I miss blogs too
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
221–230 of 637 posts
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#222Blogger... wasn't shut down?
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#223Two weeks ago I decided to set up one for myself as I have all these conversations where I instructed someone to do some obscure thing so thought to package them into public tutorials I could easily share. Wanted my own domain, didn't want to deal with content moderation by someone else, wanted the ability to easily customize things, didn't want to show crappy ads, didn't want editors being able to hold up things, et…
Blogs can be static.
Netlify static hosting has a very low barrier of entry (just drop a folder if you don't have a git repo).
You get a fast SSL enabled site.
Adding your own domain is just going to your domain registrar as usual and pointing to the appropriate address.
Now, if you go over 100GB a month it could get pricey. https://www.netlify.com/pricing/
Still for a simple text oriented blog that could be a fantastic option.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's no blame, it's just an observation. 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.
I use blogger, the thing the article claims doesn't exist.
I have a zillion blogs. I'm telling you from firsthand experience that it's hard to get traffic, it's hard to monetize, etc. So it's unsurprising that some people go "Fuck it. I don't care. I'm just going to talk somewhere on the internet."
And the irony is even if you go that route, people will give you hell. One of the most common criticisms I get on HN boils down to "Bitch, go start a blog and stop leaving long comments on HN telling us about your life." when I have a zillion blogs and I'm pretty choosy about what I say here.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#225The 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…
I often notice when I start writing on a particular topic, I learn more about my thoughts and opinions of it and realize my thoughts are wrong or not really novel. Halfway in I give up since I feel like, "oh, this actually isn't really adding anything new to the conversation". Then I leave with a new humbleness about my beliefs but also a sense of "when am I actually going to know enough to warrant writing about it?".
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#226I blog a lot. I do it mostly when I do a fun hobby project and want to write down what I did. It's kind of like a public journal with some pics. They're usually esoteric enough that when someone searches for the thing I was writing about, they'll find it. I get a few hundred hits on a handful of pages per month. Not going to make it big with this, but it is fun and I just love publishing hobby stuff on the internet for some reason.
I also find it kind of fun when I'm searching for something and my own blog comes up reminding me how I did something 6 years ago.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#227Blogs 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…
This is exactly right. I had a blog for many months, shared it from my website and social media accounts, and it never showed up in Google search. After a couple months of speaking to an audience of 20 people, I decided it wasn't worth it. Meanwhile everything else I have tried shows up on the first page of results: Facebook page, Twitter account, Soundcloud, etc.
Google heavily biases their results to two things: the top 1000 sites on the internet, and clickbait (callout posts and threads slandering someone rank like you wouldn't believe; no backlinks required). Maybe if you keep at your blog for 2+ years, manage to land a few HN frontpage story links, it might eventually show up. But who is going to invest that time and effort instead of just setting up a Facebook page instead?
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Medium minus the bullshit I'm actually working on something with that spirit. https://pluma.cloud/ We will put a "subscribe for updates!" form at some point. You can follow us on Twitter though: https://twitter.com/plumacloud
>I'm actually working on something with that spirit. Sincere question, not trying to be snarky. Since much (though not all) of the bullshit in Medium is their weak attempts at monetization, what's the bullshit-free alternative business plan to sustain and scale pluma over the long term?
Since we won't track users, sell data, or use ads... the only ethical option is having paying customers.
If you look at Ghost, WPEngine, etc, there are a lot of people willing to pay for being able to blog independently. We are betting that within that market there is a niche of people that want to do it as easily as possible, which I think is Medium's best feature.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#229Earlier 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 higher average post quality (because of the type of person that both had internet and used forums back then) as measured by intellectuality, domain specificity, and demonstrated expertise.
But this should be easy to get back in the same way blogs always did -- have individual blogs. Even if there are now a million blogs full of "noob spam" the good ones should still exist because their authors are the same people they ever were.
You still have the discovery problem, but that's kind of the OP's point -- it all falls apart if you can no longer separate the wheat from the chaff because of SEO and anti-SEO.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
No. I get spam for predatory academic journals every day.