Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

tttthis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 637 posts

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

#381

Post by jiofih »

josephjrobison wrote: post #361
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 200…

People publishing blogs were not “creators”. They were ordinary people publishing their personal, not-fashionable, unfiltered ramblings. That’s what we lost. It’s obvious that with the growth of internet access “variety” has grown exponentially, but it’s the same kind of variety you get from supermarket products, not real life experiences.

> just not in the one strict format

It’s exactly the other way around. 95% of all “content” on the platforms you mentioned looks the same today. The goal is now success, not sharing for the sake of sharing, and that severely limits how much you express yourself.

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

#382

Post by forgotmypw17 »

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?

web of trust for everything

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

#383

Post by philistine »

carapace wrote: post #348
polishdude20 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often notice when I start writing on a particular topic, I learn more about my thoughts and opinions of it and realize my thoughts are wrong or not really novel. Halfway in I give up since I feel like, "oh, this actually isn't really adding anything new to the conversation". Then I leave with a new humbleness about my beliefs but also a sense of "when am I actually going to know enough to warrant writing about it?"…

That's awesome! If only most people would do that, I think the internet would be a much more entertaining and enlightening place. Here's the thing: write that. Go meta, just a little, and write about your journey. "I thought this, but then I found out that, and now my questions have evolved thus..." I think it was Orson Welles who, when somebody asked him if they could write his biography, said, "No, because it will…

Coming from the guy who made the best biopic movie of all time, I would expect nothing less.

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

#384

Post by philistine »

m463 wrote: post #360
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.

YES! I will forever be a third-rate Game Boy enthusiast writer. FOREVER !

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

#385

Post by jiofih »

passthejoe wrote: post #294
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…

My 2000s Blogger sites are all still live. I've ported some of those posts to other sites, but most just live over at Blogger.

Great! You can do the test yourself: pick a few quotes from those old posts and try to find them with a google search.

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

#386

Post by mikevin »

thereyougo wrote: post #31

The 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…

I miss the days where Google would give me a relevant result with a minimal query, these days it's not helping me find what I'm looking for, it's 90% businesses trying to tell me something and low on content, high on SEO results. I guess this is how they do monetization but I often feel I'm unable to find content that must be out there.

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

#387

Post by derrick_jensen »

Reelin wrote: post #379
throwaway1777 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 identit…

I'm about to release something very similar to this. You might see it here in a week or two

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

#388

Post by petercooper »

noobaccount wrote: post #200
petercooper wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-hosting doesn't solve the biggest problem of blogging - which is that nobody will read your work. I started blogging in 1999 (and sadly there are the Wayback Machine archives to prove how juvenile I was!) and it was either self host or use Blogger. Discoverability was pretty interesting. Most blogs' traffic didn't come from search engines (Google existed but it was pretty much geeks only) or platforms, but from…

I used to like the stuff I’m reading and now I don’t. The stuff everybody is reading has gotten very extra. So discoverability is a problem.

You bring up a good point I hadn't really thought about. I was thinking purely about discoverability in terms of the blogger's perspective rather than the reader. You're right, unless you're already following the people who are broadcasting their blogs in all of these various places or live on Reddit/Hacker News/etc., you're going to struggle to find them more now than ever before.

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

#389

Post by jiofih »

PerilousD wrote: post #207

Okay which planet internet is this author living on? I regularly follow two cybersecurity blogs, two science fiction blogs and a photography blog? Searching for an hour and not finding any blogs? Credibility evaporated with that sentence.

There are real issues with discoverability, anonymity, archival and freedom of expression. That’s what the post is about. The fact you have found five blogs to follow doesn’t make his point any less valid.

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

#390

Post by coding_lobster »

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…

Your annoying technology blog reminds of this Jonathan Blow talk where he talked about decreasing quality of software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk
Post reply on HN