If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs • Hacker News Board

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#71

Post by heavyset_go » Sat, May 16, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

api wrote: post #45

dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

I find that all Google results are increasingly useless spam. Even searching for programming Q&A is becoming less viable and I end up landing on one of those "you need to upgrade your flash player" phishing sites at least once or twice a week. The open web has had a great run but it too is being brought to its knees by spam just like every other open platform.

I don't think it's a coincidence that Google prioritizes content that has people staring at more ads for longer periods of time.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#72

Post by zhdc1 » Sat, May 16, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

Blogs and forums stopped being a thing when Google flushed them out sometime between 2009-2012 (with the Panda update? I'm not an SEO guy so I wasn't really following it at the time).

Anyway, it felt like a bunch of places went from having active communities to stagnating or dying outright overnight. People forget just how much general innovation was being driven by these sites - Styleforum and AskAndy for men's fashion, BB.com for health and wellness (ignoring misc), Something Awful also comes to mind.

Reddit was supposed to become the trusted alternative, but it just really hasn't happened.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#73

Post by hagy » Sat, May 16, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

api wrote: post #45

dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

I find that all Google results are increasingly useless spam. Even searching for programming Q&A is becoming less viable and I end up landing on one of those "you need to upgrade your flash player" phishing sites at least once or twice a week. The open web has had a great run but it too is being brought to its knees by spam just like every other open platform.

I never realized how bad Google spam could be for technical content until I had to start searching for solution to some Windows issues. Almost without fail, the first page would be littered would spam sites posing as informative answers. Many of them were just duplicating content from official Windows documentation with minor modification. The more sophisticated ones would provide enough real content to entice you into thinking the page had the solution only to reveal you had to sign up to access the full content of the page.

I've never encountered this before when searching for linux or programming topics. In those cases, Google results always include relevant stack overflow postings and links to the appropriate section of documentation.

I'm surprised Google hasn't penalized these spam pages, but I'd imagine there are some perverse incentives to keep them around. Wouldn't surprise me if many of these sites show adds through a Google-owned affiliate program or are in another way tied into Google's ad tech empire.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#74

Post by pmlnr » Sat, May 16, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

angel_j wrote: post #39

We should be able to dial up folks' computers directly and look inside their /public or /www folder.

Opera tried it, it didn't work:

https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...

Current attempts:

DAT: https://dat.foundation/

Zeronet: https://zeronet.io/

Secure Scuttlebutt: https://scuttlebutt.nz/

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#75

Post by wincent » Sat, May 16, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

I miss blogs too, not just reading but the writing of them. I've been trying to start up again, and recently wrote this take on Twitter's role in all this:

> I turn to Twitter even though it is just about the worst platform imaginable for the exposition of ideas. In its favor: the barrier to publication is extremely low, and there is no shortage of engagement with others to be found. The negative: that engagement is often of the worst kind. Nevertheless, for all its flaws, Twitter is immediate and just sufficiently gratifying that once you’ve blurted out a half-formed, typo-ridden, uneditable utterance, you might find your original communicative impulse satisfied enough that you’ll never take the time to turn it into a more polished and complete work in the form of a blog post.

https://wincent.com/blog/something-to-say

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#76

Post by grenoire » Sat, May 16, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

Mizza wrote: post #58

Flip side: I would destroy Twitter. Twitter is absolutely the worst thing to happen to the internet. Low effort, inherently self-aggrandizing and standoffish, literally impossible to express a complex or nuanced thought. The only people I know who regularly engage with Twitter are extreme narcissists and conformist thinkers, and yet all of Twitter considers themselves to be the Important People. This mentality has cr…

I think the popularity of Twitter is due to people not wanting to express complex or nuanced thoughts. If it weren't Twitter, somebody else would be in that space. It seems to me that the ones who are participating in such networks never intended to put too much effort into their communication or arguments anyway.

It's a supply and demand issue, not a tool's existence.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#77

Post by pmlnr » Sat, May 16, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

jobigoud wrote: post #37

Semaphor wrote: post #14

90% of my RSS feeds are blogs. Of those I’d say around 80% are private ones.

What do you mean by private blogs?

Hidden; sort of. These days if I want to get the RSS for a site, I need to look for 'alternate' links in the code.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#78

Post by _bxg1 » Sat, May 16, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

Mizza wrote: post #58

Flip side: I would destroy Twitter. Twitter is absolutely the worst thing to happen to the internet. Low effort, inherently self-aggrandizing and standoffish, literally impossible to express a complex or nuanced thought. The only people I know who regularly engage with Twitter are extreme narcissists and conformist thinkers, and yet all of Twitter considers themselves to be the Important People. This mentality has cr…

All you have to do is viciously mute/unfollow people and words that are remotely in the sphere of something someone might get angry about.

My twitter feed is 95% weird humor and cool art/tech projects. It takes some work but it's doable.

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#79

Post by saalweachter » Sat, May 16, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

api wrote: post #45

dewey wrote: post #32

Blogs are still there, just not easily findable through Google as most of the ones you find are low-value SEO blogs aiming at search engine traffic. Discovery is a problem but I just subscribe to blogs when I find them via RSS (Blogs still have RSS, it's hard to find one without which is surprising but I'm glad that's the case), over time I build up my list of blogs I like and they usually link to other blogs and the…

I find that all Google results are increasingly useless spam. Even searching for programming Q&A is becoming less viable and I end up landing on one of those "you need to upgrade your flash player" phishing sites at least once or twice a week. The open web has had a great run but it too is being brought to its knees by spam just like every other open platform.

"Let's throw one away" thought experiment.

You're rebuilding the internet, if not from the ground up, then {UDP,TCP}/IP up.

What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?

Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs

#80

Post by DarrenDev » Sat, May 16, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

christiansakai wrote: post #36

ordinaryradical wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d really like to see a “Medium minus the bullshit” service. Those pages are so full of js garbage they just feel awful to read and most of the interactions Medium tries to lead you toward are even more painful.

I’m curious. Have any company or anyone implemented something like this? Basically let people blog and let author themselves pay (instead of being paid by ads) subscription fee to pay cloud machine that hosts their content. I think something does exist in Ethereum platform but why it doesn’t exist out there anywhere else.

Wordpress.com is exactly this. But it's not new and trendy.