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

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141–150 of 637 posts

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

#141
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I almost never encounter that. Just pasting the main site into TT-RSS discovers the feeds pretty much every time.

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

#142
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can't you just set the timeline to show latest tweets first to avoid this? The alternative is certainly terrible (though mostly because it hides a bunch of tweets I actually wanted to view rather than because of any outrage), but the option to disable it is there.

AFAIK no. But there exist third party websites and apps that do. Or at least used to; Twitter may have changed it since I last used TweetBot.

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

#143
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 agree. Not to mention tweeting seems to carry the highest risk of destroying your career and/or social life of pretty much any other online medium. It probably has something to do with the whole "casual communication" focus. People tend to put a lot more thought (and time) into a blog post.

I think it's been years since I posted anything on twitter.

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

#144
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…

The bloggers went to places where the eyeballs are. If you read a good book, make photo and post it with a comment on instagram. You will get much more reaction than with a blogpost on your private blog. Same for forums. If you are looking for a community with a special interest you will have more luck to find an active facebook group than a independent forum/message board somewhere else.

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

#145
Personal thought:

I wonder when writing does the content have to provide something to the reader eg. teach them something. I like to just write as I build something but I think people don't want to read it if it's not cleaned up/packaged and has value.

I think of it like a live stream where you just tune in for noise.

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

#146

Two weeks ago I decided to set up one for myself as I have all these conversations where I instructed someone to do some obscure thing so thought to package them into public tutorials I could easily share. Wanted my own domain, didn't want to deal with content moderation by someone else, wanted the ability to easily customize things, didn't want to show crappy ads, didn't want editors being able to hold up things, et…

I found something called WordOps (.org I think) and they make that trivial. Even win set up the letsencrypt. I don’t even use my own scripts any more- just theirs.

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

#147
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks, I'm dogfooding it mostly. But I added https :) ( https://handlr.sapico.me ) I'm currently the only one that can add RSS-feeds though. It has custom actions also, eg. https://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Details?id=ab43c38d-3d96-ea11-... where comments by HN are loaded in the post. ( Custom tag that adds a form field to input the HN Id ) Eg. CommentsByHackernews is the tag. I also have a variation for the city were I…

Nice! Here is mine: https://hxfd.prog.re/

It's just a static page that gets rendered on the server after each scraping round (every half hour).

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

#148
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…

Counterpoint: Twitter is the preferred social media among scientists, and a good place to keep up with the latest papers and developments. The quality of discussion on science twitter can be pretty good too, despite the character limit.

I'm skeptical that anybody's Twitter is on par with the quality and engagement you see from something like Terrance Tao's WordPress blog. Unless you're including the linked content for preprints and the like, I just don't see it. The depth just isn't there. As a way to survey news in a field, sure, twitter definitely has value but the content on Twitter itself isn't really what I'd consider quality.

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

#149

The problem as I see it is the Google algorithm. It force content creators to write it in a certain way that in many cases might be way too long and not ’to the point’. I dont remember the last time I searched for something on Google and it showed me a high quality opinion article in a random blog. nowadays everything is around SEO and blogs, as much as I understand why google does that, I think it's the main reason…

>It force content creators to write it in a certain way that in many cases might be way too long and not ’to the point’.

This is a huge problem and google definitely makes it worse, but this has always been a problem.

From magazine writers who are paid by the word to technical books that are padded out to be 400 pages when they could have been 50.

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

#150
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…

If you carefully curate who you follow, Twitter can be more like a bunch of subreddits, with the added signal of knowing who's posting. So it ends up a being great way to keep up with small communities.
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