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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

#191

Post by _uvvk »

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.

Shameless plug:

I wrote my own blog engine in Python (https://github.com/betodealmeida/nefelibata). It generates static pages, but publishes a snippet to Twitter/Mastodon/etc., linking back to the blog post.

People can only comment on the social media sites, and periodically the comments get scraped and appended to the blog post. Here's an example: https://blog.taoetc.org/mastodon_integration/index.html

This way, people can comment in the other venues where they're used to, and comments get persisted past the lifetime of these venues.

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

#192

Post by pkamb »

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…

Stack Exchange is even better, for sites with sufficiently large communities. Stack Overflow and Ask Different are amazing.

But low-traffic SE sites just don't compete. I wish SE would change their account system and/or design so that their smaller sites became a better resource.

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

#194

Post by naravara »

saalweachter wrote: post #79
api wrote: 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?

>What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?

Ads blocked by default on all browsers. The original sin with a lot of these comes from the fact that incentives drive towards maximizing clicks over building a subscriber base. Ads themselves aren't really the problem either. Magazine style ads, where you just buy space on the strength of a subscriber/distribution reach rather than paying per click, wouldn't be perfect but they'd align incentives between readers and writers much better than the current situation does.

The core problem is that the metrics are too granular, so there's too much room to game them at the margins.

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

#195

Post by kaydub »

There are still blogs.

When I hit a problem and solve it I'll usually make a blog post about it on my personal blog. I try to share as many random learnings and other tidbits from my career on my blog. There are even some search terms where my blog comes up in the top 1-5.

There aren't any less blogs now than there ever have been, other content is just more prolific these days.

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

#196

Post by folmar »

hagy wrote: post #43
specialp wrote: post #13

There is just a problem with self curated content in general. There used to be a lot of experts making their own sites with information that was never available before. It was easy to just upload some HTML files somewhere. Now this information is being put in inaccessible areas like Facebook Groups. Then people tried running their own sites with wordpress and stuff but that becomes hard as you are usually on a crappy…

I agree and have personally found it quite easy to setup small websites hosted on AWS using Route53, Certificate Manager, S3, and CloudFront. They cost nearly nothing at low scale and are quite cost efficient until you hit serious scale, which few personal website ever achieve. Yet, I don't think most people are going to want to go this route and it would take a fair amount of tooling to automate everything. It's not…

The layman has blogger/wordpress.com for free and one-click wordpress installer at any hosting provider of choice, so the tooling is a done thing (mostly Softaculous now but it's not a monopoly).

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

#197

Post by saadalem »

They still exist, many people are sharing valuable gems over there, but searching for blogs it's hard(you can find blog posts on HN then you follow the blog if you like it) + here are some blogs on HN :

Ask HN: What niche blogs are worthwhile to follow? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21928170

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

#198

Post by naravara »

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 think most wordpress blogs with commentariats just use Disqus now. It's buggy and unreliable, but the commenting capability is still there generally.

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

#199

Post by mawise »

aazaa wrote: post #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'l…

Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership. The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas. Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/... and even there with the currency of likes/comments those motivations get twisted.

Some of the internet has also shifted to a privacy centric attitude. The whole world is a big place to share intimate stories which will be indexed and used against you in job interviews or by oppressive governments.

I still think there's value in private blogging, writing just to keep your friends and family informed. Blogging doesn't always have to be sharing with the whole world. I wish there were more platforms to make this easy to do.

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

#200

Post by noobaccount »

petercooper wrote: post #68
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…

Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work. I started blogging in 1999 (and sadly there are the Wayback Machine archives to prove how juvenile I was!) and it was either self host or use Blogger. Discoverability was pretty interesting. Most blogs' traffic didn't come from search engines (Google existed but it was pretty much geeks only) or platforms, but from…

I used to like the stuff I’m reading and now I don’t. The stuff everybody is reading has gotten very extra. So discoverability is a problem.
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