogging challenges or prompts I could find out there to spark something interesting I could write about…and then I got flooded with all that nonsense and I was like, what is this?? I hate it! And I wrote about how I hated it, and here we are. :) I am relieved to see that personal blogging is very much alive on the quieter side of the web, away from social media and SEO optimization. It’s a space I am increasingly spending time in and still figuring out how to navigate. It seems like the best way to find stuff over here is to talk to people! I’ve received some really nice emails from people sharing their blogs with me and enjoyed reading their posts. I am definitely going to check out the many recommendations in this thread! Thanks to everyone who has been so welcoming to me as a total blogging newbie, and as for answering the question in my post title: Blogging for the hell of it is alive, just much harder to find by the means I’ve been used to up until now. As an aside, I do also think it’s really funny how people are assuming I’m a guy…I guess because I mentioned I’m playing Baldur’s Gate, and girls don’t know how to do that. ;)
- jfengel 3y ago
  In my (extremely limited) experience, 100% of the people I know playing Baldur's Gate are women. I suspect it's more of an HN thing. The site is overwhelmingly male-presenting. There may be more women than it would appear, being carefully neutral about using any kind of female-coded language, and content to let the assumption be that they're male. If you look into any of the threads on gender topics, very few women talk about their experiences. With good reason, I think: those threads are often very hostile to women.
JJMcJ 3y ago
The disappearance of RSS didn't help much either. Instead of being able to follow 50 or 100 blogs and just see the new stuff daily, I tend to rotate through the same five or ten blogs hoping for something new, or else look on Twitter and similar platforms hoping for something interesting.

256 points by bovermyer 3y ago

zoklet-enjoyer 3y ago

I got bored of it the same way I got bored of writing in a physical journal

andrewalan 3y ago

[dead]

paulorlando 3y ago

Amen.

diogenes4 3y ago

1. Most people don't have anything interesting to say. 2. People who do have interesting things to say deserve to get paid for their work. 3. Other platforms (e.g. TikTok) provide a more natural medium for interaction and response. 4. If you're just aiming to write, there's always journals. I journal and I find it very satisfying. 5. Obviously, people still blog, even if the scene is dominated by capital's obsession with SEO.

crawancon 3y ago
6. Entities on the internet either copy your work and claim credit, harass you because of your opinions, or use your works against you(mining, social engineering, marketing).
theshrike79 3y ago
1. That didn't stop people blogging before :D 2. Money happened pretty much. First people started monetising their blogs, then they turned into books, which turned into multiple books and youtube channels and then it was no longer a blog and more of a company. and additionally: 6. The younger generation is used to having their actual face plastered all over the internet and thus feel more natural making videos with their own face and voice. -- I, and I think a good part of the HN crowd, are in the generation where we had actual friends we only knew by their handle/nickname and never saw their face unless there was a meetup of some sort and we actually went there. For me, using my own face, or even name, to present any sort of content just feels wrong in a visceral way.
- pixl97 3y ago
  I think you missed #3 when commenting on #1 People didn't have much interesting to say before, but they didn't have much else to do. Now with #3, other platforms, they spend a lot of time on those other places writing short quips all day.
izzydata 3y ago
There is no way to know what people will find interesting. There is a healthy gap between someones content being absolutely not worth reading and being professional. I think more people should have hobbies and they should write about their experiences even without it necessarily being interesting. I also don't think it needs to be about making money. Once you start trying to get paid for your hobbies it becomes work and not fun. With an online blog rather than an offline journal you can easily share it with friends. I think the main difference here between TikTok and other huge social media is that less is more. I don't see much point in a million anonymous strangers looking at my posts. I don't think there is anything "natural" about these huge social media platforms. This kind of socialization feels very unnatural to me. Mostly do to the parasocial relationships that occur from the million people to one person style interactions.
simonw 3y ago
"Most people don't have anything interesting to say." I couldn't disagree more. People are /fascinating/. There's definitely a skill in figuring out what you can say that's most likely to interest other people, but that's a learnable skill. One of the skills of a great communicator is being able to help pull the interesting stuff out of people.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

geek_at 3y ago

Couldn't agree more with the sentiment. I started blogging [1] in 2012 as a kind-of documentation of my work and thought processes (especially with raspberry pi projects) because when after a year on not working with a specific technology I forgot many aspects or challenges I had to overcome and I was sick of re-googling fixes for problems I have already fixed in the past. Blogging has been a blessing for me and I have hit the top of hacker news a few times and even though I don't monitize my blog in any way (not even affiliate links) I still feel good about other people learning things from my projects or mistakes. For me this is the truest form of blogging [1] https://blog.haschek.at https://blog.haschek.at

izzydata 3y ago

I started a random blog of my own for no particular reason recently. Even if nobody reads it I think I enjoy the whole 90s internet vibe of people having individual personal websites. Everyone being on Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon or wherever has no personality to it.

city41 3y ago
When LiveJournal first launched my friends and I all got one. We treated it as a sanitized for public consumption diary, and we all posted regularly. It was really neat and really fun. I miss when the internet was more care free.
baggachipz 3y ago
I like writing blog posts about things which interest me, have no comments, and no ads. I post links to it on Mastodon, where I have exactly zero followers. Nothing wrong with just putting it out there.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I did that for awhile, almost as a notepad - I still get a few comments here and there randomly because someone finds just what they wanted in a search.
wvenable 3y ago
I also started a random blog out of no where recently. I had been thinking about for a while because I post random thoughts all over the Internet and felt like I should have a place where they are collected. Also started a few tech hobbies and actually putting stuff out into the world is how the hobby grows. I've benefited from the writings and videos of others and wanted to pay that forward.

femiagbabiaka 3y ago

Great read. I think the shift in internet culture towards everyone being an “expert” in their domain as opposed to sharing their experience (or sharing “vibes” if you will) has been very toxic. One example: was talking to my cousin the other day, there was a YouTube feature she misses called video replies. Around the 2010s, that feature was used in hair and makeup communities to share videos purely about an experience or journey. So you wouldn’t necessarily be reviewing a product for general purpose, just saying “this is how I used this thing and how it worked for me.” Now? It is so (potentially) lucrative to be an influencer making normative statements that not doing so seems pointless, even looked down upon as possibly spreading misinformation. Something critical has been lost.

theshrike79 3y ago
And now we have "reaction videos" where a more famous internet celebrity with millions of followers watches random funny videos and gets paid for it - while the actual creators don't get anything.
- femiagbabiaka 3y ago
  Yes, this feels like an obvious gap -- although of course the incentive will be to create videos that are easily reacted to -- in fact it already is.
- DiabloD3 3y ago
  But it is well known that these "reaction videos" are largely fake, and the creators are operating an advanced ad revenue scam, and somehow producing fake views on YouTube and not getting caught (or at least, YouTube is not publicly speaking about this, and most likely knows internally). Either YouTube is going to ban them and try to claw back literally years of money from them, or this is going to explode in the news in the next 2-3 years and Google is going to have to explain to their largest advertisers where their money went.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    We'll see how that goes. There's some really interesting Youtube drama going on where a literal multimillionaire Twitch streamer/Youtuber doxxed another Youtuber by streaming their actual home while standing on their front yard. Something that's extremely illegal by Californian law. But the offending internet-celebrity has a habit of not being affected by any kind of lawsuits because they bring in millions of viewers (34M viewers on Youtube) and are too good for business to actually kick off the platform.

muhammadusman 3y ago

My blog is for the purpose of just having a blog. I love to write medium-long stuff there. I’ll go from life updates to some technical thing I learned or am learning. I have various topics like keyboards, photography, typography, and other interests that I will write 2 or 3 posts about and then move onto a different topic. I find it impressive that people can have just one topic to write about but I can’t stick to one. I also don’t have a lot of readers. Anything between 100-200 unique visitors a month, nothing to monetize off of.

eatonphil 3y ago

There are many great bloggers out there. Some of my favorites: - nullprogram.com - zserge.com - eli.thegreenplace.net - smalldatum.blogspot.com - rachelbythebay.com - muratbuffalo.blogspot.com - sirupsen.com - brooker.co.za/blog/ - jack-vanlightly.com - utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/ - jvns.ca

whydoyoucare 3y ago
Actually, posts on HN routinely lead me to several fantastic blogs! So yes, there are people writing interesting stuff in a blog as opposed to byte-sized nibbles on social media, and I enjoy them. Thanks for these recommendations. :)
femiagbabiaka 3y ago
Adding to this list: danluu.com
- eatonphil 3y ago
  Yes that's a fantastic one.
xuancanh 3y ago
https://notes.eatonphil.com/ https://notes.eatonphil.com/ is also great :).
- femiagbabiaka 3y ago
  Wow I didn’t make the connection. Indeed, a fantastic blog!
welder 3y ago
blog.codinghorror.com and I must mention my own blog when filtered to the engineering category https://wakatime.com/blog/category/engineering https://wakatime.com/blog/category/engineering
whiona 3y ago

PaulHoule 3y ago

The blogging-SEO connection is also so unnatural to the way capital thinks, yet it's developed because it works. I mean, tell a Realtor that nobody gives a f2k about a Realtor in their town and you'll never get a link to a plain ordinary web site and that they should blog if they want attention and the vast majority of them will think you're insane. Except for the Realtor who runs a blog about your town and ranks #1.

kevinventullo 3y ago

If the author is not trying to make money, but rather “write creatively and have fun,” then why consult startpage.com or other online lists? Those are written for people who want to make money. If you want to blog for the hell of it, then just do it. Write about whatever you want. Baldur’s Gate, whatever. I have a two-post blog about some esoteric math I thought was cool. Very few people care and that’s fine.

efields 3y ago

Twitter.

Apreche 3y ago

Making and sharing work without profit motive still exists. You just can’t find it with Google.

blueferret 3y ago

I've blogged on and off for many years. Personal, work, and in between. Maybe it's just me, but I find blogs have a lifespan. There's a period wherein they provide fulfillment as well as value, followed by a period where one or both of those tends to slip away. When both have left, it's time to stop. Right now my only blog is for my freelance consulting biz (blueferret.consulting). I've debated a Substack for a different project as well...something of a philosophy discussion, wherein I'd clarify a set of ideas out in public. Because I can, and because I think others would enjoy seeing it too.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

To answer the headline, nothing happened to it. Writing about stuff for writings sake and just to get it out of your head into some form is still very much a thing. That said, it is possible to make (varying amounts) of money writing a blog, and so it attracted a huge number of people who wanted to do that, and as a ready market various "corpo" types sprung up to "feed their dreams" for a small fee. And this is where the disaster happens. When companies that index the web make 99.9% of their money selling ads on that index, and the index is a place where wannabes ask the question "how do I make money on a blog" ask that question, you gets something not unlike unconstrained algae growth in a badly maintained aquarium of things "popping out of the woodwork" to fill that demand. As a result, if you used that to measure "What happened" you would easily come to the conclusion that nobody does this any more, after all wouldn't it be great to have a reliable way to "collect" the blogs of interest and be notified that they had said something new? Yeah, that would be a really cool thing but apparently the corpo types could not figure out any way to make money on that and so decided to cancel that part of their offering. Yes, I'm still mad about it :-)

doggerel 3y ago
Aren't there places away from the conventional protocols where people still blog and the world is innocent? I'm serious. I came across some of these communities nearly a year ago while reading about solar powered servers. And after I forgot how I found them, I've thought of them about once a month and wondered what the hell is wrong with me for forgetting. They were incredibly neat and niche spaces, full of very idiosyncratic websites and things that had no commercial point. It was fantastic.
- ghewgill 3y ago
  Are you perhaps thinking of https://geminiprotocol.net https://geminiprotocol.net?
  - doggerel 3y ago
    YES! This was one of the things I came across. Thank you!

marssaxman 3y ago

I remember when the blogging world became "obsessed with this corpo nonsense", and it was a very strange experience. Blogs had been a kind of distributed social media, global conversation among creative weirdos, but eventually some tipping point of public awareness happened and seemingly overnight people just would not shut up about the idea of making money writing a blog, making a living as a blogger, which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant. But they were persistent, they were noisy, there were eventually more of them than there were of us, and... well. That was a long time ago now, and I wouldn't even know where to start looking for interesting blogs of the old style, if they still exist.

catlover76 3y ago
> which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant I lol'd and now would like to see these work somehow "Uber for dinner guests" if your social circle isn't sufficiently cool and there are people you are inviting you want to impress.
- kej 3y ago
  I recently finished reading Chesterton's "The Club of Queer Trades", and one of the jobs in there was a paid dinner guest who even set up the conversation so the client could make witty remarks.
- TylerE 3y ago
  "token white person as a service" is a thing in China. It's apparently a very big deal in business circles that you have SOMEONE non-Asian in your party.
  - RedCondor 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Cerium 3y ago

amadeuspagel 3y ago

Why do you need to google "blog post ideas" when you have so many thoughts assailing your brain? What do you expect?

mike_hock 3y ago
He wants to put his bachelor's degree to use that he paid X amount of money for. He has the same blogging-as-a-job mindset. Why is (for example) Raymond Chen's blog interesting? Because he has a real job that gives him stories to blog about and occasionally vent his frustration, and the result is entertaining but real, useful information. He doesn't spend time pondering what to write about next. You don't need a degree in creative writing to blog. You need a real job or hobby to have something to blog about. I don't care about some rando's opinion on some video game, whether he writes like Shakespeare or not.
- whiona 3y ago
  Hi Mike! It’s cool if you didn’t enjoy my post, but there are some rather strange assumptions about me in here just because I happen to enjoy computer games, and was at a bit of a loss as to what I wanted to write about that day. I have a full-time job that I think is pretty cool (I’m a librarian) but I prefer to keep my work life at work, and my internet life on the internet. Never the twain shall meet. I am also a she who has many other hobbies. :) I know there’s a bit of a stereotype that anyone who likes computer games must be a male NEET living in their mom’s basement, but it’s pretty inaccurate to reality!
joemi 3y ago
Indeed. Searching for phrases like that are exactly why he got some many not-just-for-the-hell-of-it hits. The people who are most in need of ideas about what to blog about are those that are doing it just because they heard their company's site needs a blog. So those are the kind of answers most people searching for "blog post ideas" are looking for. People who are blogging just for the hell of it don't typically need to search for ideas, since they just post about whatever they want.
- 3y ago

ge96 3y ago

I do blog about whatever thing I'm working on. I know that what gets hits are the tutorials... but I also like to thought dump but I give any readers a warning ahead of time. Somewhat unfortunately I have been lazy/writing under some platform, which it does mean having an audience.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Most points made in a blog post can be boiled down to 280 characters if you focus.

Zigurd 3y ago

Short form video happened. I reach more people for non-commercial posts about software development that way. There are a few topics that are hard to cover that way, but very few that can't be shortened to fit. Like tweets were, it's a discipline.

iwanttocomment 3y ago

Nobody here has mentioned the real reason public blogging has died off, which is that with the modern public Internet, the risk of being attacked - doxxing, harassment, or simply the grind of moderating comments - has completely eliminated any desire any normal person would have to interface publicly (or anything more than pseudonymously) with the world apart from a profit motive.

mschuster91 3y ago
Yup. It's a real hassle just to keep the spammers and skiddies at bay. Not worth the trouble.
kstrauser 3y ago
I turned off comments a long time ago because the effort required to get a signal-to-noise ratio I liked was more than the value I got from the good comments. I'm glad I did it. If you want to comment on a blog post, drop me an email.
- tasty_freeze 3y ago
  I have a few websites dedicated to some old microcomputers. They are niche and very few people care. I work on them in bursts and then they sit there for years before the next bout of updates. It is often an excuse to take advantage of the latest CSS or whatever. Anyway, many years ago I added a message board to most of them so passersby could share their recollections and nostalgia. At first it was a PITA to keep out the spam. But message boards are so passe that not only is it rare to get a new comment, but it is rare to get spam too.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I love the tiny message boards that implement a completely effective captcha with things like "How many bits wide is the 8088?"
    - meatmanek 3y ago

pacomerh 3y ago

I suppose most people want to monetize everything. Articles about how you can monetize writing articles, so you write these articles about how you would monetize and the cycle never ends and the web because harder to navigate. Now you need a clever app that filters through the BS.

bombdailer 3y ago

best blog is from ran prieur - also a great source of other interesting blogs.

jaylittle 3y ago

I blog just for the hell of it. No client side trackers, no ads, just the spew of thoughts I need to get out of my head by vocalizing them. It costs me money every month and brings in no revenue and I fucking love it. https://jaylittle.com/ https://jaylittle.com/ The personal, honest and vulnerable (emotionally, not security-wise) internet is still out there, ya just got to look a bit harder for it nowadays.

jayrwren 3y ago
bruh, that loads WAY too fast. you gotta slow that role, have a splash, prompt for signing up for newsletter, display some ads, prompt to disable ad blocker, etc etc.
- jaylittle 3y ago
  LOL I'll stick with my throwback to what websites used to be like when they were simple, quick to load and asked visitors only for their attention and not much else ;)
Minor49er 3y ago
The posts "My Career Misery is in the Eye of the Beholder" and "Code Monkey Mid-Life Crisis" hit pretty close to home
- jaylittle 3y ago
  Glad to know that I'm not the only one feeling out of place in tech as of late. Thanks for sharing!
  - Little_Kitty 3y ago
    > Utilized Low Code Tools at Client’s Request for the Web Front End Work Oof! Nice to find someone else who recognises explicitly that management is in no way a natural career progression path, it may have been decades ago, but in the current market we often see seniority / value confused with team management when the two need have little relation.

DANmode 3y ago

Concise reply: What happened to reading blogs for the hell of it, instead of doom-scrolling social media? Even one-two commenters a week can keep the spirit of a blog up. But usually not one per year.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
I'm not sure about commentors being able to preserve the spirit. I'll be charitable and not name the blog, but I still RSS-follow one blog that is one of the oldest, most respectable, and once most-read in its subject area. It still gets comments regularly, but always by the same handful of people who are 1) obviously on the autistic spectrum, and 2) all getting on in years, because younger generations no longer follow blogs. The effect is sad, it makes the blogging feel even more declassé. In fact, its image would only improve by the owner turning off comments entirely and perhaps moving to a static site generator.

kukkeliskuu 3y ago

I have been blogging since 2004. I have four blogs that I currently write to regularly. Many others are more like archives. Three of the active blogs are public and two of them are similar, about dancing, but in different languages, one IT related. The private blogs have been the most useful for my thinking. The active private blog has no readers at the moment. I kind of miss the period from 2004 to perhaps 2009 when there was a community around blogging. But even then I was intentionally very marginal. I have never tried to attract readers, more the opposite. There may be benefits from writing, such as publicity. But I dom’t think that is necessary a very useful motivation on the long term. It seems to me that the only reasonable reason for writing is that you have this internal urge to write, to understand whst you think. You will know what you want to write. It does not matter if people do not read it, because you are writing for yourself.

tarkin2 3y ago

Once the marketers found out you could make money from blogs, they became insincere/fronts. Once your employers became aware of your blog, they became sedated online portfolios. Social media has obviously taken people away from long-form, too.

wolpoli 3y ago

How do you even find blogs to read these days? In mid-2000s, I worked in a company using beta version of WPF and I was able to search for an error message, and it brings back blogs where people actually posted about the issue I encountered. These days, if blogs still exist, search isn't showing them anymore, preferring to provide results from the same few Stack Overflow/issues aggregators/documentation aggregators mixed together.

constantly 3y ago
Finding the first one is the challenge. After that just click through the webring for equally good blogs and content.
raybb 3y ago
Maybe checkout the Kagi smallweb project https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
kaycebasques 3y ago
When I really love something, I find myself just checking the site periodically to see if they've published anything new recently. Astronomy Photo Of The Day makes this more predictable because I expect to see 1 new post every day. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html Lower down in this thread someone recommends a set of blogs to follow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37920919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37920919 In other words, maybe word-of-mouth recommendations like what you see here on HN is the best way to find blogs...

jayrwren 3y ago

blogging died when google killed google reader. yes, some other readers tried, but nothing was as fast and as nice to use as google reader.

Waterluvian 3y ago

I have a system where I write markdown files that get zipped and a password I don’t know is applied. I’m just accumulating this journal nobody can read and it feels pretty therapeutic. There isn’t an audience and can’t be an audience.

expertentipp 3y ago
You write there what you'll do to your enemies or the only copies of private keys and bitcoins?
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  It’s where I keep the disaster recovery plans for work.

wduquette 3y ago

I still blog for the hell of it. Been doing it since December, 1996.

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

This is a weird rambly post. Blogs became "corpo" like 15 years ago. But in the last 3-4 years there's definitely been a return to "blogging for the hell of it".... especially around these parts. Tech people just doing writeups on their projects, something random they learned, discovered etc. After like the 5 years preceding that it's been refreshing that more posts shared around here are like personal blogs and not just news sites etc.

rhelz 3y ago

We all used to have steady jobs which paid the bills.

herunan 3y ago

It turned into a numbers game because becoming popular online equates to money. The biggest catalyst for that? Social media. Since then, social media has become the window into people’s thoughts. Blogging is an additional ‘tool’ to get a bigger cut under your rules.

cortesoft 3y ago

It seems pretty straightforward to me. Someone who writes a blog for money is going to 1) Spend more time on it, because it is their source of income and not a hobby. They don't have to just do it in their spare time. 2) Be motivated to write it even when they don't feel like it, therefore putting out a more consistent product and gaining more readers. 3) Be more motivated to generate an audience, meaning advertising their blog and/or writing content that will generate a lot of clicks. In short, you are more likely to encounter blogs written by people trying to make money because they are going to do more things to get the blog in front of you, in order to make that money.

OldGuyInTheClub 3y ago

Nothin'. I have had a blog for 10 years. Pure vanity. When I feel like getting something out for whatever reason, it is there. No one reads it, there's no money in it, and that's just fine.

kabes 3y ago

What happener with doing anything for the hell of it. Seems like everything one does need to have a business plan behind it these days.

livrem 3y ago
That was my thought as well. I feel like everything that I used to (and sometimes still) do as a hobby has become super-commercialized and 99% of those interested in doing that thing only wants to do it for the money and not as a hobby. The entire world wide web I guess is a good example. But people are seriously paying professional game masters to run table-top RPGs for them and so on.

telliott99 3y ago

Longtime HN reader, I finally made an account to comment on this. I started a blog in 2008. Math and genetics, time-insensitive material. I worked hard on the quality. Page views 1-10K per post overall. In 2018-2019 the page views dropped to 1%. I still write, but now it's just for me. And BTW, still waiting for a visitor from Tonga.

stemitom_ 3y ago
[dead]

keithnz 3y ago

blogging seemed to fall off as tweeting picked up.

phendrenad2 3y ago

Text sucks, but it was a necessity before the advent of streaming video and cellphone cameras. Now you can find all of that blog content over in video form on youtube and tiktok.

meatmanek 3y ago
Funny, I have a similar observation but the opposite opinion: I realized that my favorite major platform these days is Youtube because there's a ton of great content there that is harder to find elsewhere. Unfortunately, a lot of that content would be much better in written form. As an example, I recently watched a video about the best weapons in Tears of the Kingdom that was over 40 minutes long, but all that information could have been a ~3000-word blog post. Yes, some of the information is best conveyed in video form (demonstrating certain effects with in-game footage), but a lot of the content was essentially just the creator explaining out loud why certain combinations work well. For the bits of information that work better as video, the author could embed a short video into the article. It probably would've been a lot less effort for the creator to make a listicle or blog post with a section for each of the weapons shown, and it would certainly save the viewers a lot of time. But then such a blog post would probably make way less money than the Youtube video. Youtube does a better-than-average job of paying creators for popular content, and they've fostered a network effect where audiences go to Youtube when looking for certain types of information. All this means that the incentives push people to create video content even when another medium would suit the content better.
Gud 3y ago
Text is faster and searchable. Video has its places, but text hardly sucks.

karaterobot 3y ago

> So I consulted my friend Startpage.com with the obvious prompt: "blog post ideas." My first thought is that a lot of people are blogging for the hell of it (me, nonstop, for decades), but that they accidentally typed "blog post ideas" into a search engine, and got what they deserved. That is, the problem is with search engines returning trash, and not with the nonexistence of blogs that aren't trash.

m0rissette 3y ago

I blog without ads but then again I haven’t blogged in years lol mattharris dot org

panyam 3y ago

Hmm i thought it was still there. Problem is discoverability and the insane high bar on "sexy ui"? I maintain a personal blog (ive been waiting for ages to put it out thanks to fear of ridicule but time to break free of the shame) - http://buildmage.com/ http://buildmage.com/ where I just write about the random side (and possibly unfinished) things I dabble in pure fun, some learning, some sharing. Probably good thing discoverability is hard!

Macha 3y ago

Social media took the "small posts" off personal blogs onto bigger sites. Now it feels like a blog post has to be big and important. And that's a hard threshold to work up to.

waingake 3y ago

When you hear Zizek talk about ideology this is what he means. The ideology of capitalism influences us in certain ways, such as desiring to capitalize off our audience, the goal subtly shifts to increasing metrics such as readers, likes, shares. What really changed about blogging is that people started to care about these metrics more and more. In the early internet one wrote a blog post without really expecting anyone to read it! ( although someone stumbling upon it was paradoxically more likely before we switched to social media platforms etc ) As such I'd argue the author wrote more authentically.

bluerooibos 3y ago

Capitalism - where only things which turn a profit are deemed worthwhile.

ProgrammerMatt 3y ago

it's possible the ones that are trying to make money are the ones who are more likely to be found

voussoir 3y ago

A few months ago there was an HN thread calling for personal blogs, and it accumulated almost 2,000 comments. Plenty of blogs to be found, if you like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081

h2odragon 3y ago
Might be time for another. Or a monthly "self promotion" post alongside the jobs posts
- nighmi 3y ago
  I made it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37932996

pard68 3y ago

my take is that "blogging for the hell of it" is larger than ever but harder than ever to find.

renewiltord 3y ago

It's still going on, and it's naturally micro-communities. It's just drowned out by the sheer volume of content possible because social media lowered the cost of writing to near zero. The Planet Debian RSS aggregator is an example https://planet.debian.org/ https://planet.debian.org/ But there's lots of blogs out there. I did stop blogging but not for a good reason: I had a server with 11 y or something uptime and when the VPS provider wanted to turn it off I'd forgotten what I did. I've got the backups, though. So one day perhaps.

alliao 3y ago

This post really reminds me of my relationship with hackernews, I was elated for a period having found a source of constant interesting bits from the net, then for a brief period I got quite shell shocked; for every second article seemingly talking about one interesting thing always turned into "then I found my calling and started xyz.com and it'd make world a better place". Luckily I got quite good at noticing the tone and have since avoided bunch of them, but still.

justinlloyd 3y ago

I still blog, non-anonymously just for the hell of it, less so than I used to due to the pandemic, but I still have my cooking blog (which contains no life stories), programming blog, personal blog (consisting of quips, jokes, movie reviews, music reviews, stupid comics and observations on life) and a few other outlets. Once I work through some things, I will blog some more and also make some more comic books. I still keep my musings reasonably weird. I also pull old stuff from my journals and transcribe them into blog posts, with appropriately old date attached. My public writings go back some 40+ years with actual blog posts going back 28 years since some of my personal websites began in 1995. https://justinlloyd.li/blog/hippos-and-ducks-are-verbotten/ https://justinlloyd.li/blog/hippos-and-ducks-are-verbotten/ https://justin-lloyd.com/ https://justin-lloyd.com/ - it's not a blog, it's my C.V., and it has a space invaders game on the web page. https://github.com/JustinLloyd/retro-chores https://github.com/JustinLloyd/retro-chores - it's a software project written like a blog Some people like it, other people tell me they hate it (usually the space invaders game (wow! much unprofessional!1!) and it makes me un-hirable. Oddly enough the people telling me I am un-hirable are usually the people I would never consider working for, who in the next breath also try to convince me I should take a sizable pay cut to work for them. The oodly weird and just for the sake of it are still out there, in fact, I dare say, more so than it ever was, but frequently people complain about the state of the web, and then immediately open up Facebook or Twitter or use Google to go find their next distraction. Discoverability remains a problem, especially given Google's almost hostile ecosystem of search that favours the recent and viral over the older and evergreen.

altairprime 3y ago

Search engines happened. Once random assholes could find me and fling shit at me, I walked away from ‘blogging’ and never looked back. Since then, I’ll only write posts on sites that can’t be searched without being logging in. It’s the way it used to be, before webcrawlers and social media ruined our lives, and it’s better for it.

mikewarot 3y ago

It's simple... you write something, and then nobody ever comments on it, or links to it. It used to be that Google pushed blog results to the front, then backed off as they chased profit instead of quality. The demise of Google Reader didn't help matters. Google essentially killed blogging single handed.

firemelt 3y ago

google kill it, I just wish I could hide pinterest, quora and medium from my search result

justsomehnguy 3y ago

Just because some shmucks insist what the coffee should be only served in a mushy mix of fruits and vegetables, or be prepared, brewed and consumed only by a very specific procedures - doesn't mean you can't just enjoy your cup made in a old beaten jezwa or, why the hell no, just that 3-in-1 mix which still evokes the memories of subsistence on it and instacook ramen back in the day. You are free to write about anything. And everyone is free to visit your writing. Or not to.

mnky9800n 3y ago

Influencers all started making money and then everyone else decided they should make money and then nobody ever read my livejournal anyways so why bother continue writing it.

samsquire 3y ago

You can write for your own and other's edification. I use GitHub README.md to host and easily have access to my blog everywhere. It is effective.

amai 3y ago

The blog https://kottke.org/ https://kottke.org/ is alive and kicking since 25 years.

mortallywounded 3y ago

If you need to google "blogging ideas" you're probably out of ideas and shouldn't be writing, or you're looking for corpo non-sense and that's what you found.

whiona 3y ago

Hello! I am the author of this post. I never expected more than 10 people to read it max because it was a rambly thing that I dashed off pretty quickly. I’ve received some really interesting responses and emails as a result, as well as many recommendations of cool blogs to read!! Thank you for all those. I’ve seen some folks expressing their incredulity that a writer would need to do an internet search for ideas, so I wanted to add a bit of context. I’ve got some ideas for future posts jotted down in my notes app, but nothing that I feel I am ready to go ahead with writing yet. I still wanted to write something that day just to exercise my writing “muscle,” as it were. I like to do personal journalling and write fanfiction (yeah, cringe, I know) and in both of those online communities there are lots of ways to find cool prompts from other writers for if you have writer’s block. There are whole lists of questions to answer in your journal to help jumpstart some self-reflection. In fandom spaces, there are tons of “fan weeks” (or months) where there will be a prompt or two per day, and the challenge is to write something based on that prompt. I’ve really enjoyed consulting those to spark an idea when I’m not sure what to do, and I’ve written some pieces I am really proud of based on those prompts. So I (naively, I now realize) assumed that there might be cool blogging challenges or prompts I could find out there to spark something interesting I could write about…and then I got flooded with all that nonsense and I was like, what is this?? I hate it! And I wrote about how I hated it, and here we are. :) I am relieved to see that personal blogging is very much alive on the quieter side of the web, away from social media and SEO optimization. It’s a space I am increasingly spending time in and still figuring out how to navigate. It seems like the best way to find stuff over here is to talk to people! I’ve received some really nice emails from people sharing their blogs with me and enjoyed reading their posts. I am definitely going to check out the many recommendations in this thread! Thanks to everyone who has been so welcoming to me as a total blogging newbie, and as for answering the question in my post title: Blogging for the hell of it is alive, just much harder to find by the means I’ve been used to up until now. As an aside, I do also think it’s really funny how people are assuming I’m a guy…I guess because I mentioned I’m playing Baldur’s Gate, and girls don’t know how to do that. ;)

jfengel 3y ago
In my (extremely limited) experience, 100% of the people I know playing Baldur's Gate are women. I suspect it's more of an HN thing. The site is overwhelmingly male-presenting. There may be more women than it would appear, being carefully neutral about using any kind of female-coded language, and content to let the assumption be that they're male. If you look into any of the threads on gender topics, very few women talk about their experiences. With good reason, I think: those threads are often very hostile to women.

JJMcJ 3y ago

The disappearance of RSS didn't help much either. Instead of being able to follow 50 or 100 blogs and just see the new stuff daily, I tend to rotate through the same five or ten blogs hoping for something new, or else look on Twitter and similar platforms hoping for something interesting.