I'd bring back screen names. Some sites are nice and isolated like HN but most aren't. It's much easier to ignore death threats and racist tirades when they come from xXBonerLord420Xx than when they come from Steve Smith.
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
331–340 of 637 posts
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#332Blogs are not dead, neither is RSS.
You find interesting blogs by chance or via blogroll of blogs you like.
What really has changed are stock related news. Recently I went back into stock trading and was shocked. Basically 90% of the stock related news on google seems to be AI/ML created bullshit with zero value.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#333I 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 f…
> 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.
This happened to me a couple days ago. Except it was a 12-year-old post.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It seems like this is a cultural shift in society as well. There are no more hobbies, everything is a side hustle and if you can’t turn a profit from it, it’s not worth doing. I’m not an economist or sociologist so I can’t Even pretend to understand why this is, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed over the past few years.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 peop…
While the discoverability issue may have accelerated the decline of blogs, I suspect that it’s not the main problem. It takes more cognitive overhead to follow and visit multiple blogs as opposed to following multiple subreddits. Even if you are willing to expend that cognitive overhead, most people aren’t nowadays. Because of that, bloggers are less likely to publish (smaller audience + less engagement = smaller inc…
> It takes more cognitive overhead to follow and visit multiple blogs as opposed to following multiple subreddits.
This is the problem solved by RSS.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#336Blogs 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…
In a vein similar to your annoying technology site, you would probably appreciate https://grumpy.website/ One of my favorite blogs of all time.
Thanks, that's awesome, just spent 20 minutes reading on there.
But quite frequently as I was trying to read, everything on screen jumped upwards, by a few lines or half a page, apparently because stuff below it was loading. Normally I wouldn't complain, the site has taught me not to put up silently with such things. Don't think I've seen that behaviour before. (Am using latest version of FF)
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#337The 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!
You might like this top post from yesterday then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23142220
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 peop…
While the discoverability issue may have accelerated the decline of blogs, I suspect that it’s not the main problem. It takes more cognitive overhead to follow and visit multiple blogs as opposed to following multiple subreddits. Even if you are willing to expend that cognitive overhead, most people aren’t nowadays. Because of that, bloggers are less likely to publish (smaller audience + less engagement = smaller inc…
> cognitive overhead to follow and visit multiple blogs
Didn't used to be an issue really. Then Google killed off Reader and nothing filled the void fast enough.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It seems like this is a cultural shift in society as well. There are no more hobbies, everything is a side hustle and if you can’t turn a profit from it, it’s not worth doing. I’m not an economist or sociologist so I can’t Even pretend to understand why this is, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed over the past few years.
Not my experience at all. The mods plus fanmade expansions community is bigger than ever. And so is open source. Way more stuff is free now than ever before.
Re: If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
#340Very curious to hear – how do people actually discover blogs? A friend and I have a blog based upon our experiences scaling product/engineering at a startup (we've been fortunate enough to see several growth stages over ~8 years). But it's challenging to get in front of readers who might be interested, outside of places like HN or Reddit. When I look at the blogs that I read regularly myself, it tends to be a small s…
Plase AskHN this question! Probably it's been asked many times before.