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'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

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41–50 of 172 posts

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#41
post #4

If you are an expert reading this considering writing a blog - whatever you do, please don't start publishing on a paywalled medium like Medium.

What alternatives do you recommend? I'm starting to write, and Medium seems like the best option to me because how else am I going to get readers?

Write a lot, have your blogging software auto post to Twitter, put the URL on your HN profile. Do this for ~2 years.

Also try to engage one or two people who for no apparent reason seem to enjoy your content and start writing for them.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#42
post #31

The article mentions the 15-20 tweet roll as being cumbersome, and it is. But a bigger issue is at work here - censorship. Twitter is being pulled in two opposite directions. It's a platform in which authoritative content is hosted. For example, the president conducts foreign policy through Twitter. And Twitter is also a platform where bots try to influence elections, people post images of dubious taste, and plain ol…

> Twitter has been leaning ever-harder into the role of curating authoritative content.

To be fair, both political ends of the spectrum in the US have been leaning very hard on Twitter, Facebook & Youtube to increase the active moderation of their platforms, algorithms and advertising services (not that those three are exactly the same content problem).

And those political ploys tend to scream "censorship" (or reference "concerning developments") when they don't like the moderation, and scream for regulation when they deem the moderation too absent.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#43
post #27

The infinite scroll addiction pipeline has segmented the online world largely into two parts: Drooling scroll zombies on twitter/facebook/reddit/etc, and people who don't partake at all. The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.

>The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, I don't really like this focus on the size of audiences that has come with social media. For experts or scientists who want to communicate with other scientists, it shouldn't matter how large the casual audience is but how they can effectively communicate with each other.

"Socrates probably didn't draw a crowd": that's how I've seen this described. Meaning, the amount of people who see your content matters much less than who sees it.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#45
post #17

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

WP is accessible to the masses who just want to publish. It's not the pretties, but most people once set up can get it to do what they want it to do and start playing around with stuff.

Generally speaking, the HN audience is not the typical audience we have at StartABlog.com, but WP "just works" well enough for most people.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#46
post #35
post #27

The infinite scroll addiction pipeline has segmented the online world largely into two parts: Drooling scroll zombies on twitter/facebook/reddit/etc, and people who don't partake at all. The audience of people who might read your blog but who aren't stuck on a scroll treadmill is too small to bother, especially with the death of many popular rss readers.

“Drooling scroll zombies” is a wildly and unnecessarily uncharitable description of people that visit websites and apps that you (apparently) don’t enjoy. Disparaging entire mediums makes little sense. There is both enlightening and mind-numbing content on social networks, blogs, television, and books. Are people that read many books drooling page-turning zombies? Is scrolling through blogs inherently superior to Twi…

> Disparaging entire mediums makes little sense

I think it makes a lot of sense when the medium is purpose designed and highly optimized to maximize additive shallow interaction.

Sorry, I've had too many meetings and dinners disrupted by too many different people who couldn't stay off the phone to keep pretending it isn't a problem. ... and had far too many informative long form works ignored by their target audience (members of which also just spent our last meeting glued to facebook scroll).

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#47
post #6

Blogs never left, as a technical matter. Go to Wordpress and get your dog-gone blog on.

Blogs died the day Google killed Google Reader.

OK, they're still out there, but they rely on Twitter and sites like Hacker News to drive traffic. The RSS-driven native blog ecosystem is nothing like what it was in the Reader days.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#48
Sadly many blogs are often content mill level boilerplate followed by 1-2 sentences of real content. I think people begin to associate blogging at unknown domains as suspicious, given the wide variability in actual content per word on the page.

A series of tweets won’t have this problem, people aren’t trying to game SEO. They’re gaming social media which has a different set of incentives for good/bad

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#49
post #31

The article mentions the 15-20 tweet roll as being cumbersome, and it is. But a bigger issue is at work here - censorship. Twitter is being pulled in two opposite directions. It's a platform in which authoritative content is hosted. For example, the president conducts foreign policy through Twitter. And Twitter is also a platform where bots try to influence elections, people post images of dubious taste, and plain ol…

It doesn't help that Dorsey is terrified of making the smallest changes to the platform. I guess he's too busy meditating with Himalayan salts or something. He works 80 hours a week at his companies (or did), but increasing the Tweet size took a decade.

Check out Hatching Twitter. It presents the entire foundation, with Dorsey and Ev Williams as well meaning but flawed leaders that were more than happy to stab each other in the back when it helped them. That Medium turned out as it did, and that Twitter has changed little in the last 15 years isn't surprising. They were accidents of history and they're now stuck trying to please their existing power users and Wall Street, regardless of if that's what we really need as societies.

It goes without saying, but our families and friends are literally dying because these platforms are so bad at handling disinformation. The question is if they are even capable and if not, why?

We're either going to see the net balkanize (as it has in some places) or lose the freedom and hope that it used to entail or both. It is an existential threat, which is why these guys should be criticized all day until they show some real responsibility.

Here's an article that was on HN by the same author that sounds similarly skeptical about Dorsey:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/in-the-coronavirus-e...

Several former board members and high-level executives at Twitter (who have since become apostates of Dorsey), for example, have pointed out to me how even his morning ritual is full of holes and is not too dissimilar to Holmes’s and Neumann’s rituals. As for the 45 total minutes Dorsey allegedly spends in his 220-degree sauna at night (which he breaks up into three separate stints), two World Sauna Championship competitors (yes, that’s a thing) collapsed after spending six minutes in a sauna only 10 degrees warmer than Dorsey’s (which is already hotter than boiling water). After being dragged out, the competitors were treated for severe burns, and one of the men died. Then there is Dorsey’s assertion that he is running both publicly traded companies while he works from home two days a week.

Re: 'Expert Twitter' Only Goes So Far – Bring Back Blogs

#50
post #17

I've been on this train for a long, long time. If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog. We actually created https://startablog.com to drive this point home, teach people how to do it and even have a team that will do it for you for free if you need the help (lots of people still find the WP install process intimidating).

When would one choose WP over a static site generator? I just want to publish. I don't want to host something that needs patching and sysadmin and all that.

Today's static site generators are simply not fit for mass consumption. Even Jekyll—among the most polished and popular—immediately presents anyone stumbling onto its landing page with a facsimile of a terminal window with 3 inscrutable commands. And the kicker is that even if a prospective "customer" who was previously unacquainted with the command line managed to find their system's terminal emulator to open it up and enter the first command, it will almost certainly fail! What the jekyllrb.com folks gloss over is that there's an "implicit step zero"[1], and if you selected a random, college-educated writer, artist, etc, from a crowd, they are simply on average not actually in the audience for Jekyll or any other contemporary static site generator, despite how slick jekyllrb.com might look (and despite what delusions the "just learn how GitHub Pages works" crowd may hold).

1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/03/06/how-to-displace-java...

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