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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

#161

Post by cxr »

rodolphoarruda wrote: post #93
cxr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This describes my experience with Hugo. I ran into not only an implicit zero step, but many other intermediate steps that were not explicit in the documentation. My decision for Hugo was influenced by the clear "getting started" type of instructions on their website. I got a bit frustrated in the end, so rolled back to WordPress.

Thanks for relating this story. It's good to be able to point to comments that serve as concrete examples.

One of the things I mentioned in that post is folks' tunnel vision—in these cases, tunnel vision on the parts of the people associated with the project who are unable to see the actual number of hurdles that an outsider will encounter. The post on the Light Table blog[1] that I referenced lays this out, too. Its title "Pain We Forgot" is almost self-explanatory.

1. http://lighttable.com/2014/05/16/pain-we-forgot/

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

#162

Post by greggman3 »

imglorp wrote: post #17
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).

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.

Don't install Wordpress. Pay for a hosted/managed blog. Wordpress.com (or one of the others).

Static blogs mostly suck because they have no UI for the user. You're generally required to run your own text editor, manage all files yourself, run some build scripts, deal with the errors. Oh, and likely you need to be on a PC/Mac instead of a phone or tablet so less options.

OTOH Wordpress requires constant maintenance. Like literally every month or more often you're required to install updates and if you install any plugins you're required to stay on top of those too. I got off wordpress for precisely those reasons. I run a static blog but, in part because of the friction vs WordPress I rarely post anymore.

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

#163

Post by rakoo »

hintymad wrote: post #110
beager wrote: post #106

One interesting aspect of Twitter is that the restriction on tweet length requires serialization of complex ideas. Faced with this, authors are forced to either simplify their ideas or spread them out across tweets. An emergent dynamic of the platform, as a result, is that ideas get misrepresented, nuance gets lost, and people get irritated. That irritation turns into argument and rebuttal. And since argument and con…

Twitter's competitor Weibo launched a feature called "Long Weibo" years ago. It's essentially a blog service, except that Weibo would display the first 140 characters of a long post as if it is a tweet, and a reader needs to click on an icon to expand the tweet into a full article. It's a really nice feature. Clean time line as before, users who hate changes won't get bothered, but those who crave for longer writings…

This is exactly one of the selling points of Mastodon: the medium mimics Twitter, but allows you to write long form content at will: the administrator decides what the limit is (500 by default on Mastodon, 5000 by default on Pleroma).

This medium provides the good sides of Twitter with the good sides of a federated system, where content discovery is still done organically through people. If experts want something as easy to use as Twitter _and_ have the possibility of having more space, I feel they should migrate to it. Or anything that uses ActivityPub really, like Write.as or Plume

There's also the whole indieweb movement, with micropub, microformats and stuff that anyone can play with, like with Micro.blog.

All options that give more control to the user

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

#164

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

throwaway8879 wrote: post #100
dlivingston wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Socrates didn't draw a crowd mostly because he was super annoying. Imagine going to the marketplace to buy food and then this short and ugly man with his two sidekicks shows up to start a dialectic about the nature of forms or something goofy, while you just want to get back home and start dinner...

Socrates' social circle were free Athenian citizens. They wouldn't have "gone to the marketplace to buy food", because food shopping was the task of slaves. Free Athenians went to the agora largely for socializing and hearing the latest news, so philosophical dialogues were less annoying and disruptive than you assume. It was certain of Socrates' ideas that got him into trouble, not his public philosophizing per se.

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

#165

Post by warrenm »

joelrunyon wrote: post #115
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Then you have to gasp tell someone about it. The idea that if you build something people will automatically know about it is a delightful fantasy that has never actually been true - regardless of whatever distribution promises Apple, Medium, or Twitter will make you.

You mean blogs don't work like Field of Dreams!??

I'm shocked! SHOCKED, I TELL YOU!

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

#166

Post by whatshisface »

AgentME wrote: post #112
whatshisface wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course people only want speech protection for taboo topics, when else would they need protection? It's easy to prove that taboo topics need to be allowed: it's taboo today to express the usual 2004 opinion on homosexuality, and it was taboo in 2004 to express today's usual opinion on the same topic. So no matter what your beliefs are you have to admit that you, personally, either need or needed cover for having ta…

There's a big difference between opinions that are merely taboo and opinions that get censored on social media. Not everything taboo gets censored and banned on social media. Facebook/Twitter/popular social media as we know it barely existed in 2004, but I'm going to make a guess that discussing homosexuality wasn't banned on any of them (or whichever precursors of similar style and policies existed) around that time…

>It looks like those dynamics are a world apart

I guess my fundamental disagreement is that the two (censorship of taboos one deems undiscussable and censorship of taboos one deems discussable) don't seem so separate at all. Many of the same people want them, and for many of the same reasons. 1990s network TV was trying to appease the exact same public that Facebook would have tried to appease in 1990 if they existed back then and also had an attitude of appeasement. You, personally, have moderate views and sound relatively liberal in what you're willing to allow other people to discuss, but I'm not facing the decision of whether or not to appoint you as the censor: the issue at hand is whether or not we trust public outrage and the overall zeitgeist to determine what companies are afraid of being associated with, thereby determining what they censor. You can't set up a system with the idea that corporations will be reasonable or have a conscience.

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

#167

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

eitland wrote: post #127
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. This. More people should probably blog to their perfect audience either that audience exists or not. I used to write about stuff that I spent more than a couple of hours to and that couldn't be found on the internet. Back in the days at least that meant I'd get search eng…

This is exactly my position. I won't doxx myself and post my blog here but I write to document the things that I work on and if someone else reads and learns something that's a bonus. The act of writing is fulfilling enough in and of itself.

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

#168

Post by monksy »

aembleton wrote: post #134
monksy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I happen to agree with you a lot. Unfortunately I think what people will take away from this article is: How can we fix twitter. The answer isn't to fix it. It's the wrong use of the medium. The bigger problem is how can we network indepdent blogs in a federated fashion where it's easier to have responses, build audiences, etc. i.e. You can't exactly respond very easily and see the 10k view with a single blog article…

Maybe we need to bring back web rings

No we need services to aggregate and to network them. A good federation of services would be good.

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

#170

Post by benibela »

michaelmrose wrote: post #79
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

That is how you get a shadow ban

I used to have a Firefox plugin that would tweet all my bookmarks, but then Twitter hid all my tweets from the search.

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