6 ms·

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

• 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
        As a white person who has spent some time in China. It definitely is a thing. I have not been paid (also not interested), but have definitely been invited places for no reason other than to add a foreigner.
        • IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
          Very curious. Ive never seen this in Japan. I have to ask, what were your primary incentives and what did you hope to get our of it? Helping a close friend? Bored? Finding a SO? Networking? All/None of the above?
          • Cerium 3y ago
            One time I ended up at a lunch with some manager people from the local tv station. One of my friends was trying to sell him some tea and he asked that I attend his lunch event as a favor. It was interesting. Another example more recently - I wanted to visit a tea factory and while I was there they asked if I could put on a uniform and pose for some photos for them.
          • onetokeoverthe 3y ago
            [dead]
    • Zambyte 3y ago
      Source?
      • elSidCampeador 3y ago
        https://www.cnbc.com/id/37759560 https://www.cnbc.com/id/37759560
        • alpaca128 3y ago
          > The page is blocked because of your cookie settings. To continue, please allow all cookies. How is this legal?
          • TylerE 3y ago
            How would it not be? "I refuse cookies" is not a protected class, thus a private business may discriminate it at will. Same way a business could refuse to admit patrons not wearing shoes or carrying a firearm.
            • jowea 3y ago
              Is that true under the GDPR?
              • TylerE 3y ago
                US companies aren't bound by the GDPR. European courts have no jurisdiction here.
                • alpaca128 3y ago
                  European courts have jurisdiction in the EU, and CNBC is accessible in the EU unlike some other US websites, so they have to follow GDPR at least for EU visitors. And as far as I know cookie rejection must not influence the basic functionality of the site.
    • pjc50 3y ago
      This sort of thing exists at various times and places that value appearances a lot. A description of an "uncle from Rome" as a professional mourner in mid-20th century Naples: https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/a-zio-di-roma-an-uncle-from-rome-highly-desirable-at-neapolitan-funerals/ https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/a-zio-di-rom... (fascinating book, Naples 44)
  • jowea 3y ago
    How far is "professional dinner-party guest" from socialite?
    • malfist 3y ago
      I don't think a socialite is paid
      • mikhailfranco 3y ago
        Closer to escort ?
  • pjc50 3y ago
    "After dinner speaker" is a very viable business: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/28/barack-obama-public-speaking-politicians https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/apr/28/barack-obam... ; nearest thing to earning money from being a "dinner party guest". Just like blogging, it relies on already having an audience and an air of being an authority on something.
• ACow_Adonis 3y ago
  isn't that just the internet (and in many ways our societies) in a nutshell? All the people today saying the internet and content wouldnt survive without advertising and payments and some of us remember that actually the internet and content came first, then the corporations and profit seekers arrived. everyone was originally just excited to get their stuff out there and talk to other people who were passionate and knowledgeable about their stuff as well. then the corps, advertisers, seos came. sharers -> profit seekers remember when uber was supposed to be about being able to car share on your way to and from work and cut down on car use? sharers -> profit seekers remember when airbnb was about being able to share your home with someone else while you were away at someone else's so you wouldn't have to pay for hotels? sharers -> profit seekers remember when hackers were people who set up share drives in university halls with free music and movies, fighting for open access to books and software and info and publications? now we have saas, Steve jobs bios and hacker news is run by a startup venture capitalist firm... i wonder what the next thing they can destroy will be... i guess if the pattern repeats look for anything anywhere people are sharing or doing something of value amongst each other for free. they will climb on board try to expand the audience and swamp out the signal of the original community and change the narrative to entrepreneurship and making money from this was always the point, then they will lock it down with network effects and strap on parasitic payments or revenue streams, then they will optimise until they destroy the original with universal enshitification. thinking emoji
  • AndrewKemendo 3y ago
    Exploiters accumulate public goods into private caches That’s literally capitalism
  • carlosjobim 3y ago
    There is nothing stopping you from making and sharing the old style of internet stuff right now. There's never been anything stopping people from just continue to make 90s style web sites or 2000s style blogs. Many people still do. But you can't demand to have an audience if you do that. Likewise, you as a hacker can not demand that people produce more of that style of content for your convenience. There is no limit to the real estate of cyber space, so there is no reason to complain about the stuff online that you personally don't fancy. That stuff is not taking away any space from the stuff that you do fancy. Let's say there's a nice old family restaurant on the corner, that you've always visited every weekend. Then a huge shopping mall opens down the street, with unappetizing fast food and non-durable consumer crap. So then you go and walk around inside that mall every day and complain how bad it is, instead of just continue to go to the nice restaurant on the corner, that still is there. Does that make sense?
• PheonixPharts 3y ago
  Content marketing ruined blogging, just like SEO ruined search. I used to work with a lot of content marketers when it started to get hot. SEO was doing particularly poorly for a period (Google used to resist seo rather than reward it) and people realized that if you started writing "authentic" content, then people would organically link to it and it would increase your ranking. Then social media furthered this problem by people mindlessly sharing content they never read but just looked engaging. Marketing robots where just churning out content on blogs because eventually you would just hit search engine gold by nail the correct topic for some long tail search term. In my own domain, the atrocious "Towards Data Science" is a great example of this (except their "brilliant" innovation was to replace marketing robots with people eager to pad their resume). The content is largely garbage, but it looks about right and is easily shareable. Today, whether you like it or not, if you want to make people to see your blog at all you have to think at least a bit like a content marketer to get seen at all. Consider Jay Alammar's fantastic blog [0], which is very high quality content, but still requires a tremendous amount of polish and marketing to survive. All of this has made it impossible to create the network required for a "global conversation among creative weirdos". Real content does get made, but has to be produced with the effort of a real marketer. 0. https://jalammar.github.io/ https://jalammar.github.io/
  • com2kid 3y ago
    > if you want to make people to see your blog at all you have to think at least a bit like a content marketer to get seen at all. Tell me about it. The most outrageous the titles on my blog (https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/ https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/), the more views articles get. Before I toned it down, my blog post about SSR rendering was called "SSR sucks and you (probably) shouldn't use it", tons of views. Boring "History of " posts, meh. But it also depends who I am writing for. Ideally if I am writing for myself, I shouldn't care about the views, right? Counter argument to that is I am writing for people who may want to read it, and with all the noise out there, if I don't try and elevate my posts to some extent, the people who want to read them may not be able to find them.
    • MonaroVXR 3y ago
• OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  I would add also that after the 2008 crisis, the precariat grew, and some bloggers found themselves in it. Once your living standard is precarious, it is a lot harder to resist the temptation to include affiliate links and get at least some material reward out of your blogging, even if you don't turn it into a full-fledged business. The shift in the culture was due to a little quiet desperation, too, not just greed.
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    > ... precariat ... Thanks for teaching me a new word!
• dstroot 3y ago
  > “ 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.” Thanks for this quote - brilliant.
• paulpauper 3y ago
  blogging never went away completely, it moved to substack, medium, and twitter notes
  • matt_j 3y ago
    Medium is super annoying. Every time I end up there I immediately leave. Popups, subscription requirement "sometimes", it's the most obnoxious place.
    • Shorel 3y ago
      Twitter is even more annoying for any content with more than a single paragraph.
• AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  At the same time blogging was on the rise and "making it as a blogger" was a thing, the print media was getting absolutely torched by downsizing, layoffs, forced retirements, and private equity buyouts. So there was probably some vain hope that independent blogging could be a sustainable revenue stream for the reporter class. Alas, it has not.
• thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > which made about as much sense to me as the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest I thought escorts were generally considered to have a fairly solid business model.
• addicted 3y ago
  There’s a lot of things we can complain about but the destruction of the blogosphere had a very specific individual cause. The death of Google Reader. Google Reader came onto the scene and essentially destroyed all incumbents. Even if you used an independent client, the syncing was almost certainly based on your Google Reader account. And Google Reader also provided a social discovery component which no one even tried competing with because how could you. The sudden death of Google Reader was followed by a glut of rushed alternatives, which meant no specific alternative could get sufficient acceptance. There were a lot of things that hurt the blogosphere but most of them would either have naturally withered away (for instance, the commercial crowd would almost certainly have migrated to social media), or could have been figured out (spam blogs could have easily been beaten if the likes of Google were interested). The death of Google Reader, which also happened to coincide with the rise of social media (not a coincidence since Google Reader was killed in order to promote Google’s social media offering), was something the blogosphere could not recover from.
• chinchilla2020 3y ago
  > the idea of going into business as a dinner-party guest, or a book club participant We're laughing about this concept right now. That makes me fear that we're going to actually see people doing this professionally in the future.
  • afiori 3y ago
    I know for certain that professional dinner-party guests are a real thing that exists
    • Tainnor 3y ago
      It definitely existed in the past, for the very specific reason of avoiding 13 guests being seated at the table: https://medium.com/illumination/how-the-phobia-of-the-number-13-created-a-profession-57f2396a3adc https://medium.com/illumination/how-the-phobia-of-the-number...
  • jon_richards 3y ago
    Honestly it doesn’t strike me as too different from a paid dungeon master. I guess the horror is when it goes from explicitly compensation to some sort of product placement.
• theodric 3y ago
  > I wouldn't even know where to start looking for interesting blogs of the old style, if they still exist. If you're looking for any sources, not necessarily massive volumes, Gemini and Gopher still host written content produced without any hope for monetary gain. gemini://medusae.space/index.gmi is a good starting point.
  • livrem 3y ago
    Gemlogs are very much old style blogs for the hell of it. gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/