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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

#301

Post by pmlnr »

mawise wrote: post #199
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…

> The blogs the author misses aren't written to make money off of ad traffic, they were just written to put down ideas.

This is what I've been pointing out for years as the lost core of the internet.

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

#302

Post by ativzzz »

zhdc1 wrote: post #161
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…

The issue with Reddit is that there's little to no user engagement with older content. Comments on posts older than a day in pretty much every reasonably active subreddit are ignored. This is also an issue on HN. This kills informed discussion - some topics need more than one or two minutes of thought for a thoughtful and articulated response. This simply isn't possible when you know that the person you're replying t…

> The issue with Reddit is that there's little to no user engagement with older content. Comments on posts older than a day in pretty much every reasonably active subreddit are ignored. This is also an issue on HN.

This is even worse with communities using live chat platforms like Discord and IRC. Live chat is an atrocious medium for community building as you constantly have to be involved to keep up or if you just check it for 5 mins you don't actually get anything if there is no conversation at the moment or the conversation isn't interesting.

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

#303

Post by ezconnect »

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…

Why is the annoying.technology blog uses so much cpu?

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

#304

Post by slightwinder »

barrkel wrote: post #263
angstrom wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

old.reddit.com still works.

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

#305

Post by novok »

It's kind of ironic, but a blog I follow recently said I'm moving everything into youtube and social media now, and the blog will just be a permalink archive with transcripts to those youtube and social media posts, because that where everyone is now.

If I want to find random rare opinion X from a casual person, now I have to search youtube to find something useful unfortunately. Youtube videos are a lot slower to digest than the equivalent blog article, and take more time to make. But since youtube can give you money, thats where people go.

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

#306

Post by pmlnr »

cirno wrote: post #227
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…

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: th…

> After a couple months of speaking to an audience of 20 people, I decided it wasn't worth it

Your reasons were wrong. Blogs, the old blogs and hobby websitrs the OP is talking about were made for fun, not for followers.

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

#307

Post by smarx007 »

If I could bring one thing back to the internet, it would be to have people with little technical knowledge to be brave and listen less to [disparaging remarks from] geeks. Go to https://wordpress.com/start/user (or https://www.blogger.com/, nobody actually shut it down) and create your blog!

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

#308

Post by cglong »

slightwinder wrote: post #288
xwdv wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that rather than blogging, more people should write comments. I’ve never written one blog article, but I’ve written a novel worth of comments over the years. A comment IMO is more pure and true, and is created out of a strong desire to say something, rather than for some other extrinsic motivation. My problem with blogging is that I can’t just write in a vacuum, I must always write in response to something and…

You can just blog a comment. Read something that moves your mind longer than the first barfed out comment? Blog it. Write down your thought process, discuss with yourself, do something thoughtful witout the stress of a public discussion.

This is essentially what Daring Fireball [1] is, and it's one of the biggest blogs out there.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/

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

#309

Post by dewey »

ezconnect wrote: post #303
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…

Why is the annoying.technology blog uses so much cpu?

That's the first time I'm hearing that problem, are you sure it's from the site? It's basically just a generated static html site with no JS except a tiny analytics snippet.

For me it's really quick and lightweight.

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

#310

Post by derefr »

mawise wrote: post #199
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…

> Those blogs from the time before were written for the purpose of writing, not for the purpose of getting lots of viewership.

Or, to put that another way: blogs are/were effectively people publicizing their diaries. (Or, in the case of a work blog, publicizing the contents of their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventor%27s_notebook).

> Today that need is filled with Facebook/Twitter/

Not really? Facebook/Twitter/etc. are for "what you're thinking right now." Incomplete, out-of-context thoughts. Maybe conversations, where the thought plus access to the author for further questioning can "add up to" a complete, legible text.

I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for "a breakthrough in understanding you've had, and want to preserve for posterity and your own future reference; where enough context is given that you (or someone else) can recapture the whole of the idea just from the words on the page, 10+ years down the line." That's the sole province of blogging. (Or of books, journal papers, and open letters. But blogs are a lot lower-overhead than any of those.)

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