Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tttthis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 637 posts

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

#151

Post by BlueTemplar »

jeffkeen wrote: post #87
naavis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think RSS has gone anywhere. Most half-decent blogs still support it, I think.

Yeah, I don't get what people mean when they say "bring back RSS"—-it's still around. The thing that disappeared was Google Reader, which I guess was a signal of super mainstream popularity of RSS. Feedly is a great app that I use regularly to keep up with RSS, and there are other RSS readers too. It's not like we're talking about a dead protocol like Gopher, here.

IMHO Feedly is barely adequate.

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

#152

Post by angel_j »

pmlnr wrote: post #74
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/

imo we need personal, public IP addresses, not labyrinthine decentralized p2p projects

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

#153

Post by martinhath »

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've been collecting blogs I'm interested in via. HN, lobste.rs, reddit, or just random links all around, and am now at around 50 feeds, all of which at least have once had content that I'm genuinely interested in. Then I use `newsboat` for reading and keeping track of what I've seen.

Overall I'm very happy with this extremely simple setup, and am almost annoyed that I didn't spend those few seconds it is to set something like this up years ago.

---

As to the original link posted, blogs obviously never went anywhere, but they aren't (anymore) in the places that you are. I feel this comes close to the frustration some people have that "nobody is reading books anymore because everyone are streaming movies and series instead". Books never went anywhere, and they're probably more accessible than ever. If you're not reading books now, that's on you.

Similarly with blogs: if you're not reading and/or following blogs, it's just because you don't want to.

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

#154

Post by crazygringo »

This article makes... no sense to me. Blogs are still around, everywhere, and show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query. And bloggers still list other blogs in sidebars.

I genuinely don't understand the author's complaint. The only thing I can imagine is that there are a lot more alternatives for self-expression on the internet now, e.g. Instagram, Twitter, podcasts, etc. So blogs are perhaps a smaller percentage.

But given that you could never read even 0.1% of all the blog posts ever written, the percentage is irrelevant. There are more unique, quirky, individualist blogs out there than the author could ever get to the end of.

So I don't understand what the problem is. It's not even factual. The author claims Blogger was shut down... but it still exists. The author claims there's no way to find blogs... but it's pretty easy. The author claims nobody is writing blogs... but obviously they are.

I guess the main complaint is that you can't find quirky random blogs by searching Google for the search term "blog"? Not much of a complaint to me. If you want a curated list of quirky blogs, there are lots of lists out there of people's favorites.

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

#155

Post by angel_j »

cameronbrown wrote: post #66
angel_j wrote: post #39

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

Normal people don't have computers anymore. This is the reason platforms are far more popular than blogs - people don't have this knowledge of setting up web servers that we take for granted. And even if they did, there's no benefit.

exactly, because you need knowledge to do with files systems what we have been able to do with phone numbers for 100 years

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

#156

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

keenmaster wrote: post #112
zhdc1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intern…

1) there is no real "tragedy of the commons" in the general case. Google Elinor Ostrum to verify. Even Garret Hardin (originator of the concept) has conceded this, at least in part. The crux is that the "commons" as described by Hardin has essentially never existed in the form that he wrote about - things that are "commons"-like are actually always a complex mixture of law, tradition, culture and social sanctions governing their use. When people screw up "the commons", it's not because there are no mechanisms to prevent it, it is because these people have chosen to ignore them, and have made extra effort to do so.

2) You're seriously claiming that Reddit, a privately held company with sysadmins, subreddit moderation and user voting, could be a venue in which what happens is "a tragedy of the commons" (should such a thing actually exist)?

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

#157

Post by noobaccount »

keenmaster wrote: post #112
zhdc1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intern…

Most HN comment ever. I don’t care about noob spam or even know what that could possibly be. It just isn’t fun and weirdly addictive in a bad way.

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

#158

Post by bondolo »

I am not convinced that there is enough good content to sustain blogs. Even in the current blogging minimum I see a lot of repetitive self-selling blogs from the usual suspects and a performative aspirational blogs from nobodies. The people who I would read are mostly doing work and, if the are writing, it is about the state of their current work (Brian Goetz for example) rather than broader thoughts about the state of the industry, priorities and challenges. Technical content and informed perspectives are sadly in short supply.

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

#159

Post by alexchantavy »

keenmaster wrote: post #112
zhdc1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intern…

> Reddit doesn’t display those qualities because of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon.

I find Reddit is still one of my favorite resources to search for help. If I need help on how to do some home DIY thing or help on making a particular decision, I'll Google for "how to decide blah Reddit" and I'll get much, much better signal than just Googling for "how to decide blah". In the latter case I'll get a bunch of ad-filled garbage and an article that was probably written by an algorithm.

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

#160

Post by NicoJuicy »

progre wrote: post #147
NicoJuicy wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

No bookmarks of your own?

Eg. check http://handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create on top right (The bookmarklet).

On mobile ( Android), I share websites to Tasker that then open handlr.sapico.me/Item/Create?Title=%1&Url=%2

I then add the tags and then create the item. I think it's the only way to easily bookmark websites.

Note: If a url is filled in, but not a title. Then on focus-out the title is fetched from the page and filled in.

Although RSS is an "easy" content crawl feature, i wouldn't be able to miss the "bookmarking" functionality that makes the site more usefull.

Post reply on HN