11 ms·

Ribbonfarm Is Retiring

178 points by Arubis 2y ago

blfr 2y ago
It seems to me that the blogosphere was not a ZIRP but rather a young Internet phenomenon. Which could exists, like usenet before it, when mere access to it was a filtering mechanism. Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb. Either way, I enjoyed it while it lasted. Thanks for the Office series! https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- bartread 2y ago
  > Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb. Why can’t you? There’s a logical leap in this statement I don’t follow.
  - rogers12 2y ago
    Those seven billion people aren't very good for the most part, and include a critical mass of spectacularly awful people. It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. The Eternal September effect has been getting stronger ever since it's first been observed.
    - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
      Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twitter once was. If Twitter was to go away, places like Bluesky would unavoidably get worse.
      - lenderton 2y ago
        My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site). When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc. Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography. I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users. When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization. In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat. I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.
        MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app. Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok
    - whatshisface 2y ago
      >It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. "Checklist for new theories purporting to prove that the social web is presently unworkable:" ... 26. The predicted conflicts still wouldn't be as bad as Usenet flamewars. 27. Your theory proves that Hackernews does not exist. <--- 28. Audiences afraid of engaging with an unfamiliar interfaces weren't making websites in 1998 either. ...
      - Nihilartikel 2y ago
        Weeellll. Not every forum has a dang. Just saying.
        immibis 2y ago
        Almost every one does.
        kelnos 2y ago
        Most are nowhere near as thoughtful and effective as he is, though.
      - rogers12 2y ago
        This forum has been decreasing in quality since its inception, currently hovering at not-quite-reddit and that's with an organic audience of tech-adjacent posters. It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention. You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.
        ddulaney 2y ago
        As the guidelines [0] state: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - bhouston 2y ago
      I think that AI generated personas who push an ideological direction on anonymous forums are more of a threat that just stupid people. Eg: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-internet-users/ https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-int...
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - rtpg 2y ago
      There's a gap between public fora and the blogosphere though. Generally speaking there are plenty of blogs that get linked in places like here. Blogs just don't have comment sections hosted on their own as much anymore. Having discussions happen in separate places is also interesting, because the HN convo and some subreddit convo will be different, for example. There's a lot more mainstraeam stuff but I think niche communities still exist. Glibly, we're not a part of most of them on account of having gotten older. Or we are a part of some, but there's plenty we're not seeing.
    - throwaway14356 2y ago
      I had a hilarious time deleting comments from people who don't believe the topic is real. Specifically hard to believe stuff made the experience funny. People got really mad in private messages. As if it is a god given right to complain about others talking about something so elaborately that the conversation dies. All scaling issues solved. If you want to talk about the garden gnome liberation front you must believe they need to be rescued.
    - enugu 2y ago
      It's not just that the social media is filled with low on substance posts with excess anger and snark, but this incentivizes everyone to be more forceful - as otherwise the louder voices can dominate the discussion. So, it's not just a quality of people issue but also an emergent dynamic which encourages tribalism instead of substantive posts. The same people can make reasonable posts in other contexts This need not be a unsolvable problem, and that one has to retreat places like HN relying on a single moderator(good, but doesn't scale). One can also rely on timelines/feeds being based on Distributed moderation - A user selects moderators or custom-algorithms who they find valuable. The moderation can be along different dimensions like accuracy, interest, or aligned with some political view. There could a moderator whose style is to purely check the soundness of the reasoning without taking any position on the issue itself. This can lead to improved standards of discussion. A key issue is how to reduce the energy required to moderate - typically a moderator evaluates the quality and rely on networks of other moderators each handling smaller domains. Current discourse encourages users to sort into strongly polarized groups, whereas more nuanced feeds in social media can lead to coalitions which don't neatly align with the standard fault lines. Platforms like Polis actively encourage common points of agreement across different groups.
    - bartread 2y ago
      Yeah, but this sounds more like social media than the blogosphere. Blogs were always effort to set up and maintain, even if you were just going with one of the hosted platforms rather than self-hosting. And comment spam was certainly an issue but, firstly, systems for dealing with that became pretty good. And then, outside of major news sites - I'm thinking particularly here of BBC's HYS, but the same applies to other news sites - and other sites with very broad interest bases, you didn't tend to get loads of nasty or toxic comments on blogs. Plus, the moderation tools were - as previously mentioned - pretty decent. A lot of the bigger news websites did close comments, but I'm not so aware of this being an issue with blogs which were often more focussed around a particular community or interest anyway... just publicly available. I don't think the quantity of people online in itself had anything to do with the "death" of the blogosphere. It's just that most of those people don't read or write blogs. And it's become harder to find blogs and other long tail content because search results are now so heavily skewed towards paid results and commercial entities who invest huge amounts in SEO. FWIW I also think you're probably going a bit far with the moral pronouncements on those 7 billion people: neither you nor I have any real idea what the vast majority of them are actually like as human beings. Moreover, I'd suggest that writing off most people as "[not] very good" or branding a critical mass of them as "spectacularly awful" - and especially when you're speaking from a position of ignorance - is exactly the kind of rhetoric that's landed us with this grim tribal culture that permeates large areas of online - and offline - life.
  - 45y564hn54 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - Arubis 2y ago
      There may be examples of this, but picking on Venkat Rao for not being sufficiently prolific is a laughable argument.
    - xterminator 2y ago
      Are bloggers required to meet a quota?
  - njtransit 2y ago
    There is a NYT op ed titled “The Tyranny of Convenience” that covers the phenomena well.
    - shagie 2y ago
      https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-convenience.html?ogrp=dpl&unlocked_article_code=1.Tk4.xxe7.SY7CnEuabz8R&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-co...
- tuatoru 2y ago
  Substack is doing OK, I think. It's the intellectual child of the blogosphere.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Substack (together with Medium) appears to be the blogosphere. As usual, venture capitalists managed to take over an open protocol and turn it into a singular product.
    - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
      Surprised you lumped Medium in with Substack. I always associate Medium with C-tier tech tutorials at best these days.
      - lenderton 2y ago
        I've read some A-tier libertarian noir novellas on there.
        kelnos 2y ago
        > A-tier libertarian It's been a while since I've seen an oxymoron as perfect as this one.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 2y ago
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      - immibis 2y ago
        They are both neoblog platforms.
  - philwelch 2y ago
    Substack—and the surviving blogs that aren’t on Substack—are still going strong, and I don’t think they’re going to go away. Maybe Substack as a platform might decline the way Medium has. But the “Eternal September” types are usually either functionally illiterate or don’t like long form reading, and social media is increasingly optimized for those people. If you actually take the effort to write down your thoughts in text, you end up filtering for people intelligent and diligent enough to choose the written word even when video and photo content is readily available.
- lacy_tinpot 2y ago
  Don't think it's really systematic. I think this is just a generational cycle. Plenty of content coming from newer people on other platforms through other mediums.
- p3rls 2y ago
  Eh, even in his niche we have people like Gwern pioneering in the aesthetic web movement. I'm not sure I buy the web is dying so much as the cultural conversation revolves around the larger platforms ($$) along with in general web discoverability getting worse.
- seltzered_ 2y ago
  For those missing context: > "This blog was sponsored by ZIRP. The future historians who dive into these archives for archaeological research will likely be economic rather than cultural historians, trying to reconstruct the play-by-play impact of ZIRP. Many of the big hits of this blog, such as The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial, and The Locust Economy (a forgotten hit from 2013) had ZIRPy subtexts." I think the author might he referring to their own blog (ribbonfarm) as a ZIRP phenomenon, not the whole blogosphere.
- spaceman_2020 2y ago
  The public blogosphere died because of Google, simple as. Once search stopped prioritizing blogs over bloated, SEO-optimized slop, traffic to blogs died and discoverability was limited to you spamming your posts everywhere.
  - throwaway14356 2y ago
    You forgot technorati! They lost the plausible deniability there.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      Back when the rat was in effect, the rat would always index the splogs I made but I could never get it to index my non-spam blogs.
      - throwaway14356 2y ago
        yes, i almost forgot that part. I created splogs to promote businesses. I duplicated the comment spam from other splogs then the spammers could easily find the splog and "update" the page many times per day. My normal blogs only got traffic from comments made on other blogs. Yahoo indexed them entirely, google picked up nothing. If I put adsense on it the crawler visited every day but only to find context for the ads.
        PaulHoule 2y ago
        I think the secret to getting you blog indexed in Google back then was FeedBurner. At some point after the acquisition Google merged FeedBurner’s crawler into you own with the consequence that if you “burned” a feed and had one email subscriber Google was forced to index anything in your RSS feed almost immediately. Somehow Google found WordPress blogs highly attractive, probably because of heuristics that they put in…. Cause web crawling and web search are all about heuristics. On some level tracking changes to a WordPress is a hot mess because it has numerous reverse chronologically sorted pages that all update when you add a blog post which makes more work for the crawler but also makes the site look more dynamic than it really is. The usual reason I hear “blogging is dead” is that Google isn’t sending traffic, it could be Google doesn’t have heuristics to support modern blogging platforms (say Hugo) that it did. Maybe Jamstack = Invisibility.
- philshem 2y ago
  > ZIRP stands for “Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon,” … https://www.ycombinator.com/library/LC-what-is-zirp-and-how-did-it-poison-startups https://www.ycombinator.com/library/LC-what-is-zirp-and-how-...
cheschire 2y ago
Having access to wikipedia on a phone everywhere you go is what killed the bar conversation. No longer did you have to compare notes and argue over beers to remember trivia. And in that same way, no longer do people have to ramble on into the aether in blog form to work through some shit. Now they can do that with ChatGPT and actually get responses to their thoughts in real time. And most of the time it's agreeable in tone. Tech continues to change the world. Maybe that isn't what is contributing to this particular blog dying, but I bet it's contributing to the larger community of blogs dying, which has probably created some inertia.
- lenderton 2y ago
  From what I can tell, highschooler and younger, there's almost a complete abandonment of mainstream social media in favor of self-curated chats like Discord, and it revolves heavily around gaming. A sort of hearkening to the AIM days, which is naturally what you'd expect from individuals who socialize in friendgroups that are developed beyond "work drinking buddies", lol. But in general, without being too doom-and-gloom about it, and perhaps this is because of the election going on, it does feel like there is a greater trend going on of internet users stepping away from social media. There's no easy way to divert this weariness back to specialized forums a la the 00's or 90's, though, which is probably where everything should be for the internet to remain useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that 85% or so of internet traffic is phones, resulting in discussions being comprised of back-and-forth thumbtap-quality posts that nobody (including the senders) really seems to care about. It's also exacerbated by the fact that search engines cannot seem to index traditional message boards or wordpresses etc. properly; there are too many of them nowadays to navigate (most being identical templates like vbulletin).
  - mannymanman 2y ago
    Do you have any sources to read/learn more about this phenomenon? Would be great to understand why
    - lenderton 2y ago
      https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-social-media-fact-sheet/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-so... https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/ https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/ Average age is 16 on Discord, average time spent per day is less than 10 minutes, so it's being used as a messaging service (but connected to a greater gaming-type ecosystem). 90% of servers are less than 15 members. 30% of teens use it, which is significantly higher than the rest of the population. I don't really have anything concrete to point to for my general feeling about American society slowly moving into a post-social media phase. Tiktok falling into relative unuse with most Americans except Hispanics is probably a main point of data. There hasn't been anything emerging to replace it besides (according to studies) the more cordial YouTube, which you cannot really say is a social media site. It is the most widely used of all of them, though, something like 94% penetration.
dcx 2y ago
If the claim that the blogosphere is dying is true, does that imply the public intellectual commons is dying too? I suspect that while the cosyweb is more pleasant for most, this retreat might hinder vital testing and cross-pollination of ideas, and make it much harder for people to polarize into being intellectually active. For example, I've never been an active participant on ribbonfarm, but Rao's writing has made me a little smarter and inclined towards certain vectors of thought. And you can see ripples of his work in later writing by others. What a shame it would be for this culture to be lost; while there's a lot of dross in the blogosphere, I don't know if the brightest jewels will still be possible in a future system of local, private, transient clusters of thought.
- fallingknife 2y ago
  I would say it's dead. Killed by a change in cultural attitude to one that sees an opposing idea as a declaration of war. Retreat into private walled gardens seems like the only option.
lukasb 2y ago
I'm reading more blogs than ever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- lenderton 2y ago
  But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform, which will be set up like a social media site with curated content, otherwise you'll have to spend a lot of time finding them. Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get. And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end. In the past you could type into Google "new mothers discussion board" and immediately find organic, non-corporate socialization geared towards Americans. That ease of use is sort of erroneously gone, and probably not returning. Might I ask...which blogs are you reading?
  - lukasb 2y ago
    Crooked Timber, Daring Fireball, kottke.org, Econbrowser, DSHR's Blog, Jayarava's Raves, Pushing Ahead of the Dame, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Michael Tsai, Scripting News, Simon Willison's Weblog ... about 150 feeds in total I think (some of them inactive now but overall more than I can read.) I think most feed readers support OPML now, more people should put together blog starter packs (like Bluesky's starter packs, which are super useful.)
  - kelnos 2y ago
    > But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform No they don't. I avoid Medium and Substack like the plague. I don't use those sites for discovery at all, and whenever I come across a link to a blog on either of them, I usually regret clicking it. I end up on plenty of blogs found through various sources. A few I've been reading diligently or on-and-off for many years, others I read one-off articles here and there that I've found through sites like HN. The blogosphere's death is highly exaggerated, regardless of what TFA says. > Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get I don't see that as a bad thing. > And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end I don't think it will. I think there will always be enough people writing interesting long-form articles to satisfy my curiosity. Mind you, I don't exclusively read blogs, but I haven't touched social media in 5 or 6 years and that hasn't caused me to run out of interesting things to read.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I'd never heard of this blog before, but it looks like a really interesting, eclectic one, and the Web may be a bit darker, for its absence. That said... > anymore than there was a single heir to the Roman empire I'm not exactly sure I'd classify this blog at the same level of influence as the Original Italian Mafioso.
- kwerk 2y ago
  He’s talking about blogs in general
tolerance 2y ago
What I see most from people who appear very attached to the Web of 15-20 years ago is a constant iteration of values, branding (cozy, small, open), discussions over protocols and platforms, and not much writing or self expression. People don’t seem interested in “blogging” as much as they seem interested in building communities, or rather, full-fledged sovereign states.
epolanski 2y ago
I really don't get how and why are blogs dying.
- xterminator 2y ago
  Because people don't go surfing on the web anymore, they stay in the same facebook-twitter-instagram-netflix-amazon-reddit loop forever.
  - satisfice 2y ago
    That's not death. That's non-virality. For extroverts and fame-seekers, I guess that feels like death. But it's not.
    - tsunamifury 2y ago
      False, while you try to make this a moral point, the reality is where the audiences go the content goes. Sorry that’s just life. Source: worked on this research at Google for decades. We accelerated the issue unfortunately.
      - kelnos 2y ago
        There's still plenty of audience for blog posts. The blogosphere (god I hate that term) hasn't grown at the pace of social media, certainly, but that doesn't matter. And in some ways I'd probably consider that a good thing for the medium.
      - epolanski 2y ago
        That again only implies less popularity, if anything, not death.
        tsunamifury 2y ago
        I’m sorry to belabor this but you probably don’t know how growth and death cycles work. Every day people churn in and out. As more churn out for audiences less new ones come in. Therefore it dies.
satisfice 2y ago
It's so strange when people say that such-and-such-internet-thing is dead. For the most part, I see no truth in that. There's SOME truth in SOME of it. Private mail servers are getting harder to use, because other servers don't trust them. But blogs will work. The technology is as good as ever, and people can go read stuff on blogs. Maybe masses of people are choosing to do that less. That's not what being dead is. That's being less popular. I mostly post on LinkedIn instead of my blog, because I like the shorter writing form.
tsunamifury 2y ago
Adam Curtis’s All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace and Rivbonfarms The Gervis Priciple were foundations of my professional career growth.
- nopassrecover 2y ago
  This might seem a little odd, but I’m trying to “find my tribe” of interesting thinkers to bounce around ideas with and your comments on this thread suggest you’d have some great/thoughtful/interesting takes. If you’re open it would be great to connect (email in my HN bio).
  - tsunamifury 2y ago
    This is a hard journey and really one you need to go on finding people you work with. It will drive you to work with more interesting people and do harder things. What is it that you think you are missing?
- io84 2y ago
  I find the Gervais Principle very illuminating but would love to hear how you turned it into career growth. Did it motivate you to indulge in Machiavellian scheming and join the ranks of the Sociopaths? Or let you make peace with a fate among the Clueless?
  - tsunamifury 2y ago
    It mostly taught me to discern when to speak game talk, baby talk or PowerTalk. This is the primary way to be promoted and seen as “part of the next level” in larger organizations.
nopassrecover 2y ago
I consider Venkatesh to be amongst the brightest and insightful thinkers of our times (The Gervais Principle being a particularly brilliant eye opener that I share with everyone who could be interested and ready to benefit from it). I hadn’t quite appreciated how long he’s been blogging for, nor that we was nearing 50 (the latter point gives me some inspiration in my mid-30s that there’s still time to contribute). In terms of the article, and this doesn’t injure his main point, but I feel he has been overgenerous about how long the blogosphere has lasted (though there are of course still exceptions eg for me recently Ludic’s blog https://ludic.mataroa.blog/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/, some old gems like Rands in Repose ticking away, and more focused series like Patrick McKenzie’s Bits about Money). To my mind it was well and truly done (in the way that it once existed) before Covid, with the absence of a resurgence during a period with so many locked down and online proving its end. By that point there had already been the rise of walled gardens, the fall of Google Search, the rise of social media and influencers (and since the subsequent fall post-Covid), clickbait, smartphones as the primary browsing device, constantly online culture, attention exhaustion, (low quality) content saturation, etc. If the blog had survived all this LLMs adding fuel to the attention harvesting noise would almost certainly have sealed the deal. On the whole “online” feels like it’s falling apart. The leading apps and sites are buggy and broken with little innovation in years despite obvious low-lying fruit yet still dominantly crowding out (or buying out and shutting down) challengers, websites are a mess of instinctual clicking past popups like your relative’s malware-infected WinXP desktop you had to fix up at Christmas, almost everyone seems to be an influencer cynically pumping out low quality noise that the algorithms seem almost determined to elevate over unloved crafted quality content (and we still don’t seem to be reaping benefits of AI to sort through this), US politics contextlessly infects nearly every platform and channel globally (thankfully usually not here except when relevant), the subscription sites have bait and switched after hooking us all in and continue to turn the screws, the “gig economy” and “disruptors” have done the same continuing to damage broader society with their externalities while skirting the purpose of established laws and norms and now raising prices to higher than what they displaced, our democracy is challenged by the inability to know truth accelerated by the overwhelm of targeted noise (and old media has just as much guilt in monetising then selling out the fourth estate while governments are now racing towards totalitarianism in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle), attention span and ability to think as humans is being fundamentally reshaped in ways that most consider damaging, digital has accelerated (or at least coincided with) the society-consuming and society-destroying elements of capitalism over the last 50 years as it “cleverly” works out how to turn anything and everything (quality, brand value, trust, institutions, connections, spare time, relationships, attention etc.) into $ and destroy them in the process, and it all seems to have turned into walking through a crowded alleyway of people shouting and fighting and exploiting and vying for your attention and and and and. The fall of Rome analogy feels figuratively rather apt, because it certainly has a sense of that, and maybe this cozyweb is a nice hideaway answer from all this (I haven’t quite found my online cozy place yet). For those who haven’t seen it and find any of this resonates (especially as a Millenial), Bo Burnham’s Inside brilliantly talks to this all, and he’s the first I’ve come across to really do so. Is anyone else talking about this in a way that’s helpful, or at least helpfully relays the problem that’s emerged upon us?
noam_compsci 2y ago
Low wit: writers must have got busy Mid wit: this is a poignant soliloquy in the state of the open web High wit: writers must have got busy
- Kye 2y ago
  It's like that ancient meme where a programmer starts at Hello World, ascends through corporate complexity, then comes back to Hello World.
belzebalex 2y ago
This is quite sad, I've been very inspired by the writings of Artem Litvinovich [1] (although he stopped publishing 8 years ago). I inspired a lot of my research on what he did. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/author/artem/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/author/artem/
krick 2y ago
I always thought Venkatesh is often guilty of shaping the reality to fit the narrative of the current post, which often is quite random and possibly even contradicts all his other posts. This is also the case here. Unfortunately, I do share the suspicion that a lot of good things I am very much used to were sponsored by ZIRP and soon it will crash really, really hard. This thought makes me anxious, I really don't like it, but I do agree that the culture of open source, and free web, and all these things was a fleeting phenomenon. Some of it is already dead, some will die soon. But I don't believe it applies to blogging. I mean, fine, guy wants to retire. And it "coincides" with his 50th birthday (that's a magical coincidence for sure!) Just admit it's just about you, you are tired of doing what you did for 17 years. It's ok. But you weren't the only blogger, and everyone else isn't retiring together with you. Heck, I bet there is some new blogger writing his first post right now. I don't know if I'll like his posts as much as I liked some of yours, but I'm pretty sure life goes on without you, whether you like it or not (yeah, I know, I also don't really like the idea that life will go on without me!) Blogging is just one of the formats of how people express themselves, and while today there are many alternative formats that weren't really an option, say, 20 years ago, you cannot replace all of blogposts with a YouTube video or a TikTok. You can replace some, sure. Which isn't a bad thing either, it just means there now is a media that suits that type of content better. Also, that warning about your substack not being a blog... But it is. A different kind of blog, maybe, but let's not pretend words mean anything more than they do. Even a telegram channel with lengthy posts is pretty much a blog. And, BTW, I don't know if Scott Alexander is supposed to be an "old media refugee" who's posts Venkatesh doesn't read, but his content is pretty much the same as on SCX. FWIW.
ksec 2y ago
>Sometime in the next few months, I’ll figure out how to move it to a lower-cost archival hosting model, probably as a static non-WordPress site, That is the part I am most interested with. I wish there is a one off payment services, for let say fixed price for 20 years where you blog and domains remains on the internet.
gcanyon 2y ago
Well that was an interesting chain of events: I read the first several paragraphs. Since they seem wordy and light on actual meaning, and the post is long, as I often do, I grabbed all the text and headed to ChatGPT/Claude -- in this instance ChatGPT. "Summarize this in no more than twenty bullet points." ChatGPT spits out exactly twenty bullet points, including pointless gems like: - He believes public social media, particularly blogs, played a more vibrant role than traditional media during their heyday - Rao humorously attributes the blog’s success to the low-interest-rate era, with its cheap hosting and free distribution. So I switch to Claude and prompt: "Summarize this into no more than 20 bullet points. Skip unimportant housekeeping bits." Claude also feels the need to produce exactly 20 bullet points, including exactly the housekeeping bits I pointed it away from like: - Some content threads (lab tinkering, fiction) will find homes in other media or formats. - Rao plans to compile book-length volumes from the blog archives. Now I'm going on too long, so I'll just say it took several more prompts, with examples, to get them to coalesce to: ChatGPT: 1. Venkatesh Rao is retiring his blog *Ribbonfarm* on November 13, 2024, after 17 years. 2. He views this as the end of the blogosphere era, which played a major role in shaping the internet during the Web 2.0 phase (2000-2020). 3. The decline of blogs is linked to rising interest rates and the shift toward paid distribution models, which replaced the free, open web environment that allowed blogs to thrive. 4. Rao coined the term "cozyweb" to describe the more intimate, private online spaces (like Discord and Substack) that are replacing the public nature of blogs and social media. 5. *Ribbonfarm*'s closure symbolizes the broader cultural shift from the chaotic, public blogosphere to this new era of niche, cozy communities. Claude: • After 17 years, Venkatesh Rao is retiring his blog, Ribbonfarm, on November 13, 2024 (his 50th birthday). • Ribbonfarm's lifespan (2007-2024) coincides with the rise and fall of the blogosphere, Web 2.0, and public social media - a significant chapter in internet and civilizational history partly enabled by low interest rates and cheap venture capital. • Rao sees the "cozyweb" (a term he coined in 2019) as the successor to public social media, favoring more intimate, subscription-based platforms like Substack. • In recent years, Rao shifted to writing "blogchains" and avoiding viral content, reflecting broader changes in online writing styles. • Post-retirement, Rao plans to compile book-length volumes from the blog archives but is uncertain where to share his "random impulses" that found a home on Ribbonfarm.
GavinGruesome 2y ago
"our incredible journey"
jes5199 2y ago
I have to admit, the idea of a “viral hit blog post” sounds absolutely quaint now but honestly was that ever a good thing?
unsungNovelty 2y ago
Very curious. I started my personal website with the rise of Hugo (which I like to call as "the new age of SSGs"). 5 years ago. Time does fly. As I look more and more into the old days of anything, It's like, things survive long enough to get popular... Then it goes back to where and how it was. It doesn't necessarily die. I am curious if we had the expectation that if hosting and other tech became accessible, more people must've been blogging or maintaining personal websites. That is not how it works right? Pepole maintaining websites on their on were a niche in that time of the internet. And it is still a niche in this time of the internet. Fountain pens for example was the only way to write at one point. And once ball point pens came along which is more managed, common folks went behind it. Fountain pens didn't die. It has became more luxurious or a premium item once again. It's still thriving and there is a whole new world of fountain pens if you start digging about it. Heck, new brands have emerged. I can see the same parallels for bikes (MTB or Road Bikes etc) as well. More people will discover blogging and the blogosphere. And some of them will go away. Some of them stays. Some lives and some dies. Just like humans, websites will live and die. It is obviously sad when I see someone stop blogging or stop maintaining their personal website. Since I still consider myself young to the blogosphere, It's like reading up on celebrities you don't know about after their death. But it's way of life. Life of a blog.

178 points by Arubis 2y ago

blfr 2y ago

It seems to me that the blogosphere was not a ZIRP but rather a young Internet phenomenon. Which could exists, like usenet before it, when mere access to it was a filtering mechanism. Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb. Either way, I enjoyed it while it lasted. Thanks for the Office series! https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

bartread 2y ago
> Once you have seven billion people with virtually no access control, you can't have a public blogosphere, and groups retreat to the cozyweb. Why can’t you? There’s a logical leap in this statement I don’t follow.
- rogers12 2y ago
  Those seven billion people aren't very good for the most part, and include a critical mass of spectacularly awful people. It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. The Eternal September effect has been getting stronger ever since it's first been observed.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    Yeah. That's why Twitter is useful as a kind of flypaper or quarantine. Let the passive stay and let the deliberate find new spaces that can be good the way Twitter once was. If Twitter was to go away, places like Bluesky would unavoidably get worse.
    - lenderton 2y ago
      My experience with Bluesky has been similar to my experience with other "disruptive" platforms like Cara (the anti-AI art portfolio app/site). When a "new" (usually overall non-corporate) internet space opens up that, in theory, caters to a broader audience, the most immediate colonizers are the type of people that have some sort of "underground" bent to them - subcultural things like furries, erotic artists, etc. Opening up Cara produces an avalanche of large-breasted foxpeople, and the last time I opened Bluesky I was met with a photo of what appeared to be a boy in his underwear. Mastodon has its dubious reputation also for child pornography. I'm just saying, the mainstream internet is moderated for a reason. Being mainstream, there's money behind it, and with money comes power - this results in moderation that is usually politically motivated, and so in recent years there has been an exodus of the masses to low-moderation platforms like Tiktok, or things like Kick for younger users. When a platform or site is staffed small, such that it cannot afford to moderate, it will be suffocated by the "undesirable" groups I mentioned, earlier, as though they were some sort of choking algae. There are so many of these people "empowered" these days that, from what I have seen, it is really hard to start new social media sites without corporate resources. Twitter is already plagued with OnlyFans bots due to being smaller now, and streaming platforms are forced to aggressively build themselves to be resilient against similar sexual content creators, who are the first people that show up. Most times these creators will be working for an organization. In the end...could Twitter have existed in a non-sh*tty form in the first place? It was rapidly approaching bankruptcy when Musk was (in the end) forced to purchase it (lol). If not him, someone else would have acquired it, probably a corporation, and monetized the content to keep it afloat. I think in the end, the landscape is going to look more like Tiktok (computerized moderation) for anything beyond Meta. Smaller social media platforms will be seedy and not widely populated. Forums will continue to be used by countries with their own internet ecosystems, like Korea or Nigeria or Finland, but not really exist in global lingua franca English beyond a handful of major ones like SomethingAwful.
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Bingo, the problem is that with a world population of 8 billion, there are easily 8 million people who genuinely do want to see vast amounts of furry porn the moment they open up an app. Filtering out even a tenth of them, say 800 000, just takes too much effort for a startup, so there’s no viable pathway without being incredibly popular and scaling incredibly quickly to just drown out all the unpalatable users. i.e. Tiktok
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    >It turns out that public access forums calibrated for the small and self-selected community of mostly high quality internet pioneers aren't prepared to deal with 1000000x expansion of reachable audience. "Checklist for new theories purporting to prove that the social web is presently unworkable:" ... 26. The predicted conflicts still wouldn't be as bad as Usenet flamewars. 27. Your theory proves that Hackernews does not exist. <--- 28. Audiences afraid of engaging with an unfamiliar interfaces weren't making websites in 1998 either. ...
    - Nihilartikel 2y ago
      Weeellll. Not every forum has a dang. Just saying.
      - immibis 2y ago
        Almost every one does.
        kelnos 2y ago
        Most are nowhere near as thoughtful and effective as he is, though.
    - rogers12 2y ago
      This forum has been decreasing in quality since its inception, currently hovering at not-quite-reddit and that's with an organic audience of tech-adjacent posters. It would turn into a smoking hole in the ground if it somehow caught worldwide attention. You're a fish swimming in fragile water you fail to appreciate.
      - ddulaney 2y ago
        As the guidelines [0] state: > Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. See the link for some examples, but I can also recommend looking at some old front pages from over the years and poking through the discussions. Unscientifically, it seems that quality is pretty similar to me. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - bhouston 2y ago
    I think that AI generated personas who push an ideological direction on anonymous forums are more of a threat that just stupid people. Eg: https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-internet-users/ https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-int...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - rtpg 2y ago
    There's a gap between public fora and the blogosphere though. Generally speaking there are plenty of blogs that get linked in places like here. Blogs just don't have comment sections hosted on their own as much anymore. Having discussions happen in separate places is also interesting, because the HN convo and some subreddit convo will be different, for example. There's a lot more mainstraeam stuff but I think niche communities still exist. Glibly, we're not a part of most of them on account of having gotten older. Or we are a part of some, but there's plenty we're not seeing.
  - throwaway14356 2y ago
    I had a hilarious time deleting comments from people who don't believe the topic is real. Specifically hard to believe stuff made the experience funny. People got really mad in private messages. As if it is a god given right to complain about others talking about something so elaborately that the conversation dies. All scaling issues solved. If you want to talk about the garden gnome liberation front you must believe they need to be rescued.
  - enugu 2y ago
    It's not just that the social media is filled with low on substance posts with excess anger and snark, but this incentivizes everyone to be more forceful - as otherwise the louder voices can dominate the discussion. So, it's not just a quality of people issue but also an emergent dynamic which encourages tribalism instead of substantive posts. The same people can make reasonable posts in other contexts This need not be a unsolvable problem, and that one has to retreat places like HN relying on a single moderator(good, but doesn't scale). One can also rely on timelines/feeds being based on Distributed moderation - A user selects moderators or custom-algorithms who they find valuable. The moderation can be along different dimensions like accuracy, interest, or aligned with some political view. There could a moderator whose style is to purely check the soundness of the reasoning without taking any position on the issue itself. This can lead to improved standards of discussion. A key issue is how to reduce the energy required to moderate - typically a moderator evaluates the quality and rely on networks of other moderators each handling smaller domains. Current discourse encourages users to sort into strongly polarized groups, whereas more nuanced feeds in social media can lead to coalitions which don't neatly align with the standard fault lines. Platforms like Polis actively encourage common points of agreement across different groups.
  - bartread 2y ago
    Yeah, but this sounds more like social media than the blogosphere. Blogs were always effort to set up and maintain, even if you were just going with one of the hosted platforms rather than self-hosting. And comment spam was certainly an issue but, firstly, systems for dealing with that became pretty good. And then, outside of major news sites - I'm thinking particularly here of BBC's HYS, but the same applies to other news sites - and other sites with very broad interest bases, you didn't tend to get loads of nasty or toxic comments on blogs. Plus, the moderation tools were - as previously mentioned - pretty decent. A lot of the bigger news websites did close comments, but I'm not so aware of this being an issue with blogs which were often more focussed around a particular community or interest anyway... just publicly available. I don't think the quantity of people online in itself had anything to do with the "death" of the blogosphere. It's just that most of those people don't read or write blogs. And it's become harder to find blogs and other long tail content because search results are now so heavily skewed towards paid results and commercial entities who invest huge amounts in SEO. FWIW I also think you're probably going a bit far with the moral pronouncements on those 7 billion people: neither you nor I have any real idea what the vast majority of them are actually like as human beings. Moreover, I'd suggest that writing off most people as "[not] very good" or branding a critical mass of them as "spectacularly awful" - and especially when you're speaking from a position of ignorance - is exactly the kind of rhetoric that's landed us with this grim tribal culture that permeates large areas of online - and offline - life.
- 45y564hn54 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Arubis 2y ago
    There may be examples of this, but picking on Venkat Rao for not being sufficiently prolific is a laughable argument.
  - xterminator 2y ago
    Are bloggers required to meet a quota?
- njtransit 2y ago
  There is a NYT op ed titled “The Tyranny of Convenience” that covers the phenomena well.
  - shagie 2y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-convenience.html?ogrp=dpl&unlocked_article_code=1.Tk4.xxe7.SY7CnEuabz8R&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-co...
tuatoru 2y ago
Substack is doing OK, I think. It's the intellectual child of the blogosphere.
- immibis 2y ago
  Substack (together with Medium) appears to be the blogosphere. As usual, venture capitalists managed to take over an open protocol and turn it into a singular product.
  - mattgreenrocks 2y ago
    Surprised you lumped Medium in with Substack. I always associate Medium with C-tier tech tutorials at best these days.
    - lenderton 2y ago
      I've read some A-tier libertarian noir novellas on there.
      - kelnos 2y ago
        > A-tier libertarian It's been a while since I've seen an oxymoron as perfect as this one.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - immibis 2y ago
      They are both neoblog platforms.
- philwelch 2y ago
  Substack—and the surviving blogs that aren’t on Substack—are still going strong, and I don’t think they’re going to go away. Maybe Substack as a platform might decline the way Medium has. But the “Eternal September” types are usually either functionally illiterate or don’t like long form reading, and social media is increasingly optimized for those people. If you actually take the effort to write down your thoughts in text, you end up filtering for people intelligent and diligent enough to choose the written word even when video and photo content is readily available.
lacy_tinpot 2y ago
Don't think it's really systematic. I think this is just a generational cycle. Plenty of content coming from newer people on other platforms through other mediums.
p3rls 2y ago
Eh, even in his niche we have people like Gwern pioneering in the aesthetic web movement. I'm not sure I buy the web is dying so much as the cultural conversation revolves around the larger platforms ($$) along with in general web discoverability getting worse.
seltzered_ 2y ago
For those missing context: > "This blog was sponsored by ZIRP. The future historians who dive into these archives for archaeological research will likely be economic rather than cultural historians, trying to reconstruct the play-by-play impact of ZIRP. Many of the big hits of this blog, such as The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial, and The Locust Economy (a forgotten hit from 2013) had ZIRPy subtexts." I think the author might he referring to their own blog (ribbonfarm) as a ZIRP phenomenon, not the whole blogosphere.
spaceman_2020 2y ago
The public blogosphere died because of Google, simple as. Once search stopped prioritizing blogs over bloated, SEO-optimized slop, traffic to blogs died and discoverability was limited to you spamming your posts everywhere.
- throwaway14356 2y ago
  You forgot technorati! They lost the plausible deniability there.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Back when the rat was in effect, the rat would always index the splogs I made but I could never get it to index my non-spam blogs.
    - throwaway14356 2y ago
      yes, i almost forgot that part. I created splogs to promote businesses. I duplicated the comment spam from other splogs then the spammers could easily find the splog and "update" the page many times per day. My normal blogs only got traffic from comments made on other blogs. Yahoo indexed them entirely, google picked up nothing. If I put adsense on it the crawler visited every day but only to find context for the ads.
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        I think the secret to getting you blog indexed in Google back then was FeedBurner. At some point after the acquisition Google merged FeedBurner’s crawler into you own with the consequence that if you “burned” a feed and had one email subscriber Google was forced to index anything in your RSS feed almost immediately. Somehow Google found WordPress blogs highly attractive, probably because of heuristics that they put in…. Cause web crawling and web search are all about heuristics. On some level tracking changes to a WordPress is a hot mess because it has numerous reverse chronologically sorted pages that all update when you add a blog post which makes more work for the crawler but also makes the site look more dynamic than it really is. The usual reason I hear “blogging is dead” is that Google isn’t sending traffic, it could be Google doesn’t have heuristics to support modern blogging platforms (say Hugo) that it did. Maybe Jamstack = Invisibility.
philshem 2y ago
> ZIRP stands for “Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon,” … https://www.ycombinator.com/library/LC-what-is-zirp-and-how-did-it-poison-startups https://www.ycombinator.com/library/LC-what-is-zirp-and-how-...

cheschire 2y ago

Having access to wikipedia on a phone everywhere you go is what killed the bar conversation. No longer did you have to compare notes and argue over beers to remember trivia. And in that same way, no longer do people have to ramble on into the aether in blog form to work through some shit. Now they can do that with ChatGPT and actually get responses to their thoughts in real time. And most of the time it's agreeable in tone. Tech continues to change the world. Maybe that isn't what is contributing to this particular blog dying, but I bet it's contributing to the larger community of blogs dying, which has probably created some inertia.

lenderton 2y ago
From what I can tell, highschooler and younger, there's almost a complete abandonment of mainstream social media in favor of self-curated chats like Discord, and it revolves heavily around gaming. A sort of hearkening to the AIM days, which is naturally what you'd expect from individuals who socialize in friendgroups that are developed beyond "work drinking buddies", lol. But in general, without being too doom-and-gloom about it, and perhaps this is because of the election going on, it does feel like there is a greater trend going on of internet users stepping away from social media. There's no easy way to divert this weariness back to specialized forums a la the 00's or 90's, though, which is probably where everything should be for the internet to remain useful. This is exacerbated by the fact that 85% or so of internet traffic is phones, resulting in discussions being comprised of back-and-forth thumbtap-quality posts that nobody (including the senders) really seems to care about. It's also exacerbated by the fact that search engines cannot seem to index traditional message boards or wordpresses etc. properly; there are too many of them nowadays to navigate (most being identical templates like vbulletin).
- mannymanman 2y ago
  Do you have any sources to read/learn more about this phenomenon? Would be great to understand why
  - lenderton 2y ago
    https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-social-media-fact-sheet/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-so... https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/ https://influencermarketinghub.com/discord-stats/ Average age is 16 on Discord, average time spent per day is less than 10 minutes, so it's being used as a messaging service (but connected to a greater gaming-type ecosystem). 90% of servers are less than 15 members. 30% of teens use it, which is significantly higher than the rest of the population. I don't really have anything concrete to point to for my general feeling about American society slowly moving into a post-social media phase. Tiktok falling into relative unuse with most Americans except Hispanics is probably a main point of data. There hasn't been anything emerging to replace it besides (according to studies) the more cordial YouTube, which you cannot really say is a social media site. It is the most widely used of all of them, though, something like 94% penetration.

dcx 2y ago

If the claim that the blogosphere is dying is true, does that imply the public intellectual commons is dying too? I suspect that while the cosyweb is more pleasant for most, this retreat might hinder vital testing and cross-pollination of ideas, and make it much harder for people to polarize into being intellectually active. For example, I've never been an active participant on ribbonfarm, but Rao's writing has made me a little smarter and inclined towards certain vectors of thought. And you can see ripples of his work in later writing by others. What a shame it would be for this culture to be lost; while there's a lot of dross in the blogosphere, I don't know if the brightest jewels will still be possible in a future system of local, private, transient clusters of thought.

fallingknife 2y ago
I would say it's dead. Killed by a change in cultural attitude to one that sees an opposing idea as a declaration of war. Retreat into private walled gardens seems like the only option.

lukasb 2y ago

I'm reading more blogs than ever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

lenderton 2y ago
But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform, which will be set up like a social media site with curated content, otherwise you'll have to spend a lot of time finding them. Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get. And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end. In the past you could type into Google "new mothers discussion board" and immediately find organic, non-corporate socialization geared towards Americans. That ease of use is sort of erroneously gone, and probably not returning. Might I ask...which blogs are you reading?
- lukasb 2y ago
  Crooked Timber, Daring Fireball, kottke.org, Econbrowser, DSHR's Blog, Jayarava's Raves, Pushing Ahead of the Dame, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Michael Tsai, Scripting News, Simon Willison's Weblog ... about 150 feeds in total I think (some of them inactive now but overall more than I can read.) I think most feed readers support OPML now, more people should put together blog starter packs (like Bluesky's starter packs, which are super useful.)
- kelnos 2y ago
  > But the problem is that they have to be hosted on the same platform No they don't. I avoid Medium and Substack like the plague. I don't use those sites for discovery at all, and whenever I come across a link to a blog on either of them, I usually regret clicking it. I end up on plenty of blogs found through various sources. A few I've been reading diligently or on-and-off for many years, others I read one-off articles here and there that I've found through sites like HN. The blogosphere's death is highly exaggerated, regardless of what TFA says. > Maybe you get self-hosted things via github or whatnot, but that's about as non-consumerist as it'll get I don't see that as a bad thing. > And the younger generation is not doing this beyond work-related pages, so eventually the internet-as-literature phase will end I don't think it will. I think there will always be enough people writing interesting long-form articles to satisfy my curiosity. Mind you, I don't exclusively read blogs, but I haven't touched social media in 5 or 6 years and that hasn't caused me to run out of interesting things to read.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

I'd never heard of this blog before, but it looks like a really interesting, eclectic one, and the Web may be a bit darker, for its absence. That said... > anymore than there was a single heir to the Roman empire I'm not exactly sure I'd classify this blog at the same level of influence as the Original Italian Mafioso.

kwerk 2y ago
He’s talking about blogs in general

tolerance 2y ago

What I see most from people who appear very attached to the Web of 15-20 years ago is a constant iteration of values, branding (cozy, small, open), discussions over protocols and platforms, and not much writing or self expression. People don’t seem interested in “blogging” as much as they seem interested in building communities, or rather, full-fledged sovereign states.

epolanski 2y ago

I really don't get how and why are blogs dying.

xterminator 2y ago
Because people don't go surfing on the web anymore, they stay in the same facebook-twitter-instagram-netflix-amazon-reddit loop forever.
- satisfice 2y ago
  That's not death. That's non-virality. For extroverts and fame-seekers, I guess that feels like death. But it's not.
  - tsunamifury 2y ago
    False, while you try to make this a moral point, the reality is where the audiences go the content goes. Sorry that’s just life. Source: worked on this research at Google for decades. We accelerated the issue unfortunately.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      There's still plenty of audience for blog posts. The blogosphere (god I hate that term) hasn't grown at the pace of social media, certainly, but that doesn't matter. And in some ways I'd probably consider that a good thing for the medium.
    - epolanski 2y ago
      That again only implies less popularity, if anything, not death.
      - tsunamifury 2y ago
        I’m sorry to belabor this but you probably don’t know how growth and death cycles work. Every day people churn in and out. As more churn out for audiences less new ones come in. Therefore it dies.

satisfice 2y ago

It's so strange when people say that such-and-such-internet-thing is dead. For the most part, I see no truth in that. There's SOME truth in SOME of it. Private mail servers are getting harder to use, because other servers don't trust them. But blogs will work. The technology is as good as ever, and people can go read stuff on blogs. Maybe masses of people are choosing to do that less. That's not what being dead is. That's being less popular. I mostly post on LinkedIn instead of my blog, because I like the shorter writing form.

tsunamifury 2y ago

Adam Curtis’s All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace and Rivbonfarms The Gervis Priciple were foundations of my professional career growth.

nopassrecover 2y ago
This might seem a little odd, but I’m trying to “find my tribe” of interesting thinkers to bounce around ideas with and your comments on this thread suggest you’d have some great/thoughtful/interesting takes. If you’re open it would be great to connect (email in my HN bio).
- tsunamifury 2y ago
  This is a hard journey and really one you need to go on finding people you work with. It will drive you to work with more interesting people and do harder things. What is it that you think you are missing?
io84 2y ago
I find the Gervais Principle very illuminating but would love to hear how you turned it into career growth. Did it motivate you to indulge in Machiavellian scheming and join the ranks of the Sociopaths? Or let you make peace with a fate among the Clueless?
- tsunamifury 2y ago
  It mostly taught me to discern when to speak game talk, baby talk or PowerTalk. This is the primary way to be promoted and seen as “part of the next level” in larger organizations.

nopassrecover 2y ago

I consider Venkatesh to be amongst the brightest and insightful thinkers of our times (The Gervais Principle being a particularly brilliant eye opener that I share with everyone who could be interested and ready to benefit from it). I hadn’t quite appreciated how long he’s been blogging for, nor that we was nearing 50 (the latter point gives me some inspiration in my mid-30s that there’s still time to contribute). In terms of the article, and this doesn’t injure his main point, but I feel he has been overgenerous about how long the blogosphere has lasted (though there are of course still exceptions eg for me recently Ludic’s blog https://ludic.mataroa.blog/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/, some old gems like Rands in Repose ticking away, and more focused series like Patrick McKenzie’s Bits about Money). To my mind it was well and truly done (in the way that it once existed) before Covid, with the absence of a resurgence during a period with so many locked down and online proving its end. By that point there had already been the rise of walled gardens, the fall of Google Search, the rise of social media and influencers (and since the subsequent fall post-Covid), clickbait, smartphones as the primary browsing device, constantly online culture, attention exhaustion, (low quality) content saturation, etc. If the blog had survived all this LLMs adding fuel to the attention harvesting noise would almost certainly have sealed the deal. On the whole “online” feels like it’s falling apart. The leading apps and sites are buggy and broken with little innovation in years despite obvious low-lying fruit yet still dominantly crowding out (or buying out and shutting down) challengers, websites are a mess of instinctual clicking past popups like your relative’s malware-infected WinXP desktop you had to fix up at Christmas, almost everyone seems to be an influencer cynically pumping out low quality noise that the algorithms seem almost determined to elevate over unloved crafted quality content (and we still don’t seem to be reaping benefits of AI to sort through this), US politics contextlessly infects nearly every platform and channel globally (thankfully usually not here except when relevant), the subscription sites have bait and switched after hooking us all in and continue to turn the screws, the “gig economy” and “disruptors” have done the same continuing to damage broader society with their externalities while skirting the purpose of established laws and norms and now raising prices to higher than what they displaced, our democracy is challenged by the inability to know truth accelerated by the overwhelm of targeted noise (and old media has just as much guilt in monetising then selling out the fourth estate while governments are now racing towards totalitarianism in an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle), attention span and ability to think as humans is being fundamentally reshaped in ways that most consider damaging, digital has accelerated (or at least coincided with) the society-consuming and society-destroying elements of capitalism over the last 50 years as it “cleverly” works out how to turn anything and everything (quality, brand value, trust, institutions, connections, spare time, relationships, attention etc.) into $ and destroy them in the process, and it all seems to have turned into walking through a crowded alleyway of people shouting and fighting and exploiting and vying for your attention and and and and. The fall of Rome analogy feels figuratively rather apt, because it certainly has a sense of that, and maybe this cozyweb is a nice hideaway answer from all this (I haven’t quite found my online cozy place yet). For those who haven’t seen it and find any of this resonates (especially as a Millenial), Bo Burnham’s Inside brilliantly talks to this all, and he’s the first I’ve come across to really do so. Is anyone else talking about this in a way that’s helpful, or at least helpfully relays the problem that’s emerged upon us?

noam_compsci 2y ago

Low wit: writers must have got busy Mid wit: this is a poignant soliloquy in the state of the open web High wit: writers must have got busy

Kye 2y ago
It's like that ancient meme where a programmer starts at Hello World, ascends through corporate complexity, then comes back to Hello World.

belzebalex 2y ago

This is quite sad, I've been very inspired by the writings of Artem Litvinovich [1] (although he stopped publishing 8 years ago). I inspired a lot of my research on what he did. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/author/artem/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/author/artem/

krick 2y ago

I always thought Venkatesh is often guilty of shaping the reality to fit the narrative of the current post, which often is quite random and possibly even contradicts all his other posts. This is also the case here. Unfortunately, I do share the suspicion that a lot of good things I am very much used to were sponsored by ZIRP and soon it will crash really, really hard. This thought makes me anxious, I really don't like it, but I do agree that the culture of open source, and free web, and all these things was a fleeting phenomenon. Some of it is already dead, some will die soon. But I don't believe it applies to blogging. I mean, fine, guy wants to retire. And it "coincides" with his 50th birthday (that's a magical coincidence for sure!) Just admit it's just about you, you are tired of doing what you did for 17 years. It's ok. But you weren't the only blogger, and everyone else isn't retiring together with you. Heck, I bet there is some new blogger writing his first post right now. I don't know if I'll like his posts as much as I liked some of yours, but I'm pretty sure life goes on without you, whether you like it or not (yeah, I know, I also don't really like the idea that life will go on without me!) Blogging is just one of the formats of how people express themselves, and while today there are many alternative formats that weren't really an option, say, 20 years ago, you cannot replace all of blogposts with a YouTube video or a TikTok. You can replace some, sure. Which isn't a bad thing either, it just means there now is a media that suits that type of content better. Also, that warning about your substack not being a blog... But it is. A different kind of blog, maybe, but let's not pretend words mean anything more than they do. Even a telegram channel with lengthy posts is pretty much a blog. And, BTW, I don't know if Scott Alexander is supposed to be an "old media refugee" who's posts Venkatesh doesn't read, but his content is pretty much the same as on SCX. FWIW.

ksec 2y ago

>Sometime in the next few months, I’ll figure out how to move it to a lower-cost archival hosting model, probably as a static non-WordPress site, That is the part I am most interested with. I wish there is a one off payment services, for let say fixed price for 20 years where you blog and domains remains on the internet.

gcanyon 2y ago

Well that was an interesting chain of events: I read the first several paragraphs. Since they seem wordy and light on actual meaning, and the post is long, as I often do, I grabbed all the text and headed to ChatGPT/Claude -- in this instance ChatGPT. "Summarize this in no more than twenty bullet points." ChatGPT spits out exactly twenty bullet points, including pointless gems like: - He believes public social media, particularly blogs, played a more vibrant role than traditional media during their heyday - Rao humorously attributes the blog’s success to the low-interest-rate era, with its cheap hosting and free distribution. So I switch to Claude and prompt: "Summarize this into no more than 20 bullet points. Skip unimportant housekeeping bits." Claude also feels the need to produce exactly 20 bullet points, including exactly the housekeeping bits I pointed it away from like: - Some content threads (lab tinkering, fiction) will find homes in other media or formats. - Rao plans to compile book-length volumes from the blog archives. Now I'm going on too long, so I'll just say it took several more prompts, with examples, to get them to coalesce to: ChatGPT: 1. Venkatesh Rao is retiring his blog *Ribbonfarm* on November 13, 2024, after 17 years. 2. He views this as the end of the blogosphere era, which played a major role in shaping the internet during the Web 2.0 phase (2000-2020). 3. The decline of blogs is linked to rising interest rates and the shift toward paid distribution models, which replaced the free, open web environment that allowed blogs to thrive. 4. Rao coined the term "cozyweb" to describe the more intimate, private online spaces (like Discord and Substack) that are replacing the public nature of blogs and social media. 5. *Ribbonfarm*'s closure symbolizes the broader cultural shift from the chaotic, public blogosphere to this new era of niche, cozy communities. Claude: • After 17 years, Venkatesh Rao is retiring his blog, Ribbonfarm, on November 13, 2024 (his 50th birthday). • Ribbonfarm's lifespan (2007-2024) coincides with the rise and fall of the blogosphere, Web 2.0, and public social media - a significant chapter in internet and civilizational history partly enabled by low interest rates and cheap venture capital. • Rao sees the "cozyweb" (a term he coined in 2019) as the successor to public social media, favoring more intimate, subscription-based platforms like Substack. • In recent years, Rao shifted to writing "blogchains" and avoiding viral content, reflecting broader changes in online writing styles. • Post-retirement, Rao plans to compile book-length volumes from the blog archives but is uncertain where to share his "random impulses" that found a home on Ribbonfarm.

GavinGruesome 2y ago

"our incredible journey"

jes5199 2y ago

I have to admit, the idea of a “viral hit blog post” sounds absolutely quaint now but honestly was that ever a good thing?

unsungNovelty 2y ago

Very curious. I started my personal website with the rise of Hugo (which I like to call as "the new age of SSGs"). 5 years ago. Time does fly. As I look more and more into the old days of anything, It's like, things survive long enough to get popular... Then it goes back to where and how it was. It doesn't necessarily die. I am curious if we had the expectation that if hosting and other tech became accessible, more people must've been blogging or maintaining personal websites. That is not how it works right? Pepole maintaining websites on their on were a niche in that time of the internet. And it is still a niche in this time of the internet. Fountain pens for example was the only way to write at one point. And once ball point pens came along which is more managed, common folks went behind it. Fountain pens didn't die. It has became more luxurious or a premium item once again. It's still thriving and there is a whole new world of fountain pens if you start digging about it. Heck, new brands have emerged. I can see the same parallels for bikes (MTB or Road Bikes etc) as well. More people will discover blogging and the blogosphere. And some of them will go away. Some of them stays. Some lives and some dies. Just like humans, websites will live and die. It is obviously sad when I see someone stop blogging or stop maintaining their personal website. Since I still consider myself young to the blogosphere, It's like reading up on celebrities you don't know about after their death. But it's way of life. Life of a blog.