> Also, the platform must be profitable or promise future profit
This is arguable. The very idea and existence of non-profit organisations are proof.
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
111–120 of 637 posts
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#112Blogs 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’m not sure if the premise is correct here. What metric is Reddit being judged by? What if the various fashion subreddits, in aggregate, have more users, more content (both good and bad), and more innovation than websites like AskAndy?
I suspect what you’re looking for is:
1. The intimate small town feel of the early internet, and
2. The higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain specificity, and demonstrated expertise.
Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon. Great content is interspersed with what is essentially “noob spam.” Even if it has a greater aggregate amount of quality content, it doesn’t have the same feel as older forums.
Reddit can try to fix this by grouping people together into social clusters. If there is a subreddit with 2 million people, why not create many smaller “breakout” groups that coexist with the main thread? Of course, this is easier said than done, but I’m sure it’s possible to execute this idea well.
I think VR meeting rooms will be the ultimate solution. They will be intimate by definition, and people will sort into their favorite social groups. An American scientist might join an international “scientist salon” and socialize with scientists everywhere from Germany to Japan. A bulletin would contain and display static text posts by the members of the salon. It would also display things like plebiscites and summaries of important meetings. You’d be able to bounce around different groups with a different subject matter any time you want. Some will have barriers to entry and identity verification, most won’t. Some groups will be purely social and defined more by the members than by any subject matter. Altogether that would make the internet feel more like a collection of physical spaces inhabited by communities of people.
What I’m describing ideally shouldn’t be run by one corporation like Facebook or Reddit. The communities should be strung together by a shared backbone under an Internet 3.0. Visiting one should be like visiting a different website. We can use the formation of the original 2D internet as a template for how to proceed in creating a VR internet.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#113Everyone should consider making their own blog! Kind of like everyone should consider baking their own bread, at least once.
Having a blog that I built that is truly “mine,” with a domain name that I own, is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done. Even though I don’t write that often and don’t have that many readers.
I currently host it on github pages, but I could move it somewhere else in a weekend if I wanted to.
Depending on your motivations, discoverability by strangers may be overrated. I’ve had good success just telling people that I respect that I wrote something and getting feedback from them. I’m not selling anything on my blog, so that’s worth a lot more to me than anonymous attention.
Social media like HN, Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook may also help for getting the word out about your writing while still letting you own the space where your writing lives.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#114Blogs 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 have an entire setup for crawling rss hourly http://handlr.sapico.me
Is this your site? It's really nice! I have something similar (although without all of the features on this site). I also scrape a bunch of blogs that doesn't have rss.
One thing, people really like https, especially when sending form data such as the signup.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
Imho, try to keep it from going mainstream. If there aren't enough viewers to make advertising profitable, then many of the problems filling the current internet would not appear in the first place.
Gatekeeping then?
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#116Blogs 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…
In a vein similar to your annoying technology site, you would probably appreciate https://grumpy.website/
One of my favorite blogs of all time.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#117Flip 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 find twitter great for following astrophysics researchers and optimization/DL researchers.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#118Flip 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…
My honest recommendation for Twitter: Don't use the built-in systems to follow anyone. Keep bookmarks on people's profiles and visit manually if you want to know what they're up to. The timeline is a terrible idea. Twitter works really well for me because of this.
tweetdeck.twitter.com[0] works really well for this. It does not "filter" your feed in any way (as far as I know). You follow a hashtag you see every tweet for that hashtag. You follow a user and you can filter out "retweets" and "likes" to only see what the user posts (I wanted to see what @POTUS tweets and it's nothing only retweets).
A column in tweetdeck can be a user, a search, a list, a hashtag, and more. Every column shows ever tweet and they mostly come in realtime.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#119Flip 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…
Honestly, the only thing I really like about Twitter is Moments. They aggregate the current trend from various tweets and compile a good enough summary to get you upto speed. But this is so deeply buried in the UI, it's a shame.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
My honest recommendation for Twitter: Don't use the built-in systems to follow anyone. Keep bookmarks on people's profiles and visit manually if you want to know what they're up to. The timeline is a terrible idea. Twitter works really well for me because of this.
I'm not sure I understand, what's the problem with following people and using the timeline (maybe even in a third party client that sorts it chronologically)? What do you gain by only navigating to profiles manually?
The timeline is controlled via algorithm, and either filters or selects things to show you based on an uncontrollable process which is likely just meant to make you more outraged, annoyed, etc. to keep you engaged with the platform. Not only is that unhealthy, but it doesn’t make for an enjoyable experience almost by definition.