211–220 of 637 posts
I used to maintain one (mostly because I worked with other engineers who fetishized blogging and encouraged everybody to blog). I eventually lost interest.
Does it stem from Usenet?
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…
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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 fil…
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…
My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed on my side; I just started publishing more blockchain articles (since I work in that industry) but the drop badly affected my non-blockchain articles too (especially the ones which used to get a lot of recurring visitors from Google).
I wasn't relying on my blog financially though (just a hobby) so it hasn't hurt me too bad.
Here is my blog: https://medium.com/@jonathangrosdubois
Many of my past articles were related to my open source project (I've been maintaining it for many years and it is not blockchain related): https://socketcluster.io/
I feel that Google has always been working against open source software when it comes to search; maybe because their algorithm figured out that Google can't monetize open source projects (OSS projects don't tend to promote on Adwords). They tend to drive organic traffic mostly to paid SaaS solutions instead.
Strangely enough though, my open source project is now getting starred at a higher rate than ever before, it has almost 6K stars on GitHub and seems to be consistently getting several per week now even though I do no marketing and my Google organic traffic is terrible - The faster rate of stars is also strange because Google Analytics shows me flat traffic (has been around the same number of daily users for the past couple of years).
I think news aggregators are more responsible for a changed blogging culture than Google with its search results and Reader killing. I think the primary discovery mechanism should be blogrolls but few blogs have that today. My website does not have one either. Why? Because I don't follow my feed reader that deeply anymore. Instead I rely on Hacker News and other aggregators. The advantage of aggregators are that a hu…
As for content discovery I find that Google is irrelevant. Most of the time I want to read on topics I don’t know much about. Hence I would not even know what to search for. I rely on the power of the community to bring to light the best pieces of content. If I was still using RSS I would need to be subscribed to specific websites and would not read anything outside that bubble.
On a final note I think blogging is alive and well. This community proves it as much of the top posts are from blogs.
Flip side: I would destroy Twitter. Twitter is absolutely the worst thing to happen to the internet. Low effort, inherently self-aggrandizing and standoffish, literally impossible to express a complex or nuanced thought. The only people I know who regularly engage with Twitter are extreme narcissists and conformist thinkers, and yet all of Twitter considers themselves to be the Important People. This mentality has cr…
I have never understood the appeal of Twitter. (Or short Facebook/G+ status update type content) I mean, what is so great about seeing lots of really short posts? You can't say anything truly meaningful. It's just a bunch of pointless noise.
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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?
Mostly by putting some cost to having an ID in the network.
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…
That's what people chose, because it's easier. They gave up content rights and many, many possibilities for the ease of posting and the near instant views and feedback.
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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…
They haven't gone anywhere. And the small ones are just as hard to find as before. Furthermore, most people choose to "blog" on the major platforms, probably because it's easier and they don't care about ownership of content or monetisation or anything. Sad imo, but it's just a reflection of how the majority thinks.
Sad imo, but it's just a reflection of how the majority thinks. It's a huge uphill battle if you do care about such things. Don't go blaming them. That sounds an awful lot like victim blaming. You want to see more blogging, help people succeed instead of adding more baggage to their path.
One could use WordPress or Hugo. Or a Reddit account. The latter brings instant viewership and feedback. The former gives you more control.
There's no fight here, people choose what they want.