441–450 of 637 posts
What do you mean "back"? Blogs very well exist. I read a number of them. I write one, for heaven's sake (probably a dozen people or so reads it but it's ok that's how it is meant to be). They are living in the shadow of facebooks and twitters of the world, but who cares. Turns out, popularity is not everything, and unless you plan to make living out of it (which I most definitely don't) you don't need to compete with…
> but when you look there's nothing to read I don't get it. When was the last time you looked? There's more good stuff to read online than you could ever read. There are probably even more blogs than ever before, blogs just don't have the same slice of the pie that they once did. Seems like when people complain there's nothing good to watch anymore. I suspect that they are so accustomed to having so much material to…
I suspect you’re below 30 years of age? It’s quite interesting how quickly the memory of the internet has faded and this became the new normal. Sometimes it pays to look a little deeper.
It's very popular on HN to yearn for the good old days of the internet instead of realizing that we're in them right now.
More importantly, it's also likely you that's changing more than the internet. Maybe a decade or two ago you were looking for blogs while these days you just stop by Reddit and HN. And assume anything you don't find on Reddit/HN is probably dead or dying, you're not going to look. In fact I guarantee that's what going on most of the time in these posts.
Kinda like how almost everyone reading this who used to use an RSS reader doesn't use one anymore. Not because RSS is dead or all of the blogs evaporated overnight. But because we just don't use the internet like that anymore.
I think TFA is closer to a nostalgic obituary for how OP used to use the internet, and they remember those as good ol days, and they are mistaking this flicker of nostalgia for some overarching commentary on the New Internet.
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…
1) Locally ran blog app with nice UI (think wysiwyg text editor, file “uploads” etc) and single file install.
2) Central server managed by a cloud service to resolve people’s dynamic IP into a stable URL, your blog will live at myblog.blogservice.com
3) locally ran blog engine pings new IP address every time people’s ISP change it.
4) Good instructions on how to forward 443 to your local machine running blog.
5) bonus points if local app runs on raspberry pis that can be always on.
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…
Writing is a public act. You might still be expecting some readership without the expectation of ad money or promotion of something.
What I miss most about the blogs in 90s and early 00s is the conversation between blogs by linking, quoting and commenting each other. Reading blogs involved going from one blog to another, and reading blogs of 10 people about a single issue. It was a conversation. And you would constantly discover new blogs this way.
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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.
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So much this. For a discussion site, Reddit's a really shitty discussion site. Good conversations rarely even begin, and die rapidly. I've discussed this a few times and places. On HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16865105 It was a problem I'd identified when first trialing a Reddit-as-blog dynamic: The Reddit Notifications dynamic is proving to be a very strong negative. Something Google+ got right is to kee…
This is super awful when you’re trying to have a potentially controversial discussion with someone. Even if both of you are interested in the discussion it gets to a point where why bother continuing because no one is going to see it when they have to click “load more comments” and follow the thread for hours or days. Forums like Reddit and HN actively encourage short pithy sound bites that sound interesting but are…
HN's lack of an active reply notification means that, unless you're checking the [threads] link obsessively, replies can easily go unnoticed, so writing here is more performative.
How that intersects with the rest of the site's dynamics, I'm not sure.
The site was well visited, approaching million-month hits at times. Advertisements on the site supported me while I bootstrap my Startup (failed later).
Now, I write but very far and in between. If a topic/idea comes to mind, I search/research and found that someone has done a better job and so I don’t write. Trivial things are ignored because it is trivial and everyone would have known. I don't think I even have analytics enabled or it is just that I never cared to look at Analytics anymore.
People emailed me about missing/non-working links, open-sourced files missing, thanking me, etc once in a while but that's it.
The bar for a good article has hit the ceiling and I’d rather not write than write like I used to write long ago.
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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…
The issue with Reddit is that there's little to no user engagement with older content. Comments on posts older than a day in pretty much every reasonably active subreddit are ignored. This is also an issue on HN. This kills informed discussion - some topics need more than one or two minutes of thought for a thoughtful and articulated response. This simply isn't possible when you know that the person you're replying t…
I recently fell in love with https://micro.blog It sounds exactly like what the OP is looking for. In addition to being a easy-to-use (micro)blogger-focused platform (no ads, $5/month basic plan for hosting), the fact that they allow you to host everything on your own domain and cross post to more widely used platforms like Twitter and Medium seems like the best of both worlds. My current flow is writing in iA Writer…