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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

#171
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that all Google results are increasingly useless spam. Even searching for programming Q&A is becoming less viable and I end up landing on one of those "you need to upgrade your flash player" phishing sites at least once or twice a week. The open web has had a great run but it too is being brought to its knees by spam just like every other open platform.

"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?

Nothing, we’re just all gonna have to learn to deal with each other this way on this scale and move on.

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

#173
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 think Reddit getting big also killed a lot of the old forums. The frictionlessness of joining a community made it hard to compete. And the general lack of personality to user profiles in Reddit avoided the "cool kid's clique" issue that happens with a lot of forums where everyone knows each other.

I remember in the "dying days" of some of the forums I was on the conversation had largely devolved into reposting and discussing memes and things that were happening on Reddit. From there it's just a matter of time before the discussion moved to Reddit too. This fate perhaps could have been avoided if "Sign in with Google" type capabilities were more widely available at the time, or if we had a more universal login/forum scheme like Disqus back then, but they all came around too late.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook makes your content virtually inaccessible and discoverable from those outside Facebook. They are the opposite of the way things were on the open web. Medium "is easy" but they are gradually asking more and more of people visiting too. Twitter is a good platform for streams of thought but it is a terrible "blogging" platform. Having "a series of tweets" does not make for a blog. It is hard to read and terribl…

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.

As an everyday sufferer of the Medium bullshit, I've this on my idea bucket list, just never got to actually build it.

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

#175

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 perhap…

It’s not something most people care about anymore, and it was nice when it was.

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

#176
post #169

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! ;)

I've long argued that RSS should have been NNTP.

I never get far with that, though.

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

#177
I have recently been enjoying exploring gemini [1] - a new gopher-like web protocol that has been mentioned a couple of times in recent days here on HN. There's not a great deal of content at the moment, but that which does exist does tend to be of a personal, blog-style nature, and also remarkably interesting - if, that is, like me, you're fond of beer and steel framed bicycles (fill in your own stereotype here...).

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

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

#178
The best way to bring back blogs is to start with your own. It looks like this is the author's fourth post and s/he hit a home run with the top post on HN.

But that's rarely how things work.

The thing few people tell you when you start blogging is how futile it will seem - for a long, long time. You'll start by posting something you put a lot of work into. You'll publish, thinking of all the comments and emails you'll get.

Then, nothing. You'll check the analytics. Abysmal. Nobody is reading!

You may write a few more posts, but it's always the same story. A lot of work goes in, but not much comes out.

And this is the point at which most bloggers stop. After all, how can you justify more time spent on something that doesn't pay back?

The problem is that with a blog you need to think in terms of years. You have to write regularly over the course of years before you'll get any kind of reliable following.

In the meantime, you'll notice how blogging regularly changes you. You'll notice patterns you never noticed before, especially if you stick to a particular "beat." You'll get better at choosing topics. You'll figure out ways to write faster. You'll get better at pushing through mental fog and procrastination that keeps so many others from writing.

You may also discover that you really, really hate writing. Nothing wrong with that, but understand that many people also dislike writing anything longer than a tweet. And that's why good blogs are kind of scarce. And therein lies the opportunity.

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

#180
Why don't we have a modern, laymen version, universal replacement for RSS? The hurdle with RSS at the end of it's popularity is it required a special tool to subscribe, and a little technical knowledge to make sense of it all. My mother wouldn't ever be able to figure it out.
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