4 ms·

I had never heard of him prior to 2 weeks ago. He is exceptionally thoughtful. His reason for quitting blogging seemed reasonable, especially given the timefram

by pnathan 12y ago

I had never heard of him prior to 2 weeks ago. He is exceptionally thoughtful. His reason for quitting blogging seemed reasonable, especially given the timeframes involved. I don't think it says anything about blogging in general that one intelligent person is moving to a new position. On the other hand, I don't know that I'd call the blogosphere vibrant or even very interesting: Crappy mobile browers/keyboards, link aggregators, Facebook, and Twitter basically shot the web as we knew it dead for the mainstream. My intuition is that this is a natural consequence response to decentralization when the tools to gather your information into one place are poor. You wind up with link aggregators, and then comments on them, and then the link aggregators become the content. Like what's going right now in this thread, instead of a blog link bouncing around between disparate interlinked blog posts.

karmacondon 12y ago
The original blogosphere concept may be fading, but I don't think that bloggers or readers are suffering because of it. In a sense individual bloggers are like AP reporters and aggregators are the new newspapers. Dozens of AP stories are filed every day and local newspapers pick and choose which ones to include in each edition. The major difference between the traditional newspaper model and link aggregators is that we can easily see all stories filed by an individual blogger, whether they get picked up by our "hometown" paper or not[0]. Sharing a link to a blog post on facebook will never replace quality journalism of course, but I think we've come full circle back to this model because it works. Most people don't have the time or inclination to follow a multitude of different blogs or maintain their own. They just want news and opinion selected for them, by trained editors or a community, and the ability to comment on those stories. An open exchange of long form ideas between a network of people who each run their own blog has an important place in internet culture, but it doesn't scale very well. It was a golden age, for a time, but the aggregation model as the potential to open those ideas up to a much broader range of people. [0] I'm actually not sure if the AP allows people to easily "follow" all stories filed by specific reporters, but it doesn't seem like it.
- sukilot 12y ago
  But most aren't reading the blogs,they ate skipping that and chattering in the aggregator comments section.
hayksaakian 12y ago
As a person who prefers this new style of aggregators let me explain: The main idea is consistency. There's a consistent interface and experience to hacker news, reddit, and even facebook. Not only that, there's a consistent community. HN is HN, reddit groups by subreddits, and Facebook is your personal social circle. When I click through to a new blog, I have no idea what to expect, and a few bad websites ruin my expectation of all the good ones. -- that applies to both the interface and the community. Both are foreign and unfamiliar.

by pnathan 12y ago

karmacondon 12y ago

The original blogosphere concept may be fading, but I don't think that bloggers or readers are suffering because of it. In a sense individual bloggers are like AP reporters and aggregators are the new newspapers. Dozens of AP stories are filed every day and local newspapers pick and choose which ones to include in each edition. The major difference between the traditional newspaper model and link aggregators is that we can easily see all stories filed by an individual blogger, whether they get picked up by our "hometown" paper or not[0]. Sharing a link to a blog post on facebook will never replace quality journalism of course, but I think we've come full circle back to this model because it works. Most people don't have the time or inclination to follow a multitude of different blogs or maintain their own. They just want news and opinion selected for them, by trained editors or a community, and the ability to comment on those stories. An open exchange of long form ideas between a network of people who each run their own blog has an important place in internet culture, but it doesn't scale very well. It was a golden age, for a time, but the aggregation model as the potential to open those ideas up to a much broader range of people. [0] I'm actually not sure if the AP allows people to easily "follow" all stories filed by specific reporters, but it doesn't seem like it.

sukilot 12y ago
But most aren't reading the blogs,they ate skipping that and chattering in the aggregator comments section.

hayksaakian 12y ago

As a person who prefers this new style of aggregators let me explain: The main idea is consistency. There's a consistent interface and experience to hacker news, reddit, and even facebook. Not only that, there's a consistent community. HN is HN, reddit groups by subreddits, and Facebook is your personal social circle. When I click through to a new blog, I have no idea what to expect, and a few bad websites ruin my expectation of all the good ones. -- that applies to both the interface and the community. Both are foreign and unfamiliar.