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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

#351

Post by polishdude20 »

rolleiflex wrote: post #298
polishdude20 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and when I think about writing about rehashing basic things, I realize why those basic things are so prevalent and why they actually shouldn't be rehashed. It's like a call to enlightenment.

The end result of any good writing process is a writer who does no longer need to write it in the first place.

What about when I go through this process so fast that I don't even need to write about it to realize I know nothing?

I'm 26 and I see people writing about stuff that are much younger than me and I still think "I know nothing". Maybe I have a huge case of imposter syndrome?

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

#352

Post by polishdude20 »

madacoo wrote: post #324
tapia wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious what your silly thoughts are. How do you know that I will share your judgement of what a silly thought is? What is a silly thought to you after writing something down might be of interest to a random internet user. Is it not presumptive to assume that everyone else will share your judgement?

That's a good point. I sometimes get a feeling that only an idiot would think my thoughts were good and most people are not idiots so whatever I write about won't be useful.

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

#353

Post by jdkee »

keenmaster wrote: post #112
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’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…

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

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

#354

Post by redisman »

joyj2nd wrote: post #332

Blogs 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.

Same with recipes or diets and any information about parenting. Google is losing the battle.

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

#355

Post by rashkov »

slightwinder wrote: post #304
barrkel wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve installed a browser extension to always redirect to old reddit. That helps a bit. Hope they keep it around.

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

#356

Post by rland »

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…

Well, this is why I don’t have a blog. I have a lot of strong opinions that might be interesting to some people, but I don’t want to miss opportunities because some HR person googled my name and found a post they disagreed with. Or, in the future, not a real person but an algorithm.

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

#357

Post by cyberferret »

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've been blogging on and off for the past few years now (not going to publish the link here in case it is seen as self promotion). Mainly as a way of leaving my life story and thoughts for my family to have something to remember my life when I am no longer around (My dad had some incredible life stories, and I wish we had recorded them in some form before he passed).

I think what is missing now is the rich set of tools around the ecosystem. Posterous was a great service to let you email your thoughts directly to a blog post. I am amazed there was no other competitor that sprung up when they got bought out and shut down by Twitter nearly a decade ago.

I really miss Google Reader, which was where I used to keep a curated list of the top blogs I used to read regularly. Even now, some mornings I wish I could just open my Google Reader home page and check out the latest updates from some of my favourite bloggers.

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

#358

Post by crazygringo »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #251
crazygringo wrote: post #154

This article makes... no sense to me. Blogs are still around, everywhere, and show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query. And bloggers still list other blogs in sidebars. I genuinely don't understand the author's complaint. The only thing I can imagine is that there are a lot more alternatives for self-expression on the internet now, e.g. Instagram, Twitter, podcasts, etc. So blogs are perhap…

> Blogs ... show up easily in search results if a post matches a relevant query. No, they don't. This comes down to two main changes in how Google operates: 1) Google no longer respects search operators so that users can get fine-grained results, and 2) Google has chosen to progressively delist old content, even if many blog posts from the early millennium remain just as relevant today because no one has posted at le…

Not that I don't believe you, but that just hasn't been my experience with Google at all, and I use it extensively for research tracking down fairly obscure sources with presumably close-to-zero traffic by putting in quoted sentence fragments.

Do you have an example of a website that is linked to from other sites (so Google can find it) where a quoted search for a unique sentence fragment from it doesn't list it as a result?

I've just never heard authoritatively of Google removing old content from results, especially since it seems antithetical to the company's mission of organizing all the world's information. And seeing how so much of the value of search (and purchasing and content and so much else) is in the "long tail", it seems like it would be an extremely counterproductive strategy.

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

#359

Post by medion »

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…

Yep. I ran a great little community cycling forum from 2005 - met so many friends (real and virtual) over those years - then about 2011 or 2012 Google just dropped it. Our traffic fell off a cliff - now - the regulars stayed on for quite a while, but without an influx of new members and questions and discussions, things just died out - regular members need the stimulus of new members, even if it can be taxing moderating etc... Was actually a really disappointing decline in many ways. It really opened my eyes up to how much control we gave away, and how much content is now in these big walled garden silos. I can't help but get nostalgic.

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

#360

Post by m463 »

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…

The way to immortality is to write.
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