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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

#361

Post by josephjrobison »

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…

Essentially the author is longing for a day before social media existed, but the world has changed fast - and that's ok.

The medium has diversified away from just blogs, but the amount mediums and creators has exploded.

Many of those people who used to blog on Blogspot have moved on to YouTube, TikTok Twitter, Instagram, Medium, WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, and more.

So the whole premise is bunk. "Blogs" in their 2005 term may have changed. But the amount of people publishing 280+ character content on Twitter, Instagram (as video or image descriptions), and all others is more than ever.

Instagram and YouTube are where many of the eyeballs are.

The author longs for self-expression in blog format, the self-expression is there more than ever, just not in the one strict format that existed that way for a brief moment.

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

#362

Post by Darkphibre »

keenmaster wrote: post #245
zrm wrote: post #229

Earlier 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…

Not to mention after a certain number of 'followed' subreddits, Reddit will actually only show you a subset each day on your front page. It allows for smaller subreddits to bubble up occasionally, but you're never guaranteed to see the latest from everything you've subscribed to.

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

#363

Post by lowwave »

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.

Think this is NOT his fourth post. It may be a new front end: Check out the other blogs: http://tttthis.coolstuffinterestingstuffnews.com

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

#364

Post by bufordtwain »

dgudkov wrote: post #273
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…

There is a good advice for writers (bloggers are essentially writers) - write only if you can't NOT write. If you write because you can't not write, then you don't care about the number of readers.

Reminds me of this piece by Charles Bukowski: https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer

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

#365

Post by XCSme »

pavelmark wrote: post #2

Fully agreed. When the blogs died one of the richest and most interesting parts of the internet died with it. The good news is that Wordpress.com and Blogspot still exist so the information was not lost, but almost all of the blogs haven't been updated in 5+ years. I'd love to see a concerted effort to have them rebooted -- maybe Google could up-rank them, or CPMs could increase, or Patreon-like models could be built…

The thing about WordPress is that the majority of WordPress sites are presentational websites, landing pages or e-commerce sites, not actual blogs.

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

#366

Post by SenHeng »

I've noticed that a lot of Japanese blogs here something akin to a blog webring[0] on their blogs. It'a called Blog Mura (Blog Village) and is basically a blog aggregator. It a provides rankings, let's you search by categories and even a way for you to contact an author that does not have contact information on their own page.

Maybe we need to bring back a webrings but with a modern spin.

0: https://blogmura.com

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

#367

Post by _____smurf_____ »

Definitely! It was fun discovering bloggers' content before the era of social media. Social media platforms created silos, and limited discovery options. Now people share their content behind paywall (e.g. medium) or force you to register to the platform (e.g. facebook) to see the content.

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

#368

Post by neutronicus »

derefr wrote: post #310
mawise wrote: post #199

Earlier 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…

> 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/e…

> I've never seen Facebook/Twitter used for ...

Sports journalists (including the mathy ones) use Twitter this way. And, boy howdy, do I hate it. But they do.

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

#369

Post by neutronicus »

renewiltord wrote: post #339
freehunter wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Open source has a huge "personal brand-building" aspect to it

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

#370

Post by karatestomp »

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?

> What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?

Ban (yes, legally) collecting & monetizing most information about users. But do that generally, not just for the Internet. Or at least make holding such data incredibly risky (enormous company-ending fines for leaks or misuse).

No loading third-party domain content in browsers. At all. No images, no scripts. You can link to it. That’s it.

Limit scripting to defining custom sorts for tables, custom regexes for form fields, and... that’s about it. Too easy to spy or do shit without the user’s express permission otherwise.

That should take care of the worst of the bad incentives that have made the web so hostile and shitty.

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