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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

#161

Post by zhdc1 »

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…

The issue with Reddit is that there's little to no user engagement with older content. Comments on posts older than a day in pretty much every reasonably active subreddit are ignored. This is also an issue on HN.

This kills informed discussion - some topics need more than one or two minutes of thought for a thoughtful and articulated response. This simply isn't possible when you know that the person you're replying to likely won't respond if you take more than a couple of hours to reply, that the conversation thread will be hidden behind a 'read more' button after one or two responses, and that the post itself will be buried shortly thereafter.

The average post quality on most forums was awful, as much or more so than what you see now on Reddit or HN. The difference is that it was possible for informed posts to persist as the center of discussion for years, if needed.

As an example, I don't see how a group of people can become interested and collaboratively participate in something like designing an amplifier circuit on Reddit without moving to a third party site, and in doing so cutting off contact and visibility with potential collaborators who happen to find the discussion a couple of hours too late. That's the level of connectivity and cooperation that was possible through forums and bulletin boards for a bunch of different niche topics, and it's basically been lost now that the 2chan/Digg style format (Reddit) has taken over.

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

#162

Post by oefrha »

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 just searched for some relatively focused topics I’ve written about years ago, and Google found my blog posts just fine (mostly among the top results). I don’t know how popular those posts are (I don’t use analytics at all and since the blog has been hosted on GitHub Pages since forever ago I don’t even have server logs to analyze) but I do know quite a few were never discussed elsewhere.

I guess it’s hard to find blogs these days when you just type “blog” into the search engine, or search for a keyword that a million people compete on in order to sell you stuff. But if you have actual, say technical questions, you’ll land on interesting blog posts in no time, sometimes not even on the dumpster fire that is Medium, and written by people who aren’t writing merely to bolster their online presence.

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

#164

Post by secabeen »

krapht wrote: 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 challenge with platforms is that they have big incentives to push small, regular updates and posts, to increase impressions. Thoughtful, considered content and engaged responses are lost in the noise.

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

#165

Post by bArray »

Agreed, I try to encourage people to create their own blogs whenever I can, but very few see past the year. I think the main problem is that the temptation to buy into a centralized platform is very great - cost, maintenance, customization, out-of-the-box functionality.

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

#167

Post by acangiano »

asplake wrote: post #101

It’s not so much that blogging died but that commenting on them directly did, and with it blog culture. Commenting now takes place in other venues, not visible to the blog’s reader unless that venue is where they came from. HN is part of that of course.

I have four new interns who recently started in my team. I'm setting them up for blogging and made the same point to them (almost verbatim).

Another thing that died is the practice of linking to each other like it's going out of style. These days the majority of backlinks are earned through aggressive SEO techniques, not organically like 10-15 years ago. This penalizes regular blogs in favor of crappy blogs run by SEO experts.

I still believe in blogging and I think that the lesser competition, in a roundabout way, makes it easier to stand out. However, discoverability in Google can be a frustrating process both for readers and publishers.

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

krapht wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by ourcat »

Usenet / NNTP. That's what needs 'reviving'.

These days, light and responsive client app/interfaces with little Javascript (service worker) scripts could be busy UUen/decoding and uploading/downloading all those distributed binaries and 'news' with ease! ;)

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

#170

Post by londons_explore »

dewey wrote: post #97
londons_explore wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" sear…

Although a quick search reveals that:

https://www.google.com/search?q=1960s+music+blog+from+singap...

I'd guess the issue is simply people aren't looking for it.

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