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

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

#91
I wrote a blog article about reading books and blog articles instead of watching YouTube videos, ergo using addictive, low-quality, negative social internet: https://dennisarslan.nl/you-should-read-books-and-blog-artic...

You can still use https://www.inoreader.com/ for blogs and use Google to find good-quality blogs in your niche.

The fact that blogs aren't so popular anymore could also force them to write higher quality content to gain popularity.

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

#92
post #74
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/

[deleted]

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

#94
post #18

I would bring back RSS. The good parts of twitter (you can follow what lots of people have to say and aggregate it in a single feed) without the bad parts (character limits, "you stink" and other snarky comments, control of a centralised platform over who can say what, etc).

I use RSS everyday, and follow several hundred sites using it. One thing that gets overlooked when discussing RSS is that the nature of feeds themselves lends to scripting. I have one single source of aggregated data that I can run queries against, automate scripts with, generate alerts from etc. It's nice.

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

#95
post #15

Blogs exist, they just morphed. People with things to say moved to platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Twitch, or Medium. This is because there's no point in self-hosting; using a platform is free and gives you some degree of discoverability. Nobody wants to self-host on their own domain because it costs money and you need at least some rudimentary tech/sysadmin skills. Self-hosting doesn't solve t…

To me it's more that Blogs vanished and the people that spent time with it moved their attention onto different media, especially Twitter. Both exploring and maintaining blogs is an effort, and I think what's left are tech blogs and blogs attached to news or magazine websites that are written by professional Journalists. Medium and Youtube also seems more like something for people who spent a lot of effort on this.

I think most people resorted to platforms for hosting the blogs. Not sure if it's so important if many people read something as long as it's interesting for some people.

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

#96
post #47

If I could take two things away, it would be upvotes and targeted advertising. They allow for manipulation of the new commons and the societies of the people therein. The manipulation existed before, but not in such an effective way. US army in Eglin, various Russian bot farms, and effective private firms are open to deep-pocketed millionaires. There must be a way that's /less/ open to manipulation. Or at least a way…

I mean you're free to start a site with neither upvotes nor targeted advertising... And while I'm sure you'll find an audience, the vast majority of the population enjoys upvoting, and actually prefers targeted adverts over untargeted ones.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has an unusual situation where search now only needs to be good enough. They are much more focused on the knowledge engine of providing direct answers and the advertising business. With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality

> search has certainly lowered in quality I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there. A good chunk of that is that more and more info is locked into walled gardens (in some App, on Facebook/Instagram/TicTok), but also a lot of what people want to find in todays world just isn't…

> I would argue that the public internet has lowered in quality, and the lowering quality of search results simply reflects that the information you're looking for often isn't out there.

I think that's not the case: There's a lot more people with more diverse backgrounds, from different locations and cultures online now than it was the case 10 years ago. It's just harder to find the places through a "globalized" search that is mostly aiming at commercial offers. From time to time I stumble upon absolute niche blogs (Example from my feed reader: https://singapore60smusic.blogspot.com) and it reminds me that there's a lot of good resources out there if you find them somehow).

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

#98
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'm increasingly running into blogs that sadly don't have RSS, but just today I discovered a cool open source project to generate RSS based on visual scraping: https://politepol.com/en/

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

#99

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.

This was the model back in the 2000s before monetization was big on the internet. This is really the key issue, not whether RSS feeds or dead or if it is too hard for people to self-host blogs.

The internet has changed a lot in the last ten years. People have realized that popular content has a big monetary potential, and it is far easier now to get compensated (remember when YouTube content creators couldn't monetize?). More content is created as a income source, than out of passion or interest. Search results are gamed by commerical blogs. The average hobby blogger can't compete with that.

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

#100
post #72
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 fash…

I characterize Reddit as true neutral. It has the potential to be any alignment, but it's mostly the will of the moderator to impose what alignment any subreddit will be. It's the only place on the Internet that still has the feel occaisionally of the 90s/00s.
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