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

tttthis.com

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

#371

Post by hliyan »

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…

Speaking of discoverability, I found the author's writing interesting and wanted to subscribe to new articles. I usually do this by following the author's twitter account. Sadly, the one that he links to does not exist: twitter.com/TTTThiscom

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

#372

Post by throwaway1777 »

rland wrote: post #356
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…

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.

Start an anonymous blog. I have one. Also an anonymous hacker news account. :)

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

#373

Post by zrm »

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…

> Even if you are willing to expend that cognitive overhead, most people aren’t nowadays.

Shouldn't this cancel out against there being more people though? If people are 90% less likely to want to read long blog posts but there are ten times more people on the internet, you should still have about the same number of readers, all else equal.

> Because of that, bloggers are less likely to publish (smaller audience + less engagement = smaller incentive to publish). That lowers the average quality of blogs, turning away even their most ardent advocates.

This conclusion may be right but it's also explained by the discoverability problem. If people can't find you then your audience is too small and you give up.

> This was all inevitable. The mere existence of a popular meta-forum attenuates traditional blogs and forums.

Blogs and forums are completely different things.

https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/

https://www.popehat.com/

https://www.schneier.com/blog

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/

Reddit has its uses but it is not a substitute for these.

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

#374

Post by StavrosK »

SenHeng wrote: post #366

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

This is exactly what I wanted to post as well. Maybe that should be my next sideproject, it seems fun. I wonder if enough people have blogs about a specific topic that this would work.

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

#375

Post by stanislavb »

I was just thinking that we need to revitalize the culture of blogrolls. Those sections on the sidebars pointing to other blogs the author reads. That used to be a nice "feature" helping discovering blogs. Also, RSS. Many new blogs just don't support RSS :/.

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

#376

Post by lethologica »

lowwave wrote: post #363
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

What is this bizarre URL?

Their site is http://tttthis.com

I remember it because I sometimes try to find it. I quite liked a post of theirs called "Remember websites" or something to that effect.

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

#377

Post by xythobuz »

crazygringo wrote: post #358
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This blog post [1] has at least two anecdotal examples. Also see the corresponding HN discussion [2].

[1]: http://stop.zona-m.net/2018/01/indeed-it-seems-that-google-i...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604135

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

#378

Post by anthk »

DC-3 wrote: post #177

I have recently been enjoying exploring gemini [1] - a new gopher-like web protocol that has been mentioned a couple of times in recent days here on HN. There's not a great deal of content at the moment, but that which does exist does tend to be of a personal, blog-style nature, and also remarkably interesting - if, that is, like me, you're fond of beer and steel framed bicycles (fill in your own stereotype here...).…

Check sdf.org too. A lot of people overlap, because of Pubnixen/Gopher.

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

#379

Post by Reelin »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #372
rland wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Start an anonymous blog. I have one. Also an anonymous hacker news account. :)

The trouble with that is that once you post something to it you can never associate it with yourself (even accidentally!) or deanonymization of everything else posted by that identity will also occur.

Half baked idea: A decentralized and properly anonymized (at the protocol level) service intended for long-form articles. Employ cryptographic primitives to allow association of a single article with one or more identities at any time after publication. (I suspect such a system would just end up getting abused, but who knows?)

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

#380

Post by jiofih »

crazygringo wrote: post #358
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don’t have a source right now, but what the previous poster said is precisely true. The span of time google will actually search for has been consistently shrinking. I had a very frustrating one not long ago, where I bookmarked a post and could not for the love of god find it again using google, even with an exact quote that produced 0 results. That’s what led me onto researching about how bad the situation is and reaching similar conclusions.

You’ll also notice that you can’t really navigate to “page 13” of a google search anymore. Despite “xx million results”, they only display the top hundreds or so.

Blogs and forums are so deranged that you have to either know the domain and use that on the search, or use multiple keywords like “forum” or something specific to surface them. The only blogs you’ll ever see naturally surfacing are hosted in Medium, WP and “noticed” by bots because they were linked from reddit, Pinterest or some other aggregator.

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