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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

#71

Post by notacoward »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #55
notacoward wrote: post #24

The obstacle is not the format but the ease of sharing. Yes, I've had a blog since ~2000, I know there are some ways to share others' content on your own blog, but it never became as easy or readily consumable as a retweet. Ironically, I think the reason is recognizable from epidemiology. The network of twitter followers is just denser than the network of bloggers ever was or likely ever will be. Even the very best b…

The network is a boon and bane. The network allows things to go viral, but I don't think a retweet or tweets are very consumable. Twitter has an atrocious UI. I think when people do these threads tweet storm things, it's way way less readable than essays people were writing a thousand of years ago. I close the page when I encounter those and shake my head at how redundant all the extra stuff is between each sentence.…

> The network is a boon and bane.

Couldn't agree more. Some good info gets distributed that way, but so does even more crap. It does tax people's ability to filter.

> Twitter has an atrocious UI.

Sure, twitter.com has a terrible UI, but there are many other UIs available that are better

> there are a lot of us (dozens of us!) that won't touch Twitter with a ten foot pole.

There are a lot of us who do use Twitter too. I'm connected to probably over a hundred fellow developers, sysadmins, computer scientists, etc. One step away through them are thousands, and we do learn from each other every day. (More so than here, that's for damn sure.) Avoiding Twitter means missing out on that, just like using only Twitter would mean missing out on blog content. It's a high price to pay for fashion, and people who avoid or dump on Twitter for that reason seem to outnumber those who do so out of genuine principle by a large margin.

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

#72

Post by Alex3917 »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #56
Alex3917 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't own your platform, you don't own your content. Not entirely true. You can generate nicely formatted content using a centralized service, and then self-host the files it outputs. E.g. we support this with FWD:Everyone, folks are free to use our tool to format any email thread for publication on the web, and then self-host published threads elsewhere by just saving our API responses. IMHO this is a much…

See https://indieweb.org/POSSE#PESOS

Thanks for this. I keep meaning to get more involved with the IndieWeb folks, just RSVP'd to one of their upcoming events.

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

#73

Post by netsharc »

cxr wrote: post #50
imglorp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Despite how toxic it is, Twitter is very simple: get account, follow a few people, and you get a text field where you can write stuff, hit "Publish", and you can reach your audience. Even a senile old man who wonders if injecting disinfectant might be worthwhile can use it.

Forcing people to register a domain and choose a template is "too much work" compared to that.

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

#74

Post by chillee »

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.

A combination of low quality blogspam being posted there and the irritating paywall model.

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

#75

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #65
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.

Spread the word of your personal self-hosted blog on social media. Post about things that gets picked up by indexers like Bing or Google so that people searching the web can find your blog. Come to terms with the fact that nobody reads your blog and that's okay. Not everyone is entitled to readers or has opinions worth reading about.

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

#76

Post by taurath »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #65
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.

This is also why a public user registry would be a really good thing if it were figured out how to do it well and also give people privacy. That our social lives and online conversations are beholden to advertisers above all else is not the ideal end state of things. Can’t wait for something better to come along.

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

#77

Post by Hoasi »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #65
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.

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

Well, the same thing could be said of most tweets written by a random person. Building an audience rarely happens overnight. These things take time, be it on twitter or your blog. It is still better to own your content (and maybe syndicate it elsewhere, like on Twitter) regardless of whether you have an audience or not.

But now blogs discoverability needs to be solved again.

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

#78

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

Noctem wrote: post #35
nullc wrote: 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…

What? Not every person who uses X infinite scrolling app is a "scroll zombie". I took scroll zombie as that person you know who wakes up, starts scrolling, scrolls all day, then falls asleep scrolling at night but somehow has the balls to say they don't have time to do anything. Social media/phone addicts if you will.

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

#79

Post by michaelmrose »

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #65
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.

Can't you just tweet the main ideas behind your blog posts and link to the main content with each tweet with a link to the full content?

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

#80

Post by Hoasi »

Barrin92 wrote: post #38
nullc wrote: 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.

> I don't really like this focus on the size of audiences that has come with social media.

Neither do I. As a freelancer, I don't care about traffic at all. That's almost the opposite. If you want to choose your clients, that means you need just a select few people to visit your site and then hire you (and not all at the same time, please). In that use case, you optimize for a few people, and what would be of interest to them. If someone else enjoys the site, it's a bonus, but that's not the goal, no matter what the tribe building marketers want you to believe.

Quality over quantity.

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