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

461–470 of 637 posts

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

#461

Post by freehunter »

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.

It's not about giving things away for free, it's about doing things you like to do just for your own satisfaction. While there is a lot of that in the mods and open source space, there's also a lot of resume building, portfolio projects, etc. There's an insane amount of pressure to always be "shipping to production" no matter if your hobby is crocheting, gardening, writing code, blogging, building robots, playing music, painting, etc.

Patreon, Etsy, OnlyFans, Kickstarter, and even Github (just to scratch the surface) all serve to put pressure on creators to turn their hobbies into second jobs.

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

#462

Post by tcgv »

ljm wrote: post #51
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…

RSS is truly a blessing, and it's such a shame that the side effect of Google is to essentially corrupt a vast portion of the internet such that most of the stuff you see and read has the sole purpose of pleasing the search engine, not the reader. That relationship is the wrong way round. I'm just re-setting up my own blog (to complement a Youtube channel). Without designing one from scratch (with a static site gener…

About a year ago I started blogging, and wanted something really simple, flexible and that didn't require any sort of server/database maintenance.

After some reasearch I decided to go with Jekyll + GitHub Pages, forked a theme that seemed Ok and made some style changes, nothing fancy. Must say I'm really happy with my choice.

There's one thing though, I'm writing posts using markdown in an IDE. Don't really consider that a disadvantage though, and I guess most developers would be really fine with that.

Here's the link to the repository in case you'd like to take a look and try it out: https://github.com/TCGV/blog

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

#463

Post by rubatuga »

jondubois wrote: post #214
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…

From my (subjective) perspective, I also feel like something strange happened with Google search when it comes to blogs. My tech/programming blog has 1.4K subscribers and used to reliably get between 100 to 200 views per day, then in the space of 2 days from 6 March to 7 March this year it suddenly dropped down to around 10 to 20 views per day. The drop was extremely sudden and hasn't recovered since. Nothing changed…

IMO could be just coincidence. As humans we see patterns that don't exist.

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

#465

Post by rubatuga »

jiofih wrote: post #380
crazygringo wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not so sure, my blog shows up as the first result for the following terms in Google, while it doesn't even show up for the first few pages in DuckDuckGo. It seems to suggest that Google prioritizes blogs.

[0]: https://google.com/search?q=ghost+blog+latex [1]: https://google.com/search?q=disable+networkd

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ghost+blog+latex [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=disable+systemd+networkd

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

#466

Post by sanderjd »

raindropm wrote: post #439
sanderjd wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You asked for an example, this person gave you one, and you scoffed at it and moved the goal posts. I don't think you were asking in good faith...

I think he mean the general trend of the internet talking, writing or ranking something about blogs is generally dwindled, replaced by social media account. You can find 'Top 10 Beauty guru Youtuber' or 'Top Tiktok rising stars' everywhere on the internet, media and websites post about it, promote it, in easy to read format, interesting writeup, with spectacular pictures in said article. The attention and money was p…

I wasn't the person who replied with that list, I was just sticking up for that person. It really grinds my gears when someone asks for something, seemingly in good faith, and then proceeds to treat a person who goes out their way to answer them uncharitably.

The request was examples of people compiling blogs on a subject, and an example of that was given.

I don't get the point you guys are making. Yes, BuzzFeed style lists of "best blogs" don't exist. So what? There are plenty of blogs and plenty of ways to discover them.

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

#467

Post by adrianN »

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…

That won't be safe for very long. De-anonymization based on writing style is pretty good already.

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

#468

Post by rubatuga »

asplake wrote: post #101

It’s not so much that blogging died but that commenting on them directly did, and with it blog culture. Commenting now takes place in other venues, not visible to the blog’s reader unless that venue is where they came from. HN is part of that of course.

I use commento.io, which allows anonymous commenting. More than half of the comments on my blog are anonymous commenters. I think it's about reducing the initial friction as much as possible.

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

#469

Post by mesaframe »

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…

> used against you in job interviews

I used to think blogging come as complementary to your skills. How will anyone use them against you?

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

#470

Post by mirimir »

mesaframe wrote: post #469
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…

> used against you in job interviews I used to think blogging come as complementary to your skills. How will anyone use them against you?

Well, it depends on what you blog about.

If, say, you blog about some social/economic/political position that is (or becomes) unpopular/unacceptable, your career may be toast. Such as, for example, happened for James Damore.

So if you're going to blog as your meatspace identity, you gotta protect your brand.

If you want to blog carelessly, you'd better do that using a persona that can't readily be linked to your meatspace identity. That's why I'm here as Mirimir.

But even then, Mirimir has a reputation to protect. And that's why I use other personas, which can't readily be linked to this one.

Post reply on HN