If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by DreadY2K » Sat, May 16, 2020, 8:05 PM UTC

cameronbrown wrote: post #115

Shared404 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Either that, or have separate webs for different disciplines (maybe one for academia, one for arts, one for jounralism, one for programming, etc.) that are kept separate from each other. I'm not sure how it could be implemented, but a forced partitioning like that could probably serve the same purpose without gatekeeping (if the partitions are small enough).

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

#182

Post by qznc » Sat, May 16, 2020, 8:05 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #154

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…

Could give examples how finding blogs is easy and "lots of lists out there of people's favorites"?

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

#183

Post by imagetic » Sat, May 16, 2020, 8:05 PM UTC

and isn't the death of the traditional blog just linked to the death of the personal website?

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

#184

Post by zhdc1 » Sat, May 16, 2020, 8:06 PM UTC

alexchantavy wrote: post #159

keenmaster wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Reddit is great when the original poster or one or two of the immediate replies are insightful and informative. It's awful when either the original post isn't that great to begin with, or if a knowledgeable comment comes too late or happens to be a reply of a reply of a reply.

Case in point, my original post, which was one of the first ten-fifteen comments, has a bunch of up votes. There's no way this would be true if I missed the original post by an hour or if it was the n'th response in a large comment chain.

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

#185

Post by DoreenMichele » Sat, May 16, 2020, 8:07 PM UTC

But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago

Nope. It still exists and I use it.

And I'm given hell for it.

The degree to which my blogging gets so much hostility from people does not mesh with articles like this one claiming they wish blogs still existed. I can't get traffic for my blogs. No one shares them but me and then I get crap for doing that.

If you want that kind of internet, foster it. Look in the mirror. It's not just choices made by big companies or whatever that shape this space.

You shape it with your actions. And I get a fuck ton of accusations that if I advocate for something, it's "content marketing" and not my actual opinion. And the many people who know I'm dirt poor and most of my blogs have no ads, etc, usually don't bother to come forward to defend me or make sure to post first before some random internet stranger can thread shit.

Downvotes: Ironic evidence of the veracity of my claims.

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

#186

Post by naravara » Sat, May 16, 2020, 8:07 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #81

momokoko wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has an unusual situation where search now only needs to be good enough. They are much more focused on the knowledge engine of providing direct answers and the advertising business. With such a dominant market share, search has certainly lowered in quality

> 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.

Isn't think kind of a feedback loop though? Search gets bad, so people don't bother putting useful, relevant, and high effort content since nobody will find it. Thus, search gets worse since there is less useful content to crawl. Thus even more of the content out there starts leaning towards clickbait and SEO rather than thoughtful writing. And so on and so forth.

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

#187

Post by ourcat » Sat, May 16, 2020, 8:07 PM UTC

RyJones wrote: post #176

ourcat wrote: 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.

*nods. I was friends with Dave once too.

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

#188

Post by CM30 » Sat, May 16, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

Not entirely sure what they mean here:

> But Blogger was shut down by Google years ago

It's still up from what I can tell, the blogs hosted there still work, and the Wikipedia page still lists it as active.

That said, I definitely wish blogs were more popular again. Finding individual people's blogs used to be a great thing, and the way they've basically been buried by Google is depressing as hell.

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

#189

Post by folmar » Sat, May 16, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

naavis wrote: post #34

cm2187 wrote: post #18

I would bring back RSS. The good parts of twitter (you can follow what lots of people have to say and aggregate it in a single feed) without the bad parts (character limits, "you stink" and other snarky comments, control of a centralised platform over who can say what, etc).

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

I'd even say it's working much better than in the golden days as pretty much everyone is using an off-the-shelf blog engine which does RSS just fine, whereas in the old times a good half of the blogs were something homegrown/obscure/opt-in rss.

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

#190

Post by exolymph » Sat, May 16, 2020, 8:09 PM UTC

"I am nostalgic for the heyday of the blogosphere before social media surpassed it, even though in an absolute sense the blogosphere is larger and more vibrant than ever, and I have only myself to blame for using social media more than I read blogs"

there I fixed it