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

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

#61

Post by Noctem »

nullc wrote: post #46
Noctem wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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…

It is entirely possible to curate a Twitter feed of: experts in nearly any subject, gossip, sports, pornography, spiritual guidance, comedy, hate speech, or journalism. The same can be said of bookshelves. It is also possible to consume both excessively or in inappropriate situations. There are young members of my extended family who are regularly scolded for trying to read books during meals.

The rudeness of your guests does not justify passing judgment on millions of people with an almost infinitely broad spectrum of usage patterns, and makes about as much sense as criticizing those who read words on paper.

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

#62

Post by AgentME »

aazaa wrote: 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 won't be able to afford to host anything remotely controversial (i.e., interesting) for fear of upsetting the thought police.

What interesting controversial content are they banning specifically? Ethnonationalist propaganda?

I'm really annoyed by the common effect where people complaining about censorship on the big platforms always complain about it in vague abstract terms, because that gets a lot more support than complaining about people getting banned for targeted harassment or encouraging forcible removal of non-whites... Shout-out to a pithy evergreen tweet on this: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174....

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

#63

Post by smitty1e »

Reason077 wrote: post #47
smitty1e wrote: 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.

I migrated to https://feedly.com

One might find a clear point of inflection on blog traffic with the demise of Google Reader, but basically people just quit writing blog posts when the new wore off.

Children (parenthood) wiped out a lot of my discretionary time, for example.

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

#64

Post by ketzo »

andy_ppp wrote: post #29

Medium had such a great stab at doing this before they completely lost their way. I think someone should make another attempt at this, there doesn’t need to be a billion dollar company here to still get very rich and, more importantly, make something people want...

Genuine question: why do people dislike Medium so much? I see a lot of hate for it.

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

#65

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

joelrunyon wrote: post #13

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).

> Register your domain, install wordpress, start your own blog.

And then have 0 people read your blog because it’s on your random domain.

Maybe your strategy works for well known bloggers, but tweeting content that people actually read beats owning content that nobody reads. And it is much harder to get people to visit your self-hosted blog than it is to get them to read your tweets.

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

#66

Post by cxr »

andy_ppp wrote: post #29

Medium had such a great stab at doing this before they completely lost their way. I think someone should make another attempt at this, there doesn’t need to be a billion dollar company here to still get very rich and, more importantly, make something people want...

https://write.as/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18432327

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

#67

Post by petrocrat »

andy_ppp wrote: post #29

Medium had such a great stab at doing this before they completely lost their way. I think someone should make another attempt at this, there doesn’t need to be a billion dollar company here to still get very rich and, more importantly, make something people want...

At least for programming content, I think dev.to has replaced medium and is doing a fantastic job so far.

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

#68

Post by jasonv »

gonehome wrote: post #58
jasonv wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 refere…

I think Zuckerberg is more right on this issue than Jack and twitter. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb... The hard part is who is deciding what is true and what is not. It’s important to verify authenticity of the message (who the message claims to come from is actually who it’s coming from), but deciding what to disallow based on truthiness is a lot more problematic.

I can't read that, but nothing Facebook/Zuckerberg has done feels aligned with any principled standing that I agree with.

From a slightly different direction.. for instance: banning any content that contravenes the WHO's official recommendations for pandemic response definitely feels too narrow, esp given that the WHO might reverse course or admit they weren't optimal. I completely disagree with Trump's defunding of support for the WHO, I don't agree with everything the WHO says, but I also can't see how conferring 100% content authority to that body is aligned with democratic free speech. That position is also consistent with the idea of banning any content that isn't aligned with, say, this American administration's positions.

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

#69

Post by zem »

ketzo wrote: post #64
andy_ppp wrote: post #29

Medium had such a great stab at doing this before they completely lost their way. I think someone should make another attempt at this, there doesn’t need to be a billion dollar company here to still get very rich and, more importantly, make something people want...

Genuine question: why do people dislike Medium so much? I see a lot of hate for it.

they ran smack into the common failure mode of building up a large audience and then trying to use that as leverage for user-hostile monetisation tactics.
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