Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tttthis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 637 posts

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

#261

Post by baq »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #156
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…

1) there is no real "tragedy of the commons" in the general case. Google Elinor Ostrum to verify. Even Garret Hardin (originator of the concept) has conceded this, at least in part. The crux is that the "commons" as described by Hardin has essentially never existed in the form that he wrote about - things that are "commons"-like are actually always a complex mixture of law, tradition, culture and social sanctions gov…

Reddit is privately held but has quite of an impact on the public. Facebook is the same, as are other notable walled garden/social networks. There’s a term for that: utility company.

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

#262

Post by hombre_fatal »

> but when you look there's nothing to read

I don't get it. When was the last time you looked?

There's more good stuff to read online than you could ever read. There are probably even more blogs than ever before, blogs just don't have the same slice of the pie that they once did.

Seems like when people complain there's nothing good to watch anymore. I suspect that they are so accustomed to having so much material to watch that they confuse their lack of looking for lack of content as they're so used to the next thing to do served to them by recommendation engines.

In other words, this just sounds like another "ugh nothing is good" circlejerk, a subject unfortunately destined for upvotes on HN.

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

#263

Post by barrkel »

angstrom wrote: post #100
zhdc1 wrote: post #72

Earlier 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 characterize Reddit as true neutral. It has the potential to be any alignment, but it's mostly the will of the moderator to impose what alignment any subreddit will be. It's the only place on the Internet that still has the feel occaisionally of the 90s/00s.

Reddit is almost unreadable now, though. You have to click and click and click to expand things, and be careful not to click on the wrong thing which will take you to a different topic.

I much, much, much prefer Reddit when it was more like HN, back when HN was modelled after Reddit & Digg. Today, any time I see a Reddit link, I exit immediately after I've gotten whatever information I require - and even that is rare.

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

#264

Post by okareaman »

pmlnr wrote: post #86
okareaman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you define a blog. Could you clarify? I often delete or edit posts, so I have control. I download my FB data so I have an archive. I have a link to my FB on my Twitter and all my posts are public and I get people from Twitter reading it. I have 60 followers I don't know who read it. Not sure what else it needs to be to meet your definition of a blog.

Short answers: https://indieweb.org/site-deaths and https://indieweb.org/Facebook

I don't expect a free site to be available for eternity. That's why I archive it. The archive is a pretty nice format. I can load it up in a browser from an index file and browse my entire history. I could host it somewhere else if I wanted. I could use a parser to extract the content and repost it in a new format. I still maintain it is a blog.

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

#265

Post by blueridge »

We sure do spend a lot of time brooding about how to generate, write about, and share ideas with an unknown online audience. What would happen if instead of spending hours and hours researching whether we should use WordPress or Ghost or Jekyll, we spent that time reading and writing and reflecting?

We all know too much about one another these days. It doesn't seem to matter to whom we address our writing. There is something to writing for yourself, writing offline, writing as a means of forming a private life and a private consciousness. And what about writing for the experience of writing itself? Forget publishing.

Ours is a society that says so little about nearly everything, and most commentary on the web today isn't worth reading. Furthermore, all content is ephemeral, people share gentle opinions instead of strong convictions because it is safer for one's public reputation, nobody is good at or cares about typography, self-editing is not a skill that people have, and you can never tell where the delusional self-promotion ends and the truthful personal expression begins.

We have become so sensitive to other people's personalities, accomplishments, productivity habits, recommendations, and advice for life. To what end?

I don't know. Reading blogs is not my idea of quality time.

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

#266

Post by zone411 »

zhdc1 wrote: post #72
dewey wrote: post #32

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…

Many thousands (maybe even millions) of still-relevant older posts on my company's forum are simply no longer even indexed by Google. I guess it's a part of the deep web now.

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

#267

Post by gfody »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #259
gfody wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in other words Google shut it the fuck down, you forgot to abandon ship man. fwiw all that hostility is likely just automation shaping the sentiment curve around and away from your signal - nothing to take personally.

Google did not shut it down. https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2018/11/not-closing-... It is maintained and has new templates. I am in the process of setting up a new blog on it currently because I have a new idea.

it's a figurative euphemism - when a big company buys a blogging platform, changes the privacy policies and bans content, you can say they "shut it down".. like how the cops can shutdown a house party

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

#268

Post by afiori »

angstrom wrote: post #125
afiori wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that is/was reddit's promise, but it does not live up to it.

I think where it breaks down is when you have to run plugins that identify the kind of person a user is. I find that reduces the crapiness of the interactions if I can see someone is a POS without investing much time in finding that out. It's a step that shouldn't be necessary, but the faster that can be discerned the less I find myself second guessing their intent.

Actually that sound even more toxic...

You could say that the current karma system is sort of supposed to be that, but at least it does not affect comments visibility as far as I know.

Having a parallel unofficial social credit system looks like one thing that would just create unnecessary conflicts in communities that do not have a strong troll problem.

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

#269

Post by DoreenMichele »

gfody wrote: post #267
DoreenMichele wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did not shut it down. https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2018/11/not-closing-... It is maintained and has new templates. I am in the process of setting up a new blog on it currently because I have a new idea.

it's a figurative euphemism - when a big company buys a blogging platform, changes the privacy policies and bans content, you can say they "shut it down".. like how the cops can shutdown a house party

Whatever google has or has not done, that's not why I can't get traction. That's not it.

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

#270

Post by dewey »

novok wrote: post #248
dewey wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever you do, just don't use Medium. Ghost or Hugo (With Netlify, https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-netlify/ ) are both very low effort solutions and most of them come with themes that don't look too bad from the get go. It's very quick to get something up and running even though it's technically a static site generator.

Those are nerd only solutions. If anything will have mass market appeal and actually catch on with experts that are not nerds, it can't be nerd only.

There’s a lot of non nerd solutions. Ghost, Wordpress, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr are all very easy to Süd- platforms. There’s a variety of free and paid platforms. The existing solutions are not the problems.
Post reply on HN