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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

#231

Post by GordonS »

thereyougo wrote: post #31

The problem as I see it is the Google algorithm. It force content creators to write it in a certain way that in many cases might be way too long and not ’to the point’. I dont remember the last time I searched for something on Google and it showed me a high quality opinion article in a random blog. nowadays everything is around SEO and blogs, as much as I understand why google does that, I think it's the main reason…

Food blogs are the perfect example of this.

Instead of an introduction and a recipe, you get a massive wall of text, such that you have to scroll for what seems like an eternity until you get to the actual recipe. Drives me nuts!

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

#232

Post by jabroni_salad »

Since a good portion of this article is about platforming issues I thought I would highlight one of the good guys who is doing it right: Archive of Our Own. It does not have a recommendation engine or try to optimize for any consumer psychology networks. It does have an elaborate tagging that you can use to find something you'll be interested in and it's pretty good at displaying text on the internet. I also don't think it's going to get purchased by Yahoo and have a bunch of subcultures get dumpstered out of nowhere.

Ao3 for blogs? That'd be nice. I mean, does anyone actually like clicking into a Medium link?

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

#233

Post by lopmotr »

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?

Not sure you need a whole new internet. Maybe a search engine aggressively excluding commercial results. Even blogs with ads. Anything with ads or selling something would not be listed.

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

#234

Post by tapia »

polishdude20 wrote: post #225
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…

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?"…

That happens to me too. You really thing you have something interesting to tell, and then bam, just a silly thought... good that I realized that before publishing it.

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

#235

Post by ErikAugust »

Being in quarantine has unleashed a lot of nostalgia in me. Just recently I got a new blog up and running after years of inactivity.

I wrote a post about a precursor to blogging, which was “Everything / Nothing” websites:

https://ease.gg/2020/05/07/everything-nothing/

Does anyone here remember those days?

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

#236

Post by FailMore »

I think there could be more fun and experimental content on the web. I'm working on a side project called https://taaalk.co, where people have long and continuous text based conversations. Please check it out if you're looking for something new on the web. (Feedback welcomed)

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

#237

Post by mooreds »

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…

> 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.

Totally agree. I've written a fair bit about blogging, but when I started a new blog aimed at helping new developers, for the first month I wrote more posts than I had visitors (!): https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/10/14/how-to-start-b...

I think that six months is enough time to commit. At the end of that period you'll either have the bug and want to keep blogging or know the format is not for you.

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

#238

Post by beambot »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #151
jeffkeen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't get what people mean when they say "bring back RSS"—-it's still around. The thing that disappeared was Google Reader, which I guess was a signal of super mainstream popularity of RSS. Feedly is a great app that I use regularly to keep up with RSS, and there are other RSS readers too. It's not like we're talking about a dead protocol like Gopher, here.

IMHO Feedly is barely adequate.

Give NewsBlur a try.

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

#239

Post by cameronbrown »

DreadY2K wrote: post #181
cameronbrown wrote: post #115

Earlier 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).

Sounds like filter bubbles to me.

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

#240

Post by arkanciscan »

No mention of Twitter, Facebook or Instagram? It seems obvious to me that that is where the blogs went. People don't create content so that people they don't know have something to do in their spare time, they do it for the recognition, and social acceptance. In other words; they do it for the likes. The blogs dried up because the audience's attention coalesced on the few sites and apps that people used the most. Blogs won't come back unless people read blogs, and people won't read blogs unless doing so it easier than Twitter and Facebook. They don't care about censorship, or even privacy (apparently), just the sweet sweet dopamine rush.
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